In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week, Senators Ron Wyden and Edward Markey urged the FTC to investigate several car companies caught selling and sharing customer information without clear consent. Alongside details previously gathered from reporting by The New York Times, the...
It’s almost insulting how cheap the data is going for.
The insurance company buys your driving data for less than a dollar, then cranks your premiums potentially hundreds of dollars per year. Easy money for the insurance company, easy money for the data broker, easy money for the car company, and the little guy gets the shaft as usual.
I think the rhetoric about data gathering needs to change.
The average person doesn’t really care all that much about their privacy. “The government and all the tech companies are spying on me anyway,” they think. “If I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to fear,” they tell themselves.
But if people actually understood just how much the prices they pay are driven by data warehousing, there’d be rioting in the streets.
One thing I like to point out to those people is that they are assuming it’s accurate data collecting. If for some reason the data broker thought you totaled a car, you can’t do squat about insurance agencies raising their rates because of it. You’d never know, you’d just see prices going up. Heck, everybody I know who has checked their credit has seen something that needed correcting. No way data brokers are 100% accurate.
It’s almost insulting how cheap the data is going for.
The insurance company buys your driving data for less than a dollar, then cranks your premiums potentially hundreds of dollars per year. Easy money for the insurance company, easy money for the data broker, easy money for the car company, and the little guy gets the shaft as usual.
I think the rhetoric about data gathering needs to change. The average person doesn’t really care all that much about their privacy. “The government and all the tech companies are spying on me anyway,” they think. “If I have nothing to hide, I have nothing to fear,” they tell themselves.
But if people actually understood just how much the prices they pay are driven by data warehousing, there’d be rioting in the streets.
One thing I like to point out to those people is that they are assuming it’s accurate data collecting. If for some reason the data broker thought you totaled a car, you can’t do squat about insurance agencies raising their rates because of it. You’d never know, you’d just see prices going up. Heck, everybody I know who has checked their credit has seen something that needed correcting. No way data brokers are 100% accurate.