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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday October 20 2018, @12:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the all-your-data-are-belong-to-us dept.

The Verge is reporting that the next data minefield is your car. GM has been capturing lots of user data from the cars they have sold and is apparently planning to sell that (stolen|coerced) data to advertisers targeting, for now, radio advertising. Newer cars generate upwards of 600GB of user data per day. This is causing business leaders to drool because some expect the value of this data to reach more than $1.5 trillion by the year 2030, if the data (capture|theft) remains uncontested. GM is the first auto maker so far to try this. The first batch took data from around 90,000 vehicles. However, there was not much detail given about how permission was gained for this data capture and whether agreement was coerced or through ignorance.

GM captured minuted details such as station selection, volume level, and ZIP codes of vehicle owners, and then used the car's built-in Wi-Fi signal to upload the data to its servers. The goal was to determine the relationship between what drivers listen to and what they buy and then turn around and sell the data to advertisers and radio operators. And it got really specific: GM tracked a driver listening to country music who stopped at a Tim Horton's restaurant. (No data on that donut order, though.)

Also at The Detroit Free Press : GM tracked radio listening habits for 3 months: Here's why.


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  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday October 20 2018, @05:55AM (1 child)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Saturday October 20 2018, @05:55AM (#751296) Homepage Journal
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 20 2018, @08:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 20 2018, @08:40AM (#751325)

    A blacklist is good if you think most web pages out there are run by decent honest people and you only need to weed out the few rotten apples.

    On the other hand if you have a sane outlook that most of the internet is a dangerous wasteland, you invest in a whitelist and only explicitly trust websites. For this purpose for your Mozilla Firefox web browser you could use uMatrix. [mozilla.org]

    (Having said that, a browser extension obviously only affects the browser whereas the hosts file is a system wide solution... so apples and oranges. You can do both.)