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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 Knowledge Troll on Saturday October 20 2018, @03:06PM (1 child)

    by Knowledge Troll (5948) on Saturday October 20 2018, @03:06PM (#751402) Homepage Journal

    In this context terminator replacing an antenna would be a dummy load. Terminator is an odd term for me in radio context because it makes it sound like it's the end of a SCSI chain but it would be correct because both a terminator and a dummy load should impedance match.

    A dummy load is a resistor that eats the radio power basically. They leak a little but not very much if you do it right.

    Radios with poor antennas or even no antennas would be operating in a high impedance or high SWR mode. It's fine for receive (can blow up the RF amp in transmit though) but performance is typically much worse than having a proper antenna.

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  • (Score: 1) by Arik on Saturday October 20 2018, @05:36PM

    by Arik (4543) on Saturday October 20 2018, @05:36PM (#751423) Journal
    "A dummy load is a resistor that eats the radio power basically."

    Exactly what I expected it to be then.

    --
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