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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 RS3 on Sunday October 21 2018, @12:10AM

    by RS3 (6367) on Sunday October 21 2018, @12:10AM (#751522)

    > I foresee nothing but vintage cars in my future.

    Yep, me too.

    The dummy load resistor is a great idea, but, ... I have right here an OBD2 tracker that looks like this: https://gotrack.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/2_GotrackIMGobdfront.png [gotrack.com]

    The internal antenna is a PC board pattern. It appears to have 2- one looks much lower frequency. Obviously it can be buggered / terminated, but a bit more work and it will be obviously tampered with.

    If I'm ever forced into owning a car with built-in tracking, I'll have to build/buy an RF signal detector and find the thing(s). Not sure what will happen next...

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