Is your car spying on you? Apparently, insurance companies are getting information on how you’re actually driving in your car, and you probably had no idea it was actually being tracked. The information is being used in some cases to jack up your insurance rates.
New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill reported the information automakers are sharing with insurance companies. She joined WTOP anchors Shawn Anderson and Anne Kramer on Monday.
Listen to their conversation or read the transcript below.
Shawn Anderson: Joining us now live to talk about it New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill. Thanks for being with us. We appreciate it.
Kashmir Hill: Oh, my pleasure.
Shawn Anderson: Elaborate on this for us. Are cars really spying on our driving habits? How does that work?
Kashmir Hill: Yeah, so what’s happened is in the last couple of years, some automakers have started offering these features in their car apps called driver score or driver feedback. And if you turn it on, it would get data from your car about whether you speed, how hard you hit the brakes, whether you accelerate really rapidly. And it would give you the score saying, you’re getting a 70, you need to be more gentle with your brakes, or you need to slow down. And what people didn’t realize when you turn this on is that these programs resulted in your driving data being shared with data brokers, who work with the insurance industry. And it was very unclear in any of the kind of language about the app. And in some cases, people who drive cars made by General Motors, they had this — it was called “Smart Driver turned on — and they didn’t even know it. They’re kind of enrolled without their knowledge. And it resulted in their insurance rates going up.
Anne Kramer: Kashmir, just so that we’re clear, is it actually in the car itself? Are you talking about an app on your phone? Or is it a little bit of both, so that you wouldn’t be aware that it was actually on when you purchased a car?
Kashmir Hill: What people don’t realize is that modern cars are smartphones on wheels, and they often have a cellular connection or Wi-Fi connection, and they’re sending data directly from the car. And that’s how it was happening.
Shawn Anderson: Is this legal?
Kashmir Hill: I don’t know. I talked to (Massachusetts) Sen. Ed Markey for the story. And when I described to him what was happening, I mean, particularly in these cases with these General Motors drivers, who literally didn’t know they were in these programs and it was resulting in their insurance rates going up. He said, it sounded like a possible violation of the federal law that protects consumers against unfair and deceptive business practices.
Anne Kramer: You were talking and speaking within your article was someone who had a personal experience and their insurance rate went up by 21%. But we do have something as consumers and as car buyers that we can get our hands on to look at what they’re actually collecting. Is that right? It’s a report.
Kashmir Hill: These automakers that are doing this, there’s two data brokers that they were sharing with — one is LexisNexis Risk Solutions and the other is a company called Verisk. And under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, data brokers like this, that are telling companies, you know, how risky it is to ensure you, for example, they have to share their files with you. And so you can actually go to the LexisNexis Risk Solutions website or Verisk website and you can say, ‘Hey, tell me what you have about me?’ And that is, in fact how people found out about this, their insurance rates went up. They asked why and insurance agents said you know, pull your pull your credit report, and then they found all this driving data in their
Shawn Anderson: Kashmir, eyebrows had been raised for nearly every single person listening to us right now. So thank you so much for sharing your story.
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