Car manufacturers secretly sell driving data of car owners, US senators ask FTC to investigate

According to the New York Times, American automakers are collecting data on car owners' driving habits, braking, acceleration, etc. and selling it to data brokers, which in turn affects the car owners' insurance premiums.

Recently, two U.S. senators from Oregon and Massachusetts, Ron Wyden and Edward J. Markey, wrote to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to request a thorough investigation of automakers’ data collection and sales practices. They believe that automakers use lower insurance premiums as bait to induce consumers to agree to share data, but in fact sell the data to third parties for profit.

The report pointed out that Hyundai Motor Company was the worst, forcing all new car users who activated the network function to join the driving scoring program and share the data with the data company Verisk. From 2018 to 2024, Hyundai Motor shared the data of 1.7 million cars with Verisk and earned $1,043,315.69 (IT Home Note: Currently about 7.569 million RMB), an average of 61 cents per car. Hyundai Motor did not obtain informed consent from consumers before sharing data.

General Motors and Honda, on the other hand, induced consumers to participate in the "safe driving" program in the name of "voluntary", but did not explicitly state that the data would only be used to calculate insurance premiums.

The senators believe that the automakers' actions have seriously violated consumer privacy and asked the FTC to hold the relevant companies and their executives accountable. They said that the problems exposed so far may be just the tip of the iceberg and that automakers should not sell consumer data without consent.

Automakers argued that these were "opt-in" programs, but did not deny that data was sold to third parties. Industry insiders pointed out that automakers are viewing consumer data as a new profit growth point, but consumers know little about it. As cars become more intelligent, protecting consumer privacy becomes increasingly important.