Toyota, Progressive Insurance, and a data analytics firm are now being accused of collecting detailed personal driving information without proper consent
Toyota, Progressive Insurance, and a data analytics firm are now being accused of collecting detailed personal driving information without proper consent
Maybe it’s time to create some rules about data brokering? It’s not really about tracking and consent, it’s about who can sell what data about whom to what parties.
It’s become an enormous business, it deals with you and I, it delights in living in the shadows, and it is almost completely unregulated. I don’t really care if Toyota records my data, I care that it’s allowed to sell it or share it.
I think a reasonable first step would be that all data about a specific person belongs to that person and nobody else. We have rules about photos, we need to expand them to data brokering, because the problem is the same: if you can be identified and placed, you are at risk.
Maybe we can just learn to disable the parts of the vehicle that spy on us. It’s actually a federal felony to alter programming on products like this that we own. But maybe a surgically placed electromagnet or cut wire could do the trick?
Because government will not be fixing anything for the better. This is the best the government will be for the forseeable future.
When approaching this proposition, remember that there will be a lot of push back that might sound sincere but remember that there are a lot of people in the data mining business and they will definitely not be arguing in good faith.
You can’t even assume they’ll be people at this point.
But think of the poor shareholders and their yearly revenue growth being slowed down. Don’t be selfish bro.
/s
Yeah i agree with most of what you said. I don’t have massive issues with companies tracking and recording data. By default they should only be allowed to use that data themselves (which can get a bit murky when the company in question is that of a conglomerate) and you should have to explicitly allow the sharing of data to third parties that is separate to standard TOC’s.
GDPR tried to solve this but it kind of made a lot of the options available to the user a bit of a mess and overwhelming because there’s not much regulation about what can be done with data (somewhat - there actually are limitations but it’s not very well enforced), just that the user has to say they agree. And that’s not even thinking about how the banners and pop ups are obtrusive as fuck.
I’m not smart enough to know what the actual solution should be other than I know it needs to be better than it is now.
Maybe it’s already called GDPR?
The same GDPR that allows every website or app to share your data with their 816 partners, as long as they claim they have a ‘legitimate interest’?