Cars represent freedom. Automakers have preached and marketed that philosophy for more than a century, ensuring the automobile became indispensable to the American identity. However, over the last several years, these same companies have begun to undermine that gospel. They are pursuing new revenue streams and maximizing shareholder value in terrifying ways, turning their expensive products into essential parts of the growing panopticon, forcing people to purchase a piece of the police state that could be used against them at any moment.
And no one loves a snitch.
Over a year ago, The New York Times reported that some automakers were sharing their customers’ driving data with insurance companies, leading to higher premiums for some who didn’t even know their information was being collected and sold. One driver got his report back from the data broker LexisNexis, which included alarming details about his driving behavior.
It captured the dates and times of 640 trips, the distances he drove, instances of speeding, and incidents of hard braking or accelerating.
Photo by: Toyota
Many insurers already incentivize and encourage their customers to be surveilled, offering discounts for following the law and exhibiting safe driving practices. These opt-in programs often require drivers to install a dongle in their vehicle’s OBD-II port that transmits their driving data back to the company.
But today’s tech-packed cars and phones can circumvent these opt-in systems by collecting and transmitting the same—or even more—data to automakers and others, offering it for sale to any interested party. Your car and mobile devices are capable of logging every little potential data point you create in order to compile a detailed digital dossier of your conduct behind the wheel.
An Unhealthy Relationship
This constant surveillance could log every stop you pull away from too soon, every time you forget to signal when changing lanes on your commute to work, and every blip of the accelerator needed to rush a yellow light, all without you knowing. Deception has never formed the basis of a healthy relationship. Every time you fail to slow down for a speed change and every instance where 70 on the highway slowly becomes 72 is recorded, cataloged, and leveraged to cost you money.
Driver monitoring systems point cameras at your face, tracking when you look away from the road and for how long, adding more data to your file. Cars also have cameras that can recognize traffic signs and display that information inside their instrument clusters. It’s handy when you miss one, but much less so when that missed sign adds another data point to your file.
Mistakes happen, of course, and a few wrong turns can lead to unfamiliar streets, where there’s a need to increase the driver’s awareness of the world around them. But without robust data privacy protection laws, all this information is too easy to collect, package, and sell to the highest bidder.
Photo by: Chevrolet
It’s an unsettling reality that’s already here, and one we’re unlikely to escape, even if automakers want to reverse course.
The United States continues to lack robust federal data privacy laws, and there are few regulations regarding what information companies can collect and how they can use it. Automakers collect your data, but so does your smartphone and the countless apps that run on it. Your personal data is a trillion-dollar industry. Automakers want in on it.
The “Right to Privacy” also doesn’t inherently exist. In theory, your constitutional rights only restrict the government from getting your data. The Third-Party Doctrine of the Fourth Amendment says that “any information you share with others, even if done in confidence so they can provide you with goods and services, loses all constitutional protection,” according to the Institute for Justice. So if law enforcement can scoop up your data willy-nilly without a warrant, then companies most certainly want the power to sell it willy-nilly, too.
You Can’t Hide In Public
General Motors, one of the original automakers named in The New York Times investigation last year, argued just this month that it has the right to sell your driving data because you drive on public roads, and you have no expectation of privacy in public.
And GM is right about that.
Public conduct is for public consumption. In many states, if someone video records you breaking the law, it could be used against you in court because no one has an expectation of privacy in public or on public roads. That’s reality, but now the cars we own can do the recording.
You no longer have to worry about a ticket raising your insurance rates; Your car or smartphone will do that for you instead. The surveillance state makes it easier than ever to pinpoint, punish, and prosecute dangerous drivers, in principle, but it also undermines the very ideas automakers have used to market these products to the masses—freedom and individuality.
Companies are not selling freedom when every move you make is monitored.
Photo by: Mercedes-Benz
And even if we did have appropriate privacy protections, there’s no on-paper justification for breaking the law on public roads.
Automakers sold cars to the masses as an escape, the place you go to get away, physically and mentally, but the microprocessor has made it cheaper than ever for them to install the sensors, cameras, microphones, and the other hardware required to turn your car into an integral part of the growing surveillance state, in turn monetizing your life.
And even if you don’t buy GM’s argument that it’s okay to be constantly surveilled in public for no reason other than you are in public, insurance companies are eager to ensure they are charging customers the right rates—and they don’t even need automakers to get your driving data.
Smartphones are packed with many of the same sensors as cars, capturing your speed, location, and an assortment of other metrics. It’ll know when you visit a race track, how fast you went, and how hard you braked. Apps can access this data, collect it, and sell it to insurance companies, other brokers, law enforcement, and anyone else interested in tracking everything you do.
Police departments have already impounded vehicles that might have witnessed nearby crimes and logged the video footage. A recent Wired report revealed that departments are already training officers to access the trove of data our vehicles create.
But automakers have a choice.
There’s No Escaping the Surveillance State
When Scout revealed the Terra and Traveler last November, CEO Scott Keogh said during the presentation, “Our customers will never become our product. We won’t sell, we won’t post, we won’t commercialize our customer data to anyone ever. We want to protect the customers who drive our cars….”
We’ll have to wait until deliveries begin before we can confirm that statement. And while you should never trust a company on its word, Keogh is at least making a better argument as to why Scout should earn your business rather than those other automakers.
However, even its promise might not be enough to keep your insurance rates from increasing, if you accidentally bring a smartphone with you on a weekend of overlanding. Or the vehicle has a 5G hotspot from a cellular provider.
And that’s the thing, even if automakers de-digitize vehicles or establish robust privacy data protections for their customers, people aren’t going to suddenly begin leaving their phones at home. Someone who owns a Scout could still have their driving data sucked up by their phone and sold to their insurance company, something automakers cannot control.
Photo by: Volvo
That leaves few places for enthusiasts to enjoy the new cars they bought. People can’t fully experience them because automakers want to turn paying customers into the product, shackling them to a subscription-based surveillance apparatus that’s designed to maximize profits with services and paywalls.
Worrying about even more subscriptions, digital services, and surveillance turns cars into the very technology people want to escape. The last thing automakers should want is for the automobile to become just another annoying appliance.
Data collection reveals a false idol, highlighting a truth we all know—cars don’t provide the type of unbridled freedom automakers want us to believe in. They never have and never will. If that’s the case, we might as well let the computers do all the driving and save ourselves the indignity of a speeding ticket, and the dignity of freedom altogether.
