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Teehee I wrote about this after my gag order expired. GM was shipping all telematics data to a big data cluster processing 100gbps of data (with double the dat

Teehee I wrote about this after my gag order expired. GM was shipping all telematics data to a big data cluster processing 100gbps of data (with double the data once Cisco released 400gbps support). Originally it was to help price their used cars. A noble effort I supported. I didn’t know about the sales to insurance brokers, but should have assumed that was coming. Anyway cat is out of the bag, they won’t undo this feature they will pay a fine, offer an opt-out to 5% of users who take up the offer and in 10 years time everyone will assume their driving habits are being monitored by their insurance company. How do I know this? It’s been 10 years since the hoopla about realtime location data being sold. Last night I saw my home IP address reports my location with .25 mile accuracy. Guess that $5 check from Verizon was the fine they had to pay!

EMIRELADERO 3y ago
> Anyway cat is out of the bag, they won’t undo this feature they will pay a fine, offer an opt-out to 5% of users who take up the offer and in 10 years time everyone will assume their driving habits are being monitored by their insurance company. So can't the plaintiffs just request an order compelling GM and others to remove the feature forever as part of the remedies?
- tialaramex 3y ago
  Specific Performance. A court can order as the equitable remedy that one of the parties does a specific thing. Yes, in principle. But no in practice. The real world use of Specific Performance is mostly in Real Property ie the ownership of land and this is because land is very obviously not fungible. The square meter of land I need to get my cows from the grazing field to the nearby milking shed is not in any way equivalent to an otherwise similar square meter of land on the far side of the field leading nowhere, and having the wrong one can't meaningfully be compensated with money whereas the court can just order Specific Performance (ie the wrongful owner hands over the land) to fix the problem. But even beyond that in practice class actions are primarily about the lawyers getting a healthy pay day. $1M each for us as lawyers and each individual "participant" in the class action gets $1 and a 5% discount coupon that expires in six weeks? Sounds good. For the lawyers the incentive is that pay day and the only reason to care about their participants is that if they're treated too poorly a judge may not sign off on the deal.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    We really need something with fangs that actually hurts companies. These “kid gloves” solutions in the USA do not incentivize good behavior.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      The visceral desire for retribution is half of the problem here. Companies respond to incentives. The problem isn't generally the price. When they get caught the cost is generally more than the benefit they received. The problem is that they often don't get caught, or find a way to weasel out of it. As a result the managers who do it will be rewarded most of the time, and even when they're on the wrong side of the gamble, half the time they'll already have left for another company. Raising the penalty wouldn't deter that. What you need is a remedy that can address the offense. Order them to publish the source code to the system for 10 years, so that anyone can audit or modify it in case they try something similar again. Not only does it make it harder for them to reoffend, it's the kind of penalty that corporate lawyers hate, and then they'll be more likely to insist on policies to prevent that from happening to begin with, which puts pressure on preventing the problem from a different angle.
  - abduhl 3y ago
    Specific performance is a contractual remedy. It is rarely granted because contracts are usually about business arrangements, and you can solve most of those problems with money. So for contracts the usual remedy is monetary damages. Courts are more than able to order parties to do things without invoking specific performance via injunctive relief, which you’ll see from the complaint is what is being sought by the plaintiffs.
    - tialaramex 3y ago
      Injunctive relief requires that you show that unless the court provides this relief the harm is irreparable. I guess we'll see.
      - 3y ago
nozzlegear 3y ago
> I wrote about this after my gag order expired. Some time last year I wrote a comment here on HN about my Bolt EUV and OnStar. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote and don’t want to dig for it, but I said something like being happy with the vehicle and had disabled all of the OnStar features/tracking soon after I purchased it. Somebody replied that they were intimately familiar with the OnStar/GM project, having worked on it, and that it was still tracking me despite not being subscribed to any of their services and having turned off all the features in the car that I could. They couldn’t elaborate further, I assume because of an NDA or something. I bet dollars to donuts that this is what they were talking about now. Edit: thanks to Stavros for finding the comment below. It looks like you were in fact the person I was talking to 11 months ago. Small world!
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  You should request your LexisNexis Risk consumer disclosure report. Edit: please report back!
  - nozzlegear 3y ago
    I just did! Very interested in seeing what’s in it.
- hypercube33 3y ago
  Time to find the ATT SIM card and gut it from both of my vehicles.
  - oceanplexian 3y ago
    Most cars have an integrated SIM. You can either pull the fuse, and lose a bunch of functionality, or if you're clever, throw an attenuator on the antenna rendering it useless but preserving the functionality of the rest of your car.
    - plagiarist 3y ago
      Do they not store it an just upload it once the car goes in for service? I have a 32 Gb mini SD card the size of a fingernail that was like $10, something like that would store a fuckload of hard braking events.
Shakahs 3y ago
Not that I support any of this, but why would networking speed be the bottleneck in that system? Telematics seems very much like an OLAP situation where data ingest and querying can be asynchronous.
- notatoad 3y ago
  I read it as they are continually generating so much telemetry data that they’re saturating the link to the storage layer.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bevekspldnw 3y ago
How does the data leave the device? I tried to route traffic from the infotainment system into a WiFi network I was wiresharking, and I saw a lot of GM traffic but I couldn’t install a cert to MitM because I couldn’t figure out how to access the Android settings for the dash OS. Is the traffic through there or is it totally within the CANBUS and never hits the WiFi outbound? In that case do you need to hijack the 4G?
peeters 3y ago
> in 10 years time everyone will assume their driving habits are being monitored by their insurance company. And even if there continues to be an opt-out, those plans will become so prohibitively expensive that you're essentially forced to allow your insurer to spy on you. Privacy is always priced out in the free market. Regulation is the only way. It's not a net benefit to society, just outlaw egregious data collection.

EMIRELADERO 3y ago

> Anyway cat is out of the bag, they won’t undo this feature they will pay a fine, offer an opt-out to 5% of users who take up the offer and in 10 years time everyone will assume their driving habits are being monitored by their insurance company. So can't the plaintiffs just request an order compelling GM and others to remove the feature forever as part of the remedies?

tialaramex 3y ago
Specific Performance. A court can order as the equitable remedy that one of the parties does a specific thing. Yes, in principle. But no in practice. The real world use of Specific Performance is mostly in Real Property ie the ownership of land and this is because land is very obviously not fungible. The square meter of land I need to get my cows from the grazing field to the nearby milking shed is not in any way equivalent to an otherwise similar square meter of land on the far side of the field leading nowhere, and having the wrong one can't meaningfully be compensated with money whereas the court can just order Specific Performance (ie the wrongful owner hands over the land) to fix the problem. But even beyond that in practice class actions are primarily about the lawyers getting a healthy pay day. $1M each for us as lawyers and each individual "participant" in the class action gets $1 and a 5% discount coupon that expires in six weeks? Sounds good. For the lawyers the incentive is that pay day and the only reason to care about their participants is that if they're treated too poorly a judge may not sign off on the deal.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  We really need something with fangs that actually hurts companies. These “kid gloves” solutions in the USA do not incentivize good behavior.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    The visceral desire for retribution is half of the problem here. Companies respond to incentives. The problem isn't generally the price. When they get caught the cost is generally more than the benefit they received. The problem is that they often don't get caught, or find a way to weasel out of it. As a result the managers who do it will be rewarded most of the time, and even when they're on the wrong side of the gamble, half the time they'll already have left for another company. Raising the penalty wouldn't deter that. What you need is a remedy that can address the offense. Order them to publish the source code to the system for 10 years, so that anyone can audit or modify it in case they try something similar again. Not only does it make it harder for them to reoffend, it's the kind of penalty that corporate lawyers hate, and then they'll be more likely to insist on policies to prevent that from happening to begin with, which puts pressure on preventing the problem from a different angle.
- abduhl 3y ago
  Specific performance is a contractual remedy. It is rarely granted because contracts are usually about business arrangements, and you can solve most of those problems with money. So for contracts the usual remedy is monetary damages. Courts are more than able to order parties to do things without invoking specific performance via injunctive relief, which you’ll see from the complaint is what is being sought by the plaintiffs.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    Injunctive relief requires that you show that unless the court provides this relief the harm is irreparable. I guess we'll see.
    - 3y ago

nozzlegear 3y ago

> I wrote about this after my gag order expired. Some time last year I wrote a comment here on HN about my Bolt EUV and OnStar. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote and don’t want to dig for it, but I said something like being happy with the vehicle and had disabled all of the OnStar features/tracking soon after I purchased it. Somebody replied that they were intimately familiar with the OnStar/GM project, having worked on it, and that it was still tracking me despite not being subscribed to any of their services and having turned off all the features in the car that I could. They couldn’t elaborate further, I assume because of an NDA or something. I bet dollars to donuts that this is what they were talking about now. Edit: thanks to Stavros for finding the comment below. It looks like you were in fact the person I was talking to 11 months ago. Small world!

toomuchtodo 3y ago
You should request your LexisNexis Risk consumer disclosure report. Edit: please report back!
- nozzlegear 3y ago
  I just did! Very interested in seeing what’s in it.
hypercube33 3y ago
Time to find the ATT SIM card and gut it from both of my vehicles.
- oceanplexian 3y ago
  Most cars have an integrated SIM. You can either pull the fuse, and lose a bunch of functionality, or if you're clever, throw an attenuator on the antenna rendering it useless but preserving the functionality of the rest of your car.
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    Do they not store it an just upload it once the car goes in for service? I have a 32 Gb mini SD card the size of a fingernail that was like $10, something like that would store a fuckload of hard braking events.

Shakahs 3y ago

Not that I support any of this, but why would networking speed be the bottleneck in that system? Telematics seems very much like an OLAP situation where data ingest and querying can be asynchronous.

notatoad 3y ago
I read it as they are continually generating so much telemetry data that they’re saturating the link to the storage layer.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bevekspldnw 3y ago

How does the data leave the device? I tried to route traffic from the infotainment system into a WiFi network I was wiresharking, and I saw a lot of GM traffic but I couldn’t install a cert to MitM because I couldn’t figure out how to access the Android settings for the dash OS. Is the traffic through there or is it totally within the CANBUS and never hits the WiFi outbound? In that case do you need to hijack the 4G?

peeters 3y ago

> in 10 years time everyone will assume their driving habits are being monitored by their insurance company. And even if there continues to be an opt-out, those plans will become so prohibitively expensive that you're essentially forced to allow your insurer to spy on you. Privacy is always priced out in the free market. Regulation is the only way. It's not a net benefit to society, just outlaw egregious data collection.