It's also surprising how little money is being made. If I was buying a new car and there was an option where I could pay 61 cents for the privacy respecting version, it would be a no brainer.

oh god yes... but I am carrying my self chosen surveillance device with me every single time I enter a car.

At least your self chosen surveillance device doesn't end up reporting rapid acceleration events to LexisNexis and then Progressive.

In theory it could. Usually there is accelerometers on them so they can definitively measure this. The tricky part would be determining if the phone belonged to the driver and which car is being driven.

You could properly infer if the phone owner is the driver by determining if they use the phone less than the other car's inhabitants or if they are the only phone detected driving at that speed and location. Or they use the phone more during traffic jams and less during more intense driving.

Then this leaves determining what car is involved. You could potentially see if the phone is connected to the car's entertainment system. That would tell you what car model it is perhaps even with a unique car id though the serial number. Some cars may have bluetooth/wi-fi and the phone could potentially passively scan the largest most consistent signal to get the car's model without ever connecting.

Cross referencing from other data sources (cameras) would give this information though may still be difficult/expensive/unlawful.

So in response to your comment its possible that the chosen surveillance device does actually report acceleration events to LexisNexis and then Progressive. Or this is is a case of overly being paranoid. Either case the possibility exists.

...not yet. But I am sure they could.

Unless you install your insurance company’s app

For that they would need to market it as a rolling spyware

Surely it costs more than that to run the internet connection as well. I know they choose to do that for other features and probably get good network deals, but the cost is tangible and I would be surprised if it worked out long term.

The hardest part is managing providers across multiple countries, if you want, for example, connectivity in Kazakhstan you either use a super expensive provider that supports a lot of countries, or you have to set up and manage separate contracts with providers in Kazakhstan.

However if you care only about a one or two markets and cars are often already built inside that market...

Cars in in such large numbers that it isn't a big deal to get a bulk deal with each provider seperatly. Though maybe Kazakhstan isn't worth covering at all, I'm not sure what their economy is like.

It was quite complicated for our company since our fleet was in the <50k in size. I worked with specialized trucks.

Complex and a big deal are different axis. I assure you the deals are complex. They are just normal and doable at that scale.

The automotive OEMs are really bad at monetizing this data. How much they make is not how much could be made if the same data was in the hands of more capable entities.

So you as a privacy-desiring car buyer could offer 2 or 3 times more than 60cents to the car OEM. Or, even 10x more. The monetization of that data by the third party surely cannot be 10x their cost - that would be an enormous margin that seem unrealistic. But increasing the price of the car by $6 is almost a rounding error to the car price.

Plus, if you were allowed to opt-out, the rest of the opt-in data from other people become _slightly_ less useful.

Therefore, all the gov't needs to do is to mandate that car manufacturers offer the option at a reasonable price (where the 10x price is considered reasonable).

I question how much they could really make though. It seems like my phone has better data on me and where I go - it is always with me and I use it for more things. Thus the car makers have data but it is a lower quality source for more things. The car makers also have less direct actions they can take - they can't show a video ad while I'm driving (unlike many phone apps) and when I'm not driving they can't do anything.

They do have better information about maintenance needs of my car. However they are limited to giving that to the dealer who already can guess most of that anyway.

That's what really gets me. Wasting an hour of my time is worth a few cents of advertising to instagram. That's how little my time is really worth.

That's the advantage of externalised costs. It doesn't matter how high they are, you don't have to pay them!

You see this in all sorts of places, for example, stealing an EV charging cable. To a thief, a $500 charging station is just $10 worth of copper waiting to be melted down. They don't care about the $490 deficit they left behind because that’s the victim's problem. Social media platforms, and apparently now car manufacturers, look through the exact same lens.

Car business is ruthless, any profit margin is squeezed as much as possible. The reason the infotainment performance is bad in a lot of cars is cost-cutting on the chips used.

Procurement is expected to find ways % in cut costs continuously, every year, forever. Although data-gathering and selling is not part of procurement it is not surprising if car companies are exploring this.

Your comparing apples and oranges, the sales figures are national, whilst the fines covered California alone.

There’s state litigation in Texas and Arkansas at least and a national lawsuit

https://iapp.org/news/a/california-authorities-announce-larg...

Sources?

GM didn't sell anywhere close to half of those cars in California