Fun fact, as a owner of a GMC auto I got a innocent looking email about the discontinuation of the Onstar Smart driver service which was the service in question that violated many US laws and sent data to insurance companies without customers authorization. I hope this hits GM really hard as this type of behavior will never cease until massive amounts of money is extracted from the perpetrators(GM etc).
And not just massive. It needs to be an order of magnitude more than they made from those deals. Too many times companies get slapped on the wrist for an amount considerably less than they made from their illicit activities.
Which I never understood. Normal people that get caught doing things like selling stolen goods have to pay a fine on top of all money they may have made from selling it. Why aren't companies treated the same?
It's more of a hostage negotiation. You want to hurt the company and it's owners, but if you sue too hard, you're likely to just hurt it's workers and it's customers.
It's why preventing companies from reaching _anything near_ monopoly size is so important for corporate jurisprudence. "Too big to fail" is just the tip of this insane iceberg we've allowed to grow into our economy.
The owners of big companies include lots of pension plans, index funds, etc. Hurting those owners, who didn't have any say in the bad decisions, is probably not what we want.
Jail for executives who approve or have knowledge of illegal activities sounds good to me.
Institutional shareholders actually play a strong role in governance over companies, both in choosing where to invest, and in directing companies (and their boards) as to how they should operate.
Pension and hedge funds finding that their assets are at risk due to changes in perceptions around privacy are actually among the most effective market mechanisms for changing corporate behaviour. Far more so, it seems than the consumer/retail side of the market, where leverage is effectively nil.
Investors can effect leverage because they're not stuck with a monopolistic / oligopolistic market with a small number of vendor choices for a particular good. Investors have the entire market of stock corporations as potential investments, and can enter into or exit from those which pose attractive opportunities or undue risks with very few additional concerns.
Except institutional investors ARE restricted based on what kind of investment they need to fill out the specific portfolio they're administering.
Oftentimes these restrictions limit them to a subset of companies in a certain market to fill a specific niche in the name of diversification. Are they artificial limitations? Sure, but only in the sense that there is no regulation saying they cannot find a different company to invest in.
All that to say that things are not nearly as cut-and-dry as it may seem.
With regards to the ultimate thrust of my comment, to a greater or lesser degree than ordinary "consumers" (I hate that term) within monopoly-dominated product or service fields?
Is there any investment category in which an institutional really has only, say, 1--3 options? Because that is the relevant comparison.
I'm going to posit that investment markets are overall more competitive than consumption markets.
(They may have other issues, including some that, of all people, Matt Ridley's pointed out. I believe it's somewhere in this discussion with Johan Norberg and David Runciman, which I've listened to previously but not just now in referencing it: "The New Optimism" on Intelligence Squared, <https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/the-new-optimism-...>. It's worth listening to on its own. I'll admit to being partial to Team Runciman myself, but Ridley's comment on asset markets has been bouncing around my noggin for a while.)
If they are willing to accept the profits than they must also accept the risks. Otherwise you're just vouchsafing the hostage negotiation because of one level of indirection.
Ideally, the people responsible for managing the money on behalf of these institutions end up bearing most of the responsibility.
> Jail for executives who approve or have knowledge of illegal activities sounds good to me.
I suspect one possible outcome is many people wouldn't want to take the risk to become an executive, and the percentage of executives who wouldn't mind taking risks of going to jail will increase, which is not a desirable outcome.
Then don't commit crimes? I'm usually pretty sympathetic to executives being used as sacrificial lambs by constantly being put in the position of having to bet their jobs on a coin flip they're calling in the air. But this really isn't defensible.
Jailing people with only knowledge isn't the right move compared to having a fully anonymous whistleblower program, with fine sharing. It sucks that there has to be zero transparency but you don't want some unfortunate schmuck doing the right thing and then getting blackballed for the rest of their career for it. But jailing the people with authority and accountability is completely doable-- if you didn't know that's on you because it's literally your job to know and that lands you 3rd degree $crime. If they can prove you knew that's 2nd degree, and if they can prove you ordered it or signed off on it then that's 1st degree.
Suppose there are two insurance companies. One is following the law, the other one is bribing a mid-level employee of a car company to give them driver info and then using it to set rates and solicit policies. The CEO of the car company doesn't even know it's happening and the CEO of the insurance company does, but isn't telling anyone about it and it just looks like they have above-average margins on their policies.
As long as they don't get caught, the ones breaking the law are not only making money for themselves, they're the ones investors will choose to invest in when all they can see is the bottom line. The honest CEO of the other insurance company gets deposed because investors want someone who can get the same returns as the cheating one, so they cycle through executives until they get one that posts better numbers because they're cheating too.
Some of them will never get caught and come out ahead. The others expect that to happen, which is why they're willing to do it, and if they do get caught then they get replaced by someone else who thinks they won't get caught.
The underlying problem is the structure of the system. The owners want higher profits but are also a diffuse group without the capacity to pay detailed attention to how it happens, so you create evolutionary pressure to cheat. What you actually want is for companies to be operated by their owners because then the owners know what's happening inside the company and can distinguish between a company which is making more money because it's well-managed and one which is making more money because it's cheating and putting their investment at risk. But then we need to stop having megacorps with diffuse passive investors and instead have small and medium businesses which are operated by the owners.
I think this line of argumentation follows and is logically consistent but if this is really how it worked then you're saying in the long run with probability 1 every executive will be a criminal. Nothing about what you're saying about the incentives is unique to white-collar financial crimes. For crimes that have a low chance of being caught the SOP is make the punishment disproportionately severe and weaponize the people likely to observe or carry out the crime. If all goes well you can't cycle through executives because none of them are willing to risk years of prison, fines, and being barred from leadership roles for life.
I don't see how your example resolves as anything other than the mid-level employee is guilty of bribery, and CEO of the insurance company is guilty of 2nd degree $yet-to-be-derermined-crime-name. I don't expect a CEO to somehow know of literally any crime that occurs by any of their employees, just crime by policy.
> I think this line of argumentation follows and is logically consistent but if this is really how it worked then you're saying in the long run with probability 1 every executive will be a criminal.
Certainly not. For example, if a company is run by an above-average executive who can produce good results without cheating, they won't be replaced by someone who cheats. But that's no general solution because it's not possible for every executive to be above-average.
> For crimes that have a low chance of being caught the SOP is make the punishment disproportionately severe and weaponize the people likely to observe or carry out the crime.
Yeah, that's the War on Drugs strategy. It's aggressively broken and encourages the dangerous and socially destructive behaviors associated with organized crime.
> I don't see how your example resolves as anything other than the mid-level employee is guilty of bribery, and CEO of the insurance company is guilty of 2nd degree $yet-to-be-derermined-crime-name. I don't expect a CEO to somehow know of literally any crime that occurs by any of their employees, just crime by policy.
A CEO in a company that isn't the size of a country is going to be directly involved in the company's operations. That companies have grown so large that their owners and executives no longer have a handle on what's happening inside them is the problem.
Which is why we need the law to make crimes not profitable, or at least to attach enough personal risk to dissuade decision makers. It's how we got US corporations to stop dispensing bribes in foreign countries, to which exactly the same logic applies.
So here's the problem. There are some crimes that have a relatively low probability of detection. It doesn't even have to be that low; say it's 40%.
Then there are people with nothing to lose. Some mid-level manager who isn't very good at it, isn't making his numbers. If he plays by the rules, he's about to get canned and lose his house and his wife. If he cheats and gets caught, there's a 40% chance he goes to jail, but a 60% chance he not only makes a lot of money but gets promoted to the head of the company because his numbers are so good. There are going to be too many people willing to take the risk in that case. It's going to happen a lot of the time.
To fix this you need to attach a penalty to someone who both has something to lose and is in a position to detect the crime. But the someone with something to lose are the owners and when they're diffuse passive investors they're not in a position to detect the crime.
> Then there are people with nothing to lose. Some mid-level manager who isn't very good at it, isn't making his numbers. If he plays by the rules, he's about to get canned and lose his house and his wife. If he cheats and gets caught, there's a 40% chance he goes to jail, but a 60% chance he not only makes a lot of money but gets promoted to the head of the company because his numbers are so good. There are going to be too many people willing to take the risk in that case. It's going to happen a lot of the time.
But exactly the same argument applies to paying bribes to foreign officials, and yet the FCPA at least cut that down. I'm not naïve enough to believe that it eliminated it, but surely it's made a difference.
> To fix this you need to attach a penalty to someone who both has something to lose and is in a position to detect the crime. But the someone with something to lose are the owners and when they're diffuse passive investors they're not in a position to detect the crime.
You clarified later you meant the stock owners, but there are also executives of the company. Somewhere up the chain of command will be someone who's reluctant to have their name attached publicly to the behavior, and the possibility of legal hazard will encourage them to regulate their reports appropriately. This is definitely a place not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
> To fix this you need to attach a penalty to someone who both has something to lose and is in a position to detect the crime. But the someone with something to lose are the owners and when they're diffuse passive investors they're not in a position to detect the crime.
If they had any accountability they would find ways to put themselves in such a position.
No, they wouldn't. They are you. If you have a 401(k), you probably have shares of some of these companies -- likely hundreds if not thousands of different companies. You don't have time to investigate each of their inner workings and if one of them was convicted of mass murder and fully imploded causing their share price to go to zero, you would typically lose a fraction of a percent of your portfolio and might not even notice.
A far more direct consequence of the current situation is that these executives just do whatever the hell they want to maximize their profits at everybody else's expense. Without punishment enough to make it unprofitable, dishonesty only has incentives, on both business and personal level.
I just don't see that twice-removed latent effect having worse consequences for society than the base problem. Not by a long shot.
As a kid, I grew up playing in a marsh that turned out to be the illegal, unmarked, non-access-controlled chemical waste dump for a large specialty chemical plant nearby that had operated there since the late 19th century. Those executives knew what they were doing was wrong— it was the 90s, not the 60s— but spent decades telling bald-faced lies to everyone involved, and when the writing was on the wall for regulatory action, they just dumped the company onto a shell company so the large international parent corporation wouldn't be in the news, and retired happily in huge mansions while the parent company dumped probably 2 years profits into the superfund project to remove the most dangerous stuff and cap/fence of the entire area. I could certainly never know for sure how much that exposure affected my cancer, but the chance of it being zero is pretty slim. Nobody even told me or anyone else around there— I only knew about it because I dug up some old EPA document scans. You're goddamned right they deserve to be in jail and not taking 4 month yacht trips. On a moral level, I think they deserve worse. It was not a sparsely populated area.
This is the kind of thing I expect and want investigative journalists to write about and quiz politicians about non-stop, all the time. Instead they interview them about vacuous things like "ice cream", non-committal questions about policies, "initiatives" like DEI and corporate governance, and stuff so far removed from any concrete instance (like yours) that they can answer in vague non-answers that sound like answers but answer nothing. And of course, never a follow-up, unless it's a politician they don't like, in which case the journalist gets visibly annoyed and angry (wtf?) and tries to call them out on "misinformation". The entire thing is a farce, whilst real-world people on the ground suffer.
Well Jimminy Crispix! Think about the consequences of what you're suggesting.
A) Reporting on serious topics takes a lot more effort than recycling news wire coverage and rehashing political argument trends on Twitter. That means having to collect more analytics data to sell, and charging more than a few dollars per month for subscriptions. Sheesh.
B) People find serious topics depressing: reporting on important things that might be uncomfortable or gross can only lead to lost clicks, subscriptions, and viewers.
C) Upper-management couldn't even try to replace such reporters with web-scraping LLMs. Think about the dozens of starving would-be prompt engineers who won't get hired to replace thousands of journalists. They have families to feed too, you know.
D) There's a good chance that someone in the C suite or someone they know will be put in a very uncomfortable situation because of this! Unacceptable.
What sort of dystopian business hellscape are you trying to lead us into?
> I suspect one possible outcome is many people wouldn't want to take the risk to become an executive
We will run our it if executives? Oh no, what will we ever do? It’s not like people compete for that job and salary
> The owners of big companies include lots of pension plans, index funds, etc. Hurting those owners, who didn't have any say in the bad decisions, is probably not what we want.
I mean... Shareholders are ultimately responsible for the company, they elect the board etc. If shareholders were impacted by this, maybe it would make more folks think twice about "passive investing"?
I don't see this doing much unless everyone stops at about the same time. The largest shareholders have a disproportionate amount of power to influence the direction of most companies.
For much of SP500, the largest shareholders are the passive investors. It's common that an activist hedge fund can influence decisions with a mere 3% or so stake because the likes of BlackRock and Vanguard support them or abstain.
If you properly punish the shareholders, then it doesn't matter if they stop or don't. If they stop, the bad behaviour stops; if they continue, the onerous penalties continue. Anybody who wants to sponsor bad behaviour with their AUM can pay the appropriate fee.
I love when people bring this up. I passively invest by which I mean I take a couple of bucks every couple of paychecks and throw them into an index fund or buy one or two shares of stock of a company. Not to mention my 401k. How about we hold the people making the decisions accountable all the way up and down the chain instead of letting the go with the whole "following orders" defence.
How about we don't let companies control their dividends. Excess profit that's not reasonably ear-marked for growth, should be mandated to be distributed as dividends. And that's probably just one item we can start doing to make the stock-market less of a gamble and hedge against inflation, and more of just "people owning portions of profit-making entities".
> The owners of big companies include lots of pension plans, index funds, etc. Hurting those owners, who didn't have any say in the bad decisions, is probably not what we want.
It is exactly what we want. Otherwise the only deciding factor for what to invest in is maximum profit and that just incentivizes companies to skirt the law as much as possible.
> Hurting those owners, who didn't have any say in the bad decisions, is probably not what we want.
It's definitely not what we want in the short term, but thinking longer term, it's index funds and such that need to remove these actors from their portfolios if we really want to start reshaping the economy.
> Jail for executives who approve or have knowledge of illegal activities sounds good to me.
Life hack: make your activities so complex and distributed that it's impossible to tell who, exactly, is responsible for what. And then also just delete communications when you can.
Simple solution: You're held liable regardless of if you knew or not. It should be your responsibility to do everything possible within your power to make sure the company you're heading isn't committing illegal acts. If it is and you can't prove you tried everything you possibly can to have control over the situation, tough luck buddy.
Maybe then the inflated CEO salaries will make some form of sense for once, instead of the current system where there's 0 actual risk for them other than a golden parachute waiting for them at the end of the road after having fucked millions of people's lives irrevocably.
> Hurting those owners, who didn't have any say in the bad decisions
Why do you think this? Executives have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, so if these actions are more profitable, they are legally required to perform them. Moreover, the primary beneficiaries are the owners.
Indeed, if you harm the shareholders by reducing the price of shares, you are harming them in the most fair way possible: In proportion with their share of the responsibility.
>Executives have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, so if these actions are more profitable, they are legally required to perform them.
Zero percent of this is correct, and even if they had a legal responsibility to make "as much money as possible", which they don't, that would definitely not force them to commit crimes
The "fiduciary responsibility" is NOT "to make every dollar possible", it is a "don't purposely hurt the company" rule.
Surely it must be at least fifty percent correct, since you grant the first clause :)
Of course the duty does not extend to committing crimes. I was being a bit cynical. You are right that profit maximisation and fiduciary duty are distinct concepts. In practice, though, the owners are profit maximisers. Companies that do not profit maximise are less attractive to investors, attract less investment, and are outcompeted.
To advocates of the market system, this is a feature and not a bug. But its effect is that companies operate "optimally" within the bounds of the law - said differently, the line between legal and illegal conduct is generally skirted as closely as possible. And when, as other commenters have noted, punishments for breaking the law are on average less than the profits incurred by illegal activity, selection bias means you are left with lawbreakers in the long run.
You are right that this is not a (direct) consequence of the fiduciary duty of an executive. I stand by my main point, though, that this behaviour is a consequence of the owners' selection criteria, and they deserve to be punished for it.
Pension plans are nearly gone and the whole point of index funds is to weather volatility. We have unemployment to assist workers (or we would if workers had modern rights to begin with). meanwhile whole draw of market investment to everyone but the shareholders goes tits-up if failure is weathered by the market as a whole rather than the incompetent or malicious actors.
I mean, people will put up with a lot, but eventually they'll realize that the market isn't magic and its continued failure to address our the economic and social conditions can be blamed on a specific enumerable class of person.
Ok, as I said they're nearly gone. Unless you think we should tank our society to benefit 14% of the country, or backing pensions with something more reasonable than market forces, there's not much to gain from prioritizing pensions over every other symptom of economic health.
No. What you'd really want if you really wanted to fix things is to hurt the top and mid-managers who decided to commit those offenses. Unfortunately it almost never happens.
No they choose to because of the benefits it gives them. Realistically middle management are the ones who need to start going to jail to cleanup this kind of behavior.
The only way to fix things is to drag the occupants of the c-suite into civil court and start dropping massive fines on their heads. Do that, and this type of behavior would vanish within days.
I know it's a number that gets calculated on cybersecurity assessment sheets, but I've never seen it being in any way connected to reality. Best I can tell, the actual reputational damage is almost universally $0. Security breaches are non-actionable oopsies - unless your product is literally preventing such breaches[0], it's going to be seen as a random event that has no bearing on customers making their purchasing decisions. After all, it could've happened to anyone, and might just as well happen to any of the competitors, and it doesn't even impact any of the subjects directly.
--
[0] - And not even then - see e.g. CrowdStrike, who're busy turning the greatest security fuckup to date into a net positive event for them.
They don’t exactly have a captive audience. Besides the corvette, their competitors pretty much universally have a drop in replacement.
Changing cars is a heck of a lot easier than a corporation ripping out software that they likely have a 3-year contract on, and would require millions in services on top of just eating the cost of the contract itself.
Only if you believe the competition isn't doing the same thing.
My bank isn't a monopoly. They provide with terrible service. (Truely terrible). Trouble is all their competitors are just as bad.
GM gets no blow-back from this. Firstly because "nobody" cares. Second because "I bet you they're all doing it" and thirdly because in 20 minutes I'll be outraged about something else. By the time I buy my next car I can't remember who had this issue, plus all the other complaints about all the other manufacturers.
If I stopped buying from every company that has, or is, behaving badly, every company that had a security breach, or contributed to the wrong politician, or hired a racist, or whatever, I'd never spend a dime.
Firstly, with respect, one purchase is not damage.
Hacking the cellular is not damage to them (you bought the car.)
But mostly, given that you have principles (which I applaud), tell me which brands you would consider. (I'm pretty sure I can Google a bad-news-day for them too.)
> Firstly, with respect, one purchase is not damage.
In so far as the sense that anecdotes are not data. To the extent that Tempest1981 is a representative sample, it is an observation of damage to the brand's reputation.
If we take that as true, then we can ignore that aspect when we make our choice.
While both parties are funded by corporate interests, they still are far enough apart on policy and personality for the choice to have an impact.
Corporates are mostly caring about tax policy and industry regulation. They (mostly) have neutral stances on things like Healthcare, equality, racism, immigration, abortion and so on.
How about this. For criminal behaviour which crosses a certain $ threshold (as in, what size of fine is levied by the courts/fed authorities), the entire remuneration given to anyone who served on the board of directors is considered forfeit, and used to pay the fine. That means seizing secondary properties from current or ex directors, and other assets.
Once that pool is exhausted, then you ding the shareholders (via draining the company's own coffers).
Sure, this would give rise to some schemes of "how do I squirrel away my bonuses, in case they come after me tomorrow", but hubris & the unpredictability of this would still lead to some big, eye watering examples. Which would have the necessary deterrent effect.
And yes, this WOULD be justice. Those who did the wrong, and profited from it, SHOULD pay.
> Sure, this would give rise to some schemes of "how do I squirrel away my bonuses, in case they come after me tomorrow", but hubris & the unpredictability of this would still lead to some big, eye watering examples. Which would have the necessary deterrent effect.
The simple solution to such games is the same as with other monetary fines for individuals: if you can't pay the fine, you go to jail.
I'm a full-on free market freedom person, but even I'd agree with this kind of stuff at this point.
One thing we really need to be careful to avoid whilst going down this proposed route, is to not mimic the failure mode of socialist/communist entities. I.e. Whereby performance is mandated (produce X amount of grain), along with constraints and other mandates that make the first or all mandates impossible to achieve at the same time, thereby guaranteeing failure and/or reporting shenanigans.
E.g. in our current world context. Mandating increases in hiring as a percentage, but then also giving a mandate that we can only add female/non-white employees; all while existing in a male/white dominated pool of applicants. We have to give reasonable and understandable growth / performance mandates, and not pie in the sky stuff that takes generations to fix but we want it done by next quarter.
I'd be fine with letting the company get to choose between a sufficiently large fine, and board level executives who encouraged the behavior going to jail for real durations of time.
They can pick one of three choices: Don't be evil. Pay more than they made. Go to jail for the same duration of time as having stolen Option 2's money, and not the scapegoats, people actually in charge.
I absolutely want electronics built into car! Requirements for antilock brakes, electronic fuel injection, and other electronics in vehicles has made them safer and more efficient. The other items on your list I can agree with, though.
And ECUs make it so easy to manage all of these things! I love 80s/90s Japanese sports cars, but I don't think we need to go back to the era of using a gazillion vacuum lines to control all kinds of esoteric valves and sensors. But I agree with everything else; I don't want my car to connect to the internet, I don't want my car to track my travel and driving habits, and I definitely don't want that data sent to the manufacturer to be sold.
It really just smacks of greed and nothing else... selling cars has a long history of being a profitable business on its own. You don't need to steal your customers' data to turn it into another revenue stream, but it sure looks good on a financial report.
> It really just smacks of greed and nothing else... selling cars has a long history of being a profitable business on its own. You don't need to steal your customers' data to turn it into another revenue stream, but it sure looks good on a financial report.
Its not only greed, its also a race to the bottom. If you're GM, you might prefer not doing that, but if your competition starts doing that, then you're at a competitive disadvantage, because they'll have more money to invest in engineers/production optimization, etc. So the logic then goes that you might as well do it first.
This is a case where you need government regulations to enforce mutual disarmament.
Or GM could not do it, and loudly advertise the fact that their cars are more private than their competitors, who snitch on you to insurance companies. The marketing alone would be worth far more than they gain from selling the data.
>I absolutely want electronics built into car! Requirements for antilock brakes, electronic fuel injection, and other electronics in vehicles has made them safer and more efficient.
There are car people out there who would rather drive a fully analog car without any electronics such as ABS - though that typically means a hardcore sports car such as a Caterham.
Too bad new cars are required by law to have a real time internet connection so that the police can track them and execute remote shutdown commands. There's no opting out of government law by selecting a different brand
The best way to combat this is walking and bike lanes. With no alternative to cars for most people you will see this kind of behavior continue.
Trying to pit automakers against each other on this topic and others is the misdirection. They want to distract you from wanting alternatives so that you don’t even need to have a spying car in the first place.
What about them? The roads are still there and they can still use them.
I’m suggesting that future growth can be handled better by providing alternatives to forced car ownership, and so if you don’t want your data collected by your car you can have an alternative.
There is no reasonable alternative. Public transport is unreasinable for most people when you look at suburban and rural areas for the bulk of places people live and work given how spread out everything is.
But you’re also missing the forest for the trees. There are easy wins in public transit that can reduce car usage but we refuse to fund them. Bike lanes and street cars in urban areas for example can reduce car usage (and reduce congestion for drivers) and allow us to do more with less. I’d prefer riding a bike a mile down the road to grab groceries (or just walking) but our infrastructure makes that impossible and so I have to drive a car, taking up a limited parking spot and slowing your driving down too.
Most Americans actually live in urban environments as well. We aren’t that spread out actually.
I cannot emphasize strongly enough how little public transit makes sense as a replacement for cars in most suburban and rural areas.
As in - you are asking people to sacrifice a 15 minute drive home for a 1.5 hour public transit commute with home in many cases.
Their life and their time is worth more than enough to get a car at that point.
There is also no "walking to the train or bus stop" for most people because they live spread out enough that there is no conceivable way public transit could work as a replacement for cars.
In Columbus our regional transit agency COTA built parking lots out in the suburbs.
They call it park and ride. [1]
People who live in more remote areas or even not far away in the suburbs will park their car at the parking lot and hop on the bus as it heads toward areas like downtown where a lot of jobs are or to other large employment centers. Sometimes people just meet up at these locations and carpool too so you don’t have to take the bus.
They don’t have to stress about traffic, or pay for parking (parking lots are economic outflows so this is a nice side effect), and they can work or read or do any number of more productive and interesting things instead of pay attention and drive.
This is just one example where without even making any drastic changes we can reduce reliance on cars and leverage existing infrastructure better than we are today.
As cities like Columbus and other small/medium size cities modify zoning to allow for more dense development in urban corridors instead of additional vehicles on the road, turning your 15 minute commute into 45 minutes - 1 hour, we can reduce the impact of population increase on our highways and we can do so at much lower cost in all aspects with better transit (bikes, trams, bus, sidewalks).
Socializing auto-only infrastructure is not smart and it’s way too expensive not just in terms of taxpayer dollars but also in the mandatory costs of car ownership: insurance, loans with interest, data harvesting that you won’t have a say in, gas, wars to secure gas supplies, kids dying in car crashes instead of living good lives, new windshield wipers, oil changes, etc. - these are all costs we can reduce for more people. [2]
For those living in rural areas nothing really changes (frankly not much changes for suburban areas either). They’re already on the gubmint dole and receiving large road maintenance subsidies that their tax base can’t support. They’re more than welcome to spend an hour driving and paying for parking but that’s not an excuses to not build sidewalks and other basic necessities where most of us live.
I am with you, but the power that Big Auto and Big Oil wield in this realm makes it impossible to foster change unless consumers start collectively organizing. Good luck with that. I hate to say it, but that war feels already lost in the US. There is hope elsewhere, perhaps, but sadly, the US is shackled to their cars and trucks by the civil engineering that resulted in suburbia.
I think it's still hopeful. Even in places like Columbus we have regional leaders and mayors who recognize we can't just do "cars forever". Younger people I speak with want to be able to walk to places too. It'll be a battle but I think we can make things better for everyone, including drivers.
Pretty sure this metric will be constant (provided the hands aren't perfectly synced). The frequency of confluence is proportional to the difference in rates, but the duration is inversely proportional.
So the better way would be something like average angular distance? If it's close to correct, but just off by a second or so - then that average will be very small.
Same problem. The distribution of misalignments will be uniform.
Picture a clock frozen at the 12 o'clock position. It will be exactly aligned at midnight and noon, and exactly misaligned at 6am and 6pm. The angular misalignment will smoothly go from 0 to 180 degrees, then back at the same rate. The time it takes to move into and out of alignment will change, but the average misalignment will always be 90 degrees (absolute value).
The only exception is clocks which proceed at the exact same rate. Here they will both be stuck in sync, locked into whatever the initial misalignment was.
Paxton is a crook, but in this case he's fighting the good fight. Texas collected a $1.4B settlement from Meta for its facial-recognition scanning, and in this case the monetary damages to the victims are far worse in terms of higher insurance premiums.
He should then go after the insurance companies who used this data next, and force them to disgorge the excess profits they made from the illegal use of data, preferably with triple penalties.
In an efficient market insurance premiums are essentially zero sum. The more that one person pays to offset their own risk, the less everyone else pays.
Safe drivers subsidize unsafe drivers and this subsidy can and should be reduced when possible with better predictive information.
Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function.
Secondly, you seem to be implying that only aggressive drivers are getting flagged by the data. But the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circumstances require it. Maybe you have to commute to your job in heavy stop-and-go traffic with difficult merges.
Finally, this kind of surveillance changes behavior in ways that may make things less safe. If you're driving down a street and a ball bounces out from behind a parked car do you slam on your brakes out of fear that there is a child chasing after it, or do you think that hitting the brakes might make your premiums go up so you just hope that there isn't a child coming.
> But the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circumstances require it. Maybe you have to commute to your job in heavy stop-and-go traffic with difficult merges.
I would contend that this doesn't matter in terms of risk. It doesn't matter if the risk is caused by the person being a bad driver or if the risk is caused by the commute route that you take at a certain time of day.
In either case, there's risk that is shown by the data. If you are driving a route that is stressful and risky, it doesn't matter if you're a good driver or a bad driver - you're doing something that is risky.
In days of old this was done by looking at the commute distance and likely route (the insurance company has home address and work address).
> In either case, there's risk that is shown by the data
Somebody this there is risk in the data. Big difference.
In any case, you can buy insurance that does this, they install telematics box and sends them data -it’s available, and not popular. So the market has spoken
> the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circumstances require it
Preface: I'm not strongly for these hyper monitoring systems of driving patterns for insurance.
Often being in a situation where you have to slam on your brakes means even if you're a good driver you're in a lot more riskier environments than a driver who doesn't often have to. A good driver that is rarely in a situation where he has to slam on his brakes probably gets into fewer collisions than the same driver in an environment where he needs to do it often. Often having to brake hard is still potentially an indicator of higher claim likliehood.
Yeah but if you really optimize it to ad absurdum, everybody will pay according to damages they will cause, negating whole point of 'socialized' spread-across-variable-population insurance.
End users shouldn't generally want insurance to run over-optimally, that benefits just shareholders of given insurance and not population overall. That I consider myself above-average driver changes absolutely nothing in this. And those stupid enough who think similarly and think they should therefore pay less can and will be easily hit from unexpected angles and end up same or worse (age, old injuries/mental diagnoses, family history and gazillion other params which are/should be mostly illegal to optimize against, and you have little to no control of).
I'm not generally for hyper analyzed metrics gathering in this case (I don't like the privacy implications), but I'm generally for riskier drivers paying significantly more. Individuals should feel the costs of their driving more in the US IMO. I don't like heavily subsidizing people who drive so recklessly.
Maybe then they'd realize overly building car dependent cities isn't that great in the end.
Convincing risky drivers to pick an option other than driving seems great to me. I'd be happy if a huge chunk of drivers couldn't drive anymore. It would make everyone safer and save a ton of lives.
Some optimization yes, but this has been already achieved decades ago by simply using driving/accident history that insurances shared among themselves probably since they went digital. All the consistently bad drivers will easily fall into this.
What I talk about is anticipation/prediction, possibly wrong conclusions from data (since we all know data can be pretty bad or incorrectly analyzed), also no way to correct any incorrectly derived bad rating.
There are no consumers winning in this scenario, even if it may feel intuitively as such if you are a stellar safe driver. Also there are many second-order effects, ie poor risky people pushed out of insurances, still driving since in US you can't do anything without a car in rural places, still causing accidents but no way in hell to pay back, ever. So we move the losses from private corporations to random citizens caught in some bad luck.
I'd say keep the risk at those corporations, they anyhow still manage to earn billions annually, no need to make their life even easier.
> if you really optimize it to ad absurdum, everybody will pay according to damages they will cause, negating whole point of 'socialized' spread-across-variable-population insurance
Except spread out over time, which is still a net-benefit.
Ultra efficient premiums should include the time domain by charging premiums in winter vs. summer based on risks.
Keep getting better and a ‘perfect’ system would bump the premiums pre accident to cover the full costs of that accident immediately before your accident. Making insurance a pure dead loss for consumers which means insurance must be inefficient to be useful.
Hot take: maybe that is actually desirable? If insurance has a plethora of good actuarial information and risk modeling, and one's insurance costs are high, that's the market telling that person that they probably shouldn't be driving. If high insurance costs promote alternate means of transportation for highly risky drivers, that's a net win for everyone on the road.
the point of insurance is to make sure if you get into a crash with somebody else and they are at fault, that they even have the means to pay you in the first place. if forced to, people make the decision to drive uninsured because it is nigh impossible to travel around this country otherwise, and then it's worse when they do get into an accident and cannot pay the other driver's costs. you can't squeeze blood from a stone.
this is also partially the reasoning behind ACA requiring health insurance; hospitals were struggling because they could not collect from people with no money that were winding up in the ER.
Sounds like we need better enforcement of insurance requirements. Driving a car uninsured should have some extremely stiff penalties. Once again, maybe if the penalties are high enough and the costs expensive enough for more people, there'd actually be more of a push to re-think overly car dependent life.
It will optimize society overall to have risky, uninsurable drivers not driving.
It's not like healthcare. There will always be healthcare costs. We don't have to have everyone drive all the time, we choose to.
> Driving a car uninsured should have some extremely stiff penalties.
I want to agree with you, but wonder if you have ever been poor? When you need the car to get to work so you can feed your kids, but you can't afford all of
- feed kids
- rent
- insurance
because you got hit by a surprise medical bill (kid got sick, maybe?)
I'm strongly in favor of your end goal (less car-dependent life), I'm just cautious about using punishment as a way to get there.
Rather than subsidize the poor person being poor via insurance, we can subsidize them by say, building public housing nearby their place of work, or direct payments.
Let's expand that. Let's name your hypothetical person, Bob. He's living on the edge financially, and decides to go without insurance.
Let's bring in another person, Alice. Alice is also not in great financial shape. But Alice is able to pay for insurance and follows all the rules. Alice has a small amount of savings, go Alice!
One day, Bob hits Alice. It causes medical issues for Alice. Alice might have insurance, but it's potentially still expensive for Alice. Because of her injuries she can't work for a few weeks. She works hourly, so now loses wages. Luckily with FMLA she won't necessarily lose her job, but she needed every paycheck. But it doesn't really matter, because her car is now gone. She can't drive to work anymore. She can't drive to groceries. She can't afford a car, as a huge chunk her savings went to cover those medical bills and missed paychecks. She's pretty SOL huh.
Sounds like we need to let Bob off the hook for inflicting all this on Alice. After all, he needed to drive without insurance.
No. We should just make it possible so Bob didn't need to drive in the first place instead of excusing his choice to still drive when he couldn't really afford it. We should structure the incentives so Bob doesn't want to drive if he can't afford it.
People driving without insurance ruin lives like Alice's all the time.
That scenario is completely missing the point. Bob has to drive because of the lack of good public transportation and the fact that he can't afford a house near his work. Not to mention if he can't afford a car with insurance it's because his job simply doesn't pay enough.
It's much more likely that external factors put him in that situation, rather than himself. Yet you propose we should punish him personally and paint only Alice as a victim. That's naive. Both are victims.
These are systemic problems and trying to solve them with individual punishments is only going to hurt individuals while not fixing the underlying issues that really matter.
I'm fully aware Bob is the victim. That's why I'm saying the solution is to make it so Bob didn't get in a car. He is a victim of car dependency. Subsidizing insurance to make sure Bob could always afford it isn't solving that. Ensuring he can always afford insurance just furthers his victimhood.
But the only question that really matters in the end is: is that profitable?
If we really cared about safety many people would not be allowed to drive in the first place. Tests would be much more strict and rightly so. But it's way more profitable to let those people spend money on cars (and eventually kill people) than it is to provide good public transportation.
Especially with the auto industry, they have basically won the lobbying game. Most people can't even imagine a world where cars aren't in the center of it, so we keep moving the goalpost...
Realistically, the other person ends up in jail and then you still can’t get compensated for car repairs. It’s not super clear why that would be better than the pooling of risk that happens today that results in compensation.
American society has chosen to create a built environment that is inhospitable to anything else except driving, so I don’t think this is actually a real choice. The people who are getting into crashes all the time are not the ones pushing for that built environment.
I'm saying they should face such extreme penalties it's not worth it anymore and have it policed so those people aren't on the roads in the first place to get in a collision. Right now you're pretty much not going to have anything happen driving without insurance unless you get into an accident that you can't escape from. If it was highly likely for someone to face judgement every time they went out you'd probably have significantly fewer uninsured drivers out there.
Then you basically just have a roving class of jobless people stuck at home.
We’re not talking about the currently uninsured. We’re talking about a “hot-take” proposal to significantly increase the amount of uninsured people today, people who today can get insurance.
Or we get a stronger political will to no longer force car dependency on everyone when people actually start to understand the real costs of car-centric design.
When the stores and restaurants where rich people shop can't get anyone to work there anymore without paying people the full costs of actually driving far away maybe there will be a will to change things.
Lots of people around the world can go to work without needing a car.
Using our justice system to meter out extreme punishment would mostly impact poor people, and it is not as if the US has historically been very good at listening to the suffering of poor people.
The Bay Area can barely keep service workers in housing and its taken several decades of this problem to get even the slightest bit of progress.
Being frank, you shouldn't be making the 40+mile commute in a car if you can't afford all the ramifications of it. It's a failure of societal design to force people to drive 40 miles on a vehicle they can't responsibly afford to operate just to survive.
In the end, they shouldn't live 40mi from where they work. It's not a good thing to force such a lifestyle.
Honestly it's depressing you're suggesting we should continue to force people to spend so much of their productive lives commuting to dead-end jobs that will never lift them out of the poverty of their situation. It's sad you're continuing to argue people should live an hour+ away from where they work, and that should just be the norm and the basis for our designs.
If you want to live 40+mi from your work and can afford all that involves and are willing to live with the tradeoffs, sure go ahead. Pay the tolls for the highways. Pay the congestion fees. Choose to spend more time with the insides of your car than you do spending time with your family on an average weekday. Pay the higher insurance compared to those who live close or take the train. Just quit asking for handouts and subsidies to pave over other people's homes, force bullshit parking minimums which lead to seas of empty pavement, demand other people pay for the roads you drive, etc.
your proposed change will take decades to rework cities to move away from car-centric city design, to introduce public transportation, to rework current districts, to move shopping malls/restaurants closer to living districts etc.
all of this just because you wanted to make stricter insurance just to make it more (by how much?) efficient for insurers, so that they would make more profit.
No, I'm suggesting it because I don't want to pay for Bob to smash several cars a year. I'm saying it because there's lots of people who have no business being out on the road. Having Bob drive when he's a bad driver makes everyone around less safe.
But I guess you'd have society pay for all the cars Bob ends up destroying. We'll subsidize him crashing cars over and over and hurting Alice but we just can't seem to find the money to add another bus line!
> If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function.
Then we need to break whatever that social function is away from the umbrella of "insurance." Mandatory car insurance is predicated on the fact that you can pay enough on average to cover your damages to others but might not be able to do so in the worst case. If we're in a world where somebody's driving exceeds the external damage bounds they can afford _even on average_, subsidizing those people is no longer the job of insurance.
Mandatory car insurance is essentially a welfare benefit. The benefit is just administered by insurance companies, because they are believed to be more efficient than the government. (This is pretty common for all kinds of benefits around the world.) Mandatory insurance is not a private contract two parties have reached at their own initiative, and the usual business considerations don't apply. If an insurance company wants to provide mandatory car insurance, they must follow government policies, not their own policies.
If someone drives recklessly and causes excessive damage, the government has other tools beyond insurance premiums. They can, for example, revoke the license and confiscate the car. Or issue a fine or put the driver in prison.
Mandatory car insurance, in theory, moves money from drivers (proportional to the risk they represent) to victims (proportional to the damages caused), plus a cut for the insurance company.
I'm missing something in your flow of ideas. Is it a welfare benefit because that idealized theory of insurance is itself a welfare benefit or because when insurance is mandated it doesn't live up to expectations?
The insurance is mandated, and the focus is more on guaranteed benefits to the victims than on fairness for the people paying them.
If you can't afford to pay for the damages you caused, that's your problem. You took the risk, and now you face the consequences. There is no reason to make the insurance mandatory to prevent that. But if the victim doesn't get any compensation because you can't afford to pay, that's a public problem. Now there is a reason to make the insurance mandatory, and it's particularly important that the riskiest drivers have insurance. If you make it too expensive for them, they may choose to drive without insurance. Which is exactly what you wanted to avoid in the first place.
> If we're in a world where somebody's driving exceeds the external damage bounds they can afford _even on average_,
Does this have any meaning at all? I think you are too busy thinking about cars and not people.
If a pedestrian is hit and crippled for life, the damages are more than you can afford for majority of the population.
Many accidents are random chance, caused by factors that cannot be controlled (weather, random technical failure, etc) and lethal accidents do not tend to repeat.
I think we agree about the nature of accidents -- they have some chance of occurring, the damages are often more than any one person can afford, and beyond a probabilistic assessment you have no way of knowing exactly how many wrecks will happen or what the damages will be.
My point is that you _can_ analyze those accidents probabilistically. Somebody who practices defensive driving, never drives over 25mph in a residential, only drives in broad daylight, and only travels 500 miles per year will have a very different baseline, both in number and severity of accidents, than somebody who habitually blows through residential stop signs at 60+mph and drives 50,000 miles per year.
Insurance concerns itself with flattening those spiky probability distributions. The first person will likely never severely injure a person even if they get in an accident, just from the difference in miles driven they're going to be in 100x fewer accidents per year, and probably much better than that because of their other safety practices (call it an additional 2x factor).
Just to have some hypothetical numbers to play with, the safer driver has an average of 0.001 wrecks per year, and the average damages might be $20k (fender benders, minor hospitalization, ...), so they have about $20/yr worth of risk to insure against (yes, I know you have to integrate over probability of different types of wrecks or whatever; this is a simple HN comment with ballpark numbers). The dangerous driver has 0.2 wrecks per year, and the average damages might be $100k (total both vehicles, major hospitalization, ...), so they have $20,000/yr to insure against.
_Insurance_ concerns itself with factoring in those relative risk profiles (along with the time value of money and whatnot; it gets a bit complicated) and guaranteeing that the individuals only have to pay their flat premiums (and optionally a flat deductible per wreck, though a decently high deductible is a good idea for most people) instead of risking bankruptcy and then some (it's the "and then some" that made car insurance mandatory in the US -- ensuring that the unlucky person you crashed into can still be made as financially whole as possible).
And that's all I meant with the "even on average" comment. If the safe driver's premiums were a bit more than $20/yr, and the dangerous driver's premiums were a bit more than $20,000/yr, that would be _fine_ from an insurance perspective.
The person I was replying to was talking about the "social function" of insurance, and my real point is that if the social function is to allow that dangerous, more expensive driver to continue to drive (not necessarily as bad of an idea as it sounds in the abstract -- if they couldn't legally drive, would they do something more dangerous or less insured instead? is it worth the additional costs we inflict on people when driving is nearly mandatory but we just won't let them?), _insurance_ isn't the tool to enable them. We should be thoughtful and explicit when providing those sorts of subsidies, instead of hiding and burying them in a tangentially related financial instrument.
Mind you, going 1-2 comments up the chain and referring to the data collection, I still think that's bad for other reasons, and using "too complicated" of models (under the assumption that they'll likely never be analyzed by a real person and have a chance of being egregiously wrong) isn't great either, but pricing insurance based on what you know about a person isn't bad in and of itself.
> Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function.
Not necessarily! If you’re a physician, you have liability insurance against malpractice claims. If the insurer can correctly determine that you are a particularly incompetent physician and your premiums should be so high that you’re effectively just pre-paying the future settlements for your inevitable future malpractice cases, you will not be able to afford those premiums and will be forced to stop practicing medicine. In this scenario, the insurance market has satisfied its social function.
In principle, incompetent and unsafe drivers could similarly be identified and priced out of being able to drive, and the act of doing so would serve a purpose of making the roads safer for everyone else.
I think these systems are bad and I think vehicle manufacturers piping data directly to insurance companies should be illegal whether you consent or not. That being said, "but privacy" has always struck me as a weird argument.
There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when a vehicle with a particular license plate is at a particular intersection or on a particular public street. Some jurisdictions extend some privacy rights to whether or not a particular person is driving it but many don't.
So when it's in public, the location of your car is not "private" information. How is acceleration, braking, or other engine telemetry data private?
The right to privacy is not boolean. There is a spectrum of reasonable expectations of privacy. Also, the right to privacy in public is not necessarily zero. The varying degree of rights to privacy in public are less than in private settings, but often greater than zero.
While your insurer may, by happenstance, see your license plate while you are driving around, they certainly are not following you 100% of the time. The degree to which your location is tracked when your license plate is plainly visible, is different than degree of privacy expectation when that location is being automatically recorded.
> So when it's in public, the location of your car is not "private" information.
It's just not that simple. It would be nice and convenient if "private" was a boolean value. But it is very much a float type:
> they certainly are not following you 100% of the time
I don’t follow the argument being made here.
The state of modern surveillance is different from what is described. People are consenting to precise monitoring for slightly lower insurance premiums. The question is: should it be illegal (should we fight against monitoring) for some moral/philosophical reason, or are we accepting it because that’s the way things are.
There is not necessarily informed consent with the type of informatics data collection described in these suits.
This isn’t a lawsuit about a “progressive snapshot” type of device.
It has been described by many that these vehicles had been opted in at the dealer with little to no notification, and the data subsequently sold to brokers, who then sold the data to insurers.
If I personally attach a GPS tracker to your car or follow you everywhere with a camera, I will get charged and thrown in prison despite it all being in public. This behaviour will be considered stalking and threatening.
People on here argue about laws as if they are universal, but if you actually try to do the exact same thing as these companies do, you will find out the difference very quickly.
Insurance spreads risk over outcomes. The social function of spreading risk over people (subsidizing risky behavior) is both incidental, accidental, and a clear moral hazard. Insurance would still be extremely useful even if we knew with perfect certainty the probability that you would have a car accident in the next 5 years.
Seems dangerous when the "risky behavior" is outside the control of the person being insured. Or if what you infer as risky behavior isn't actually risky. Is being born with a heart defect risky behavior? We have regulations to avoid discriminating over pre-existing conditions for a reason, and I could easily see these methods leading to similar bias. Doubly dangerous when insurance across multiple industries are essentially or literally required.
It'd be easy if we had a magic ball that could pinpoint risky immoral behavior, but I don't think we're anywhere near there yet. I barely trust the sensors in these cars to not report bad data, let alone trust the company to not extrapolate cynical conclusions that help their bottom line at the expense of people's wellbeing.
>Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function.
Insurance is a business, where the insured pays an insurer to pay for costs for damages that the insured cannot afford to pay. The insurer's job is to calculate the amount of premium necessary to ensure they can afford to pay for the damages, but they also have to sell the insurance at competitive prices, so they probably have to calculate premiums based on the risks that each insured represents.
>Secondly, you seem to be implying that only aggressive drivers are getting flagged by the data. But the computer doesn't know if you accelerate and brake hard because you're an aggressive driver, or if your circumstances require it. Maybe you have to commute to your job in heavy stop-and-go traffic with difficult merges.
The goal is not to label drivers as aggressive or not aggressive. The goal is to tease out the factors that lead to claims. With a sufficiently large dataset, it should be possible to tease out whether or not characteristics such as stop and go traffic is an indication of higher likelihood of claims. If an insurer does not calculate this property, then a competing insurer probably will and hence be able to offer lower premiums to less risky customers.
>Finally, this kind of surveillance changes behavior in ways that may make things less safe. If you're driving down a street and a ball bounces out from behind a parked car do you slam on your brakes out of fear that there is a child chasing after it, or do you think that hitting the brakes might make your premiums go up so you just hope that there isn't a child coming.
If a single event of slamming brakes is causing premiums to go up, I doubt that insurer is pricing premiums accurately. However, if the insurer experiences greater losses in neighborhoods where people are slamming their brakes more often, then obviously the risks are higher in that neighborhood and premiums need to reflect that.
The higher premiums themselves would tell people in the neighborhood that either they are driving too fast, or they are not looking after the children. And if people are choosing to risk plowing into a child for the sake of their premiums, then that is more of a moral quandary than a problem with insurance pricing.
If the goal is to subsidize a specific population, then that should be a government function via taxes.
> If the goal is to subsidize a specific population, then that should be a government function via taxes.
As I understand, all 50 states require insurers to write high risk drivers policies through assigned risk plans. I guess you could shuffle the money through the state as well, but it seems like an inefficient way to accomplish the same.
But really, car insurance and their respective mandates exist to protect the innocent, not drivers themselves. e.g. No state requires that you insure your property.
But yeah, that’s kind of my point. No state (except NH) wants people to be able to run others over, default on any damages, and leave the innocent person screwed. That’s why liability insurance is mandatory, and it’s why (mostly) first-party insurance is not. It is a social safety net.
> Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk.
I think that definition is incomplete: Insurance is to spread risk equitably.
That means accounting for disparate probabilities and disparate impacts. For example, consider "house burns down" insurance, where premiums depend on whether the house is/isn't near a wooded area, and whether it is a cheap/expensive house... And yes, also whether or not the homeowner has a passion for homemade fireworks.
> If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function.
While I agree that various dystopic outcomes are possible, the problem is not better knowledge about risks itself. Improved information about the dangers we're trying to avoid or fix is--all else being equal--always a good thing.
The real problems stem from those other no-so-equal factors like:
1. Imbalanced power relationships. (Strongly implicated in the rest of the list.)
2. Opaque decision-making that cannot be reviewed or appealed.
3. Information not being fairly discovered/shared. (Customer hides known higher risk, insurer hides lower-than-expected risks to squeeze out more profit, etc.)
4. Bad contracts which pull the rug out from under people because of how they handle changes in knowledge even when risks haven't actually changed. Imagine health-insurance which covers Giant Monsterification, but later a test reveals patient has Godzilla genes, and now the customer is dropped... Even though the originally-covered probability itself hasn't changed, only our knowledge about it.
> Insurance is to spread risk equitably. That means accounting for disparate probabilities
Everyone defines equitably according to their whims. Does it mean the riskier pay more? Those can afford it pay more? The unsympathetic pay more? Et cetera
While it's true that Solutions Are Hard, that doesn't change the fact insurance is absolutely not meant to spread risk blindly.
Even early proto-insurance of seagoing merchants mutually carrying one-another's trade-goods on their various ships (in case one sank) still cared about how some cargoes were more valuable and some ships were more seaworthy.
>Firstly, the entire port of insurance is to spread risk. If the the market for insurance is "too efficient" at determining who is high-risk and who is not, then it is no longer fulfilling its social function.
This might be definitionally correct, but that doesn't mean it's right.
There's no reason you shouldn't rewarded for being a better-than-average driver (or conversely, punished for being worse).
>Maybe you have to commute to your job in heavy stop-and-go traffic with difficult merges.
You don't think we have the technical ability to determine this, to some degree? We have self driving cars for crying out loud.
>If you're driving down a street and a ball bounces out from behind a parked car do you slam on your brakes out of fear that there is a child chasing after it, or do you think that hitting the brakes might make your premiums go up so you just hope that there isn't a child coming.
What a reach.
You hit the brakes, because if there is a child, and you hit them, your premiums will be even higher.
> You don't think we have the technical ability to determine this, to some degree? We have self driving cars for crying out loud.
I actually work on self-driving cars, so I have some experience on this. Trying to predict safety performance based on more easily measured metrics like hard stops is hard. AV companies spend a lot of time thinking about it. I don't think they get it perfect either.
Their modeling will penalize safe drivers who have to deal with non ideal scenarios. The OBD2 accelerometer modules are a bad idea when you live in an area where traffic and road design requires bursts of acceleration to make turns. You're going to be lumped in with the bad drivers when the data is not comprehensive enough to separate good from bad. Nor will they put in the effort to ensure fair driver ratings with thorough analysis of the data they do have.
This already happens (probably more accurately) via other metrics. If you live in an area with poorly designed roads that cause more claims, you will be charged more because of your zip code.
Restricting insurers from using relevant data to calculate risk premiums is not the way to subsidize people who live in an area where traffic and road design are subpar.
If there is an unfair situation that needs to be rectified with a subsidy, it is best for the subsidy to transparent to prevent corruption.
For example, the knowledge of this subsidy can help propel political change to remedy road design so that some people are not driving in unsafe road designs.
Insurance premiums also fund salaries, bonuses, massive ad campaigns, high end office leases, and more.
If we just had a simple common slush fund (like amongst a large family self-insuring), our insurance would be far cheaper. The data harvesting boosts profitability but does not necessarily equal lower premiums.
>A mutual insurance company is an insurance company owned entirely by its policyholders. It is a form of consumers' co-operative. Any profits earned by a mutual insurance company are either retained within the company or rebated to policyholders in the form of dividend distributions or reduced future premiums.
> Safe drivers subsidize unsafe drivers and this subsidy can and should be reduced when possible with better predictive information.
Okay, that's an interesting perspective, let's explore. A policy that can be unilaterally cancelled at any time, and forces you to put cameras in your car, could be the most efficient insurance ever. As long they manage to predict that you'll be in an accident in time to electronically cancel your policy, they'll never need to pay out more than refunding your premium.
Car insurance companies are already generally legally required to give notice in writing 30 days before cancelling your policy, even for material changes in risk.
You're the one proposing to change real world policies. I find it really interesting that I'm speaking directly from the libertarian playbook and the anti-insurance folks in the conversation are telling me to trust the government regulations. Especially when those very government regulations would be eviscerated by the proposed changes.
Why? You'd probably have better outcomes for everyone with more information. Unsafe drivers might start reigning in their bad habits because it is costing them money every month, and safe drivers will save money. Seems like a win-win. I'd love it if my dash cam could do ALPR and send a video to the registered insurance agency when I see some absolutely ludicrous driving.
Because of the obvious privacy implications, as well as the negative impact it has on the perception of driving. When you enable very precise insurance billing you get all sorts of weird behaviors like “I don’t want to drive through there because I’ll take a hit on my rate” or “slowing down to stop in a way people expect me to is consider a mark against me by the insurance provider, so I will do something surprising”. I think Tesla has (or used to have?) a “driving score” and it often incentivized bad driving that was locally “good” but bad in the context of everyone else on the road.
In this model, what incentivizes safe drivers to have insurance?
And then when a "safe driver" wipes out in a freak snow storm and racks up a million dollars in damages that they can't afford to pay, where's the win-win?
The same thing that incentivizes them right now, legal requirements to maintain a certain minimum amount of auto liability insurance in order to be able to legally drive. Which, by the way, is currently far less than a million dollars in every jurisdiction I know.
may i introduce you to the jurisdiction of germany? 7.5m for personal injury, 1.3m for property damage and 50k for ?financial loss? (ger:reiner vermögensschaden) [1][2]. granted that's in euro so exchange rates are to be considered
out of curiosity: how much are you guys paying per month? i had, at that moment, 7 years of no accidents and the 9/1999 version of [1] and was at ~25euro/month
$50 per month for $500,000 of liability only insurance for 5,000 miles per year. Since it is only liability insurance, the type of car I have does not matter.
I have 20 years of no accidents or insurance claims.
I assume countries where healthcare is covered more extensively, such as Germany, have lower premiums? Although, I think Germany is health insurance covered healthcare, so I wonder if a German health insurance company would sue the auto insurer of an at fault driver to recover healthcare costs. In that case, it would be similar to the USA.
interesting, in germany model of the car, the expirience (age) of the driver and the years of not having your insurance cover something [1] play heavily into the amount of premiums you are paying. also who is "covered"[2] by that insurance and the km you drive in a year are considered.
[1] trivia: because of this sometimes people cover damages, even realtivly high ones, out of pocket because it saves them money in the long run.
[2] you say who (only you or more people) is driving the car and in practice the relevant fact is if one of the drivers using the car is under 25 and/or is still in "Probezeit" (?trial period?)
The incentive would be being able to pay very little to get coverage which insures you even for the circumstances where a safe driver would crash.
Wouldn't a safe driver who was considering unwisely dropping coverage be more likely to drop coverage if coverage was expensive(because they are subsidizing unsafe drivers), as opposed to if it was cheap?
I'm not justifying the specifics of your own car ratting you out behind your back, merely the idea of having more data would let insurance companies segment users based on driving habits.
As Eric Schmidt of Google noted long ago, your privacy is already dead. License plate readers are all over the place. Please don't shoot yourself, and good luck to you.
I pay for insurance to avoid the chance of catastrophic loss. No matter how safe I operate, an innocent accident (instigated by myself or another) could still lead to financial ruin.
He's a well known crook.. he's been repeatedly indicted for serious financial crimes but due to his position in government, the charges either were dropped for nonsense reasons or just never prosecuted for over 9 years...
Then afterwards nearly a dozen of his staffers whistleblew to the FBI about his relationship with an Austin-based real estate developer who was committing serious crimes with Paxton's blessing and likely with kickbacks --
That developer was indicted on a number of serious Federal charges where it came out that he renovated Paxton's home for free and covered up Paxton's affair with one of his other staffers: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/08/nate-paul-indictment...
Which ultimately resulted in an impeachment trial where the Texas GOP compeletly beclowned itself to acquit an obvious crook because they agree with him politically.
Cool - which is why I expanded the post to include all sorts of other evidence of crimes. And indictments don't mean "literally nothing" -- they mean that a prosecutor convinced a grand jury that they had enough evidence to bring charges against you, no matter how catchy the slogan from some judge from 40 years ago happens to be. As I'm sure you can appreciate, the rules of evidence and general criminal case law has changed pretty dramatically since the 1980s.
In this case he narrowly avoided trial by agreeing to pay significant restitution to his victims, do community service, and attend a legal ethics education course. He is a rich person with significant resources, he would not have agreed to this settlement if there wasn't a good chance of conviction.
The accusation was that he was a crook, not necessarily (or limited to) being a criminal. You don't have to break the law to be a crooked person, a "crook".
I find that people say it is dishonest when they otherwise oppose the person doing it, and normal minor things not to worry about if they agree with that person.
He did say "regard anyone as" so didn't actually say the GP lied, but that their arguments are so one-sided you can just assume they are lying until it's proven they're not. I don't really agree with that way of approaching things but I can see why you might do that.
I have a better question: where's the balance in it? All I see are links to biased, left-wing sources. Not a source from the right or center, and not a mention of the defendant's counterclaims.
So the only conclusion one can reasonably draw from it is that the commenter thinks that Paxton is a crook--not that Paxton is one.
But, of course, anyone taking even a neutral position here is heavily downvoted, because Paxton is a Republican, therefore he is guilty. And so the echo chamber echoes.
What makes my variety of sources left leaning? What is a right wing news source? Why don't you post them yourself? I trust the Texas Tribune, The Associated Press, and the other sources I posted.
If you're going to tell me to use a right wing news source like Alex Jones, Breitbart, True North, Newsmax, or OANN, then I would tell you to get better news sources. Everything I posted can be easily confirmed, yet you choose not to. Why won't you confirm everything I've posted?
I live in Texas, specifically Austin, and know first hand how terrible Ken Paxton is as a person, lawyer, and politician. How many times is he going to sue cities from decriminalizing marijuana usage? Citizens of those cities voted for it, yet he chooses to waste taxpayer money on disrespecting the will of the people.
You're falling into a common trap: assuming that presenting people with information will automatically persuade them. Jonathan Haidt, in his insightful work The Righteous Mind, demonstrates that there's scant scientific evidence for this belief. While some individuals can indeed be swayed by facts, the vast majority are not. This explains why effective marketing often appeals to emotions rather than relying solely on rational arguments.
It's crucial to recognize that the will of the people varies significantly across Austin, Travis County, and Texas as a whole.
The map clearly shows Amarillo and Odessa within Texas, granting their residents the right to expect state laws to be enforced within Texas borders. Similarly, inhabitants of Spicewood and Cedar Valley can rightfully anticipate Travis County's enforcement of municipal ordinances within its jurisdiction. Austinites, naturally, should expect their local authorities to uphold city ordinances.
Your point about localized governance is well-taken. It's worth noting that Attorney General Paxton has ardently advocated for local control regarding the Texas-Mexico border, despite federal preferences. This raises an intriguing question -- should Paxton maintain consistency in his stance, or does this situation reveal a fundamental flaw in the federal government's approach?
Insurance is regulated so maybe it's different, but plenty of companies rely on illegally obtained data. Websites like haveibeenpwned.com and identity theft protection services couldn't exist without hacked/stolen information. I guess the distinction is that they didn't commission it.
> Paxton is a crook, but in this case he's fighting the good fight.
The Texas Attorney General is an entire office of people. It's always nice to know that while you want to judge the book by it's cover you're willing to put that aside.
It is always odd to me that people feel the need to announce this.
The common belief is that Texas === Republican (it doesn't), and folks here need to virtue signal that they're definitely not one to be or support any Republican in any way ever under any circumstances. This is clearly one of the single-digit number of aberrations where a Republican has done something that isn't objectively evil, right?
I don't know why we can't just say a good thing is a good thing and leave it at that. Every politician has done good things. Every politician has done bad things. Every politician (or very close) has probably done something you'd consider downright evil.
Paxton is a crook though, abuses the power of his office, and generally would prefer to act in ways that hurt his political opponents rather than ways that server the public. He works against the public interest and should be called out for it. So, it's genuinely shocking for the TAG under his direction to be protecting consumers from these kinds of abuses.
> He works against the public interest and should be called out for it
It's an elected position in Texas. I understand that most of the people who frequent Hacker News wouldn't share his politics, but it's pretty undemocratic to "call him out" incessantly, even when it adds nothing to the situation being discussed, and in particular when he's been elected by a vote.
It's mindless preaching to the choir to show that, yes, you are on the "proper" side of the false political divide. It's tiring. So, _I_ call _this_ out.
The attitude, to me, boils down to, "I refuse to acknowledge anything good without reminding myself of everything bad." What value does this have? Maybe I just don't "get it."
I'm literally trying to get him voted out because he gets rich harming people I care about.
If you think an elected official working against the interests of the constituency is just going to naturally get voted out of office, I don't have the energy for the depth this conversation requires.
Assertions of opinion as if they were fact is part of what makes me bristle. To do this and then act surprised that I might not exactly share your view and that it would take extreme energy on your part to continue is a bit churlish, don't you think?
> If you think an elected official working against the interests of the constituency is just going to naturally get voted out of office
I do think that. If it's not happening in your mind, then I'd have to ask, what means are you using to judge the "interests of the constituency?" In particular, outside of polling, how can you be confident your measure truly represents a majority?
> I don't have the energy for the depth this conversation requires.
It's not that I begrudge you your position, it's just that I openly wonder if this is the best place and means to put forth these opinions. Again, if you are worried that votes will not be effective, then broadcasting this message where the majority already likely holds this view seems, to me, misguided.
How is that an opinion? I stated what's happening as plainly as I could. I didn't say "him bad" - I said his work does harm to people I care about, which it does; and that he gets rich doing it, which he does. Those aren't opinions, they're facts. You can dispute that they're true facts, but calling them opinions does not make sense.
> If you think an elected official working against the interests of the constituency is just going to naturally get voted out of office, I don't have the energy for the depth this conversation requires.
Regardless of what you think that's exactly how democracy works. If enough of his constituency thinks he is working against their interests they will vote him out. Conversely, if enough of his constituency thinks he is working for their interests he will get (re)elected.
Democracy means sometimes people you don't like are elected to positions you'd rather they not be in, but that's the rub.
Your understanding seems to be "the rubes are too stupid to know what's for their own good" so it's probably good we don't continue the conversation - it makes you dangerous.
> it's pretty undemocratic to "call him out" incessantly
I don't understand this sentiment. Using your freedom of speech to criticize a politician doesn't feel undemocratic to me. If anything, the implication that critic should be reserved feels undemocratic. You can vote and speak, and without critic we don't have a true democracy because voters aren't educated. Democracy requires not just voting, but informed voting.
I can't really see how enriching the state of Texas to the tune of 1.4 billion US dollars is "the good fight". Meta does something that negatively effects individuals & the outcome is the state collects a paycheck? No thanks.
I don't see how comments saying that are accepted here. Everyone knows that no books are being banned anywhere in the country. You can go to a bookstore or web site and buy whatever books you want. They can be bought in public or delivered to your home. Publishers can publish whatever they want. The First Amendment protects authors, publishers, and readers.
Meanwhile, in the UK, if you share a message consisting entirely of a couple of emojis on Facebook, you can be sentenced to 2 months in jail, being convicted and sentenced in merely 3 days.
Yet people here continue to make accusations of "banning books." I hope that the Internet enables humanity to eventually "graduate" out of this state in which we have infinite access to information yet consume enormous amounts of propaganda.
> I don't see how comments saying that are accepted here
because they are true. "The district then banned 14 titles (bringing its total since 2021 to 30), including popular books by Dr. Seuss and Judy Blume"[0] i don't see how comments like yours are even made here, but at least they are not accepted.
Forcibly removing books (about very specific topics related to oppressed cultural minorities) from public school libraries is not the same thing as enacting a national ban on printing or trading those books, no.
But it's a lot closer to a total ban than it is to not banning books. (And I stand by "forcibly," if you've seen any of the adults screaming at school board hearings or issuing threats over these books)
What’s really funny is that these books are usually so obscene that just reading from them at a school board meeting is a good way to get “forcibly” removed. A few stories:
> A speaker at a Florida school board meeting was removed for using vulgar language after reading aloud from a highly sexualized book available at the high school’s public library.
> Law enforcement escorted a man out of a local school board meeting in North Texas after he read from a book banned by the district earlier this summer. The clash comes as public school districts across Texas—including several in the Houston area—move to exclude titles deemed "obscene" in increasing numbers.
> A Georgia school board member cut off a mother reading sexually explicit content from a book available to high school students in the district, saying the passage was "inappropriate" for any children to potentially hear.
I frankly find it impossible to believe that anyone actually believes that literally any book should be allowed in a public school library. We can disagree about where to draw the line but I don’t think anybody wants copies of The Turner Diaries in a public school library.
It’s particularly hard to take these complaints seriously when they come from the same people who hold congressional hearings to attack a private business for selling certain books to grown adults: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/09/1035559330/democrats-slam-ama...
> What’s really funny is that these books are usually so obscene
This is not the case because literally hundreds of books have been, or are, on the chopping blocks.
Keep in mind the word "obscene" here is doing a lot of work. These types of people consider any display of homosexuality obscene. Their purpose is to mix in REAL obscene books into the pot to confuse you and get you to think "wow they're doing the lord's work!"
It's a common, but effective, strategy. You say a few reasonable things and then you mix in some absolutely crazy bullshit and it goes under the radar. Meaning, you ban actually absurd books and then you sneak in "The Handmaid's Tale" or "To Kill a Mockingbird" and hopefully nobody notices.
What oppressed cultural minorities? Nearly the entirety of the media landscape outright celebrates LGBTQ, if that's what you're talking about. I'd be hard-pressed to think of a more exaggerated use of the word "oppression".
Does the fact that you view this group as oppressed make a difference on whether such a ban is more or less valid?
> I'd be hard-pressed to think of a more exaggerated use of the word "oppression".
How fortunate for you, and how exhausting for the rest of us, that you live in such a world.
You're telling me you haven't even heard of the drag bans popping up all over the country? That's queer culture, if you couldn't tell. (It's also, since you probably won't notice this right away, a veiled instrument for criminalizing trans people.)
> Does the fact that you view this group as oppressed make a difference on whether such a ban is more or less valid?
Well yes, because you won't ever see a ISD try to ban a book because it contains a heterosexual couple.
We can play dumb all day long, and sometimes that can be fun. But after a certain point we have to wade through the bullshit.
It's not about sexuality, it's not about protecting children, it's not about inappropriate content. When 100% of proposed book bans "conveniently" target books which, either tangentially or directly, address LGBT topics then clearly THAT is the reason they are being banned.
Of course, nobody is going to tell you that. Because saying "we want this book gone because gays" isn't very nice and doesn't sound very good. However, as human beings, we have been given the power of logic and deductive reasoning. We can look at patterns, locations, history of regions etc. and come to the conclusion that is what they're doing.
Books are absolutely being banned from public libraries and schools in the US. There may not be laws preventing the private circulation of such books (yet...some are arguing bringing back the Comstock act for these works) but they certainly are being banned from certain settings.
That’s librarians at a school subjected to a two year criminal investigation, complete with search warrants and interrogations, because of the books that were on their shelves
I've been frustrated by the ability to easily disable vehicle cellular systems. In older vehicles you could simply unplug the right cable and have it disabled. In newer vehicles I've found the cellular system to be integrated with other components -- making it impossible to disable without also getting a permanent check engine light.
Ideally I'd like some sort of CAM module that plugs in between the antenna system and the ECM that selectively drops telemetry packets.
I found the antenna, and replaced it with a 50 ohm resistor and wrapped the entire thing in foil, grounded to the chassis. No check engine light, no signal
I haven't bothered to get to it yet on my Bolt, but I've heard that pulling the fuse for this also disables the microphone for hands-free calling which is a bit more of a deal-breaker than a check engine light. Probably need to disconnect the antenna and put a dummy load on it or something. Really should get on it due to the LexisNexis shenanigans...
And what else does it break-break, even if you do kill the antenna, more that just the annoyance of a light? Integrated GPS, because it uses cellular to “enhance” that?
What other risks are there? Haven’t we seen CAN bus “hacked” over the air to shut down vehicles before? (Even ignoring the intentional ability to do so by the OEM, granted to law enforcement)
In my opinion who cares if it breaks the car gps. I have my phone that already does this function and never needed my car to do this. I would a thousand time over delete my car gps if it meant no tracking.
Meanwhile I'm actually the opposite. I'd prefer for my phone to pull from the car's GPS system instead of trying to figure out its own signaling. It would probably be a lot better since it's not locked in a steel cage and in suboptimal placement.
Yes. I can see turn my phone off or turn off location services or leave it at home since cell towers can track me should I really want to stay private. For example should I visit a brothel I might want that private. If I was going to a HIV clinic I might want that private. Should I be be cheating I might want that private. All made up examples but we should have the ability to remain anonymous and not have our car companies selling that information.
When it came time for me to buy my most recent car I made a list of requirements. If I couldn't find a car that meet them I was resolved to not bother buying a car at all. The requirement at the top of the list was, "It doesn't spy on me." I ended up finding one that checked all the boxes once I removed its Data Communications Module (DCM) fuse.
Depending on the manufacturer, you won't want to take it to the dealer without factory resetting first. Infotainment connects via WiFi initiated by technicians and will upload all stored data if it's there. And that's of course if you aren't using integrated apps like Android Auto or other third party apps, which also takes the data. I was a software engineer on these systems at one time and it's one of the bullet points of why I left. It's an uphill battle.
The philosophy is that it's no longer the customer's car after they buy it and drive off the lot.
Despite the fact that I have free oil changes with the dealership I still do my own oil changes for exactly this reason. Thanks for the reminder about the factory reset though, in case I need a warranty repair in the future.
I guess I was just trying to keep my comment short and on-topic rather than blab on about my car. Anyway I also wanted the ability to use gasoline for road trips, a manual transmission, emergency brake activated with a cable, knobs and buttons for the controls, ability to shut off or disable the center display, AWD, hatchback, plenty of get-up-and-go, made by a manufacturer with a reputation for reliability, broad availability of parts and places where I can get it repaired, reasonable price, and relatively small size to fit in cramped spaces in the city. I ended up with a Toyota GR Corolla.
Dangerously invasive data like location should be subject to HIPAA-like regulations. Leak or sell without authorization? That'll be $100k per data point of unauthorized location data per user.
This would convert data like that into a liability rather than an asset, which would pretty much fix the problem.
A single national regime and enforcer. No obligation for every complaint to result in an investigation. Fines based on gains and damages, not revenue. Liability that can be privately enforced. And a trebling of damages where noncompliance is shown to be willful.
Absolutely yes to private right of action and treble damages. Not sure why you want "no obligation for every complaint to result in an investigation" though. That's contradictory to the private right of action.
Disagree on fines based on gains and damages on their own. My understanding is that percentage of global turnover usually is a higher number than gains and damages. I'd prefer it be "the higher of either".
> Not sure why you want "no obligation for every complaint to result in an investigation" though
It's trivial to bulldoze a European start-up by having complaints filed in a bunch of jurisdictions alleging this or that nonsense. It's nonsense, so no fines. But the mandate to investigate means this tiny start-up now has up to twenty-eight national supervisory authorities sending it demands, which can easily overwhelm a small team.
> Disagree on fines based on gains and damages on their own. My understanding is that percentage of global turnover usually is a higher number than gains and damages. I'd prefer it be "the higher of either".
Gains and damages contrates the discussion to the malfeasance at hand. Global-revenue fines are subject to grandstanding. That means lots of headlines and fewer fines actually paid.
> It's trivial to bulldoze a European start-up by having complaints filed in a bunch of jurisdictions alleging this or that nonsense.
You vastly overestimate the responsiveness of data protection authorities. Your complaints will be filed and requests be sent in what, months? Certainly not all at once; and for pretty much all requests, even a small startup will have general answers prepared (or can make them up) they can send out immediately, with clarifications sent later.
Edit: And that's even glossing over the fact that for your bulldozing, you'll have to research how to report your "nonsense" for each individual jurisdiction, in that country's language; and I'd be surprised if they wouldn't want to know which citizen encountered the privacy violation you're trying to report; the people working there aren't stupid, either. All that is to say: I've yet to see such a trivial bulldozing happen.
That's already the case (cf. article 83(2)). The percentage of revenue thing in articles 83(4) and 83(5) is a cap, not a fixed amount. I don't think anybody was ever fined the maximal amount possible.
> And a trebling of damages where noncompliance is shown to be willful.
This is taken into account, cf. article 83(2)b. Not a trebling though, it's up to the DPA to decide, and cannot exceed the cap.
I can't imagine why this case should succeed if this same practice has long been tolerated by telcos or Facebook -- any company that provides no opt-out to collection and sale of personal info.
If Texas had real guts, they'd pass a law that clearly prohibits the collection and sale of personal info without explicit opt-in. But nooooooo...
Except for the fact Facebook created shadow accounts for people without FB accounts to track them anytime they encountered embedded FB content, be it ads or otherwise, across the internet.
GM / onstar likely set aside a few million in a "Rainyday" fund from the additional profit they made from this and that money sat in the market/bonds and they probably made 100x off that money what they will be fined/judgment-ed.
The funny thing is that they supposedly only made a couple million from this, total. I can't remember if that was an internal discussion from when I worked there a few months ago or a news article, but I'm pretty sure of it either way. That makes the whole stupid thing just dumb.
Well Texas DPS (transportation dept) leaked thousands driver license info two years ago and many people paid fair price to identity theft losses. There is nobody to initiate a class action lawsuit against DPS, could Texas sue itself to play it fair and balanced? Suing GM is fine with me, how about wipe yourself clean too?
Not to alarm you but there are for sale all of the car driving data in the US from that emergency request service that kindly the manufacturers install in every new car they sell.
Just make sure that you also pay the subscription because in an emergency it will not call 911 for you, because who cares about you if are not a revenue stream.
They also should be looking at other brands who did this - like Subaru, Hyundai/Kia, Mitsubishi, etc. I recall that Subaru in particular did not revise their location sharing policy when articles came out earlier this year about how these companies resell data to brokers like Lexis Nexis or Verisk. If you get a new Subaru with a Sirius XM radio for example, something that gets forced onto many or all configuration of cars (not sure), by default there is an option selected for sharing your location data with them. That might be true for any brand that shoves satellite radio into your vehicle. But you also are giving them authorization to do whatever they want with such data when you sign up for convenience services like the ability to lock/unlock/remote start the car from your phone. The fine print for those digital services includes giving your consent from what I read.
There's really no way to allow companies to have your data when they need it, and also not lose it. Even if they don't sell our data, they can just get hacked, our info gets leaked, and now everybody has it anyway. Data security should come first, then data privacy, then data autonomy.
HIPAA was basically created to do this (require your consent to receive your information, then require your consent to transmit or share it, within reason) but lack of data security means our private medical data still gets leaked. So I agree we absolutely need all personal data to be treated like HIPAA (at minimum) but it's kind of pointless without improved security requirements.
I'm not at all surprised that GM did it. I'm surprised that Texas had a law against doing it though. It looks like it wasn't about the sale of data as much as it was about GM misrepresenting what they were doing. Still, good to see Texas standing up for consumers.
If every state sues GM, GM might go bankrupt. Then the American tax payers will be footing another bailout. Thus earning GM the moniker, Government Motors (again).
What's the alternative? Let them keep breaking laws because they're too big to fail?
That's what makes me so angry with this stupid economic model. Once these monopolies/oligopolies are inevitably formed (after all, competition breeds monopolies), they are essentially untouchable.
I don't think there's a way to fix this within the current system.
I agree with you, but this will never happen. You think anyone would like to be responsible for bankrupting GM? It's bad PR. All people will talk about is how many jobs will be lost.
Here in Brazil we have a somewhat similar problem where the auto industry has been completely subsidized for over 70 years. Our factories are extremely inefficient and customers pay exorbitant amounts of money for a car. But if they remove the subsidies and import restrictions all of these industries would inevitably go bankrupt. Even though this is a good thing (these industries would not exist without these unfair advantages) nobody will ever want to be the bad guy that caused all those job losses.
Ford tracks me and I'm happy about it. I even got a developer API key so I can write scripts that remotely lock and unlock my car doors, download my vehicle telemetry, etc. The "find-my-car" feature alone is worth it. As long as they don't sell my data (they don't) I'm all about it.
> They also say they can share your personal information with dealers (there are lots of those around for sure), social media platforms, advertising companies, joint marketing partners, SIRIUS XM radio service, law enforcement, regulatory agencies, and other government agencies.
Hmm.... so, I dug into the Ford privacy notices, and they do have a very thorough explanation of everything they collect and what it's used for. It does look like the Connected Vehicle information is sold to advertisers by default, but there is an opt-out. Disappointing :/
The YOUR STATE-SPECIFIC PRIVACY RIGHTS part of the Policy links to a form to exercise Consumer Rights, but of all the form options available, Opt Out isn't on the form :( I'm calling Ford now to try to open a ticket with their marketing/data privacy department to fix that.
I'm concerned that this practice will continue minimally abated with a mandatory inclusion in the ToS forcing you to agree to continually provide your driving data or else you don't get the car.
Seems to be standard practice in tech these days to lawyer-away any meaningful notion of consent.
They are like Boeing. There isnt really anything worth saving here. Do we need another fake-luxury SUV/Truck company? Not that I think Ford is better. Chrysler is more yikes than anyone.
Maybe a total replacement of management? There is so much Rot.
This case exemplifies a broader trend we're seeing across industries: the tension between data-driven innovation and individual privacy. On one hand, collecting and analyzing vehicle data could lead to safer cars, more efficient traffic systems, and personalized services that genuinely benefit consumers. On the other, it raises serious privacy concerns and the potential for misuse.
The key issue here isn't just about GM or even the auto industry - it's about how we as a society want to balance progress with privacy. Do we want a future where every device is constantly collecting data about us, ostensibly to provide better services? Or do we draw a line and say some spaces - like our personal vehicles - should remain data-free zones?
Texas DPS was selling driver registration data to car warranty spammers as recently as 2022. This pearl-clutching from Abbott and Paxton is a bit amusing.
I've spent, like, several minutes of my life trying to figure this out, and... came up blank?
The title is not copied from the PDF, where such issues would be rare but not unimaginable. I also couldn't find any articles linking to this PDF with this particular title.
So... a misfiring accessibility solution? Solar rays directly going for the Shift key?
(P.S. Yeah, I know "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." -- but this seems sort-of uncommon?)
Sorry, this was a mobile autocorrect issue I didn’t notice while submitting. I took the title from the press release but had to rearrange some things to fit and apparently iOS thought it should capitalize. The title came from the AG’s office[0], but I wanted to link directly to the filing.
Thanks for sharing the exact workflow, and sorry for potentially derailing the discussion on this! (For the record, I upvoted all substantial comments, and truly enjoyed my comment going from +4 to -2 and back again...).
I've never had iOS (either the Cisco or the Apple variant) randomly apply CamelCaps, though. One more thing to look out for in the future :)
I was perplexed as well. I even tried counting the randomly capitalized letters to see if it spelled out a secret message or something...but unless someone can tell me what 'TSGMUFLCSDVPVD' means, I think it might be a red herring.
Best I could come up with was that they're trying to make a mockery of Texas's position on the case. But the odd capitalization isn't frequent enough to make it obvious, so I too wasted minutes of my life looking for some kind of pattern.
Well, I'm not a native English speaker, but I'm pretty sure that in "UnlawFulLy" the capitals don't represent pronunciation stress points? Those would look more like "uNlawfullY", right?
