In 2022 a man near Seattle asked a company for his own file. 258 pages came back:
640 trips, every hard brake, every fast acceleration. He had never knowingly
signed up for any of it — and his insurance had just gone up 21 %.
This is how driving data left cars, reached brokers like LexisNexis and Verisk,
and turned into a score insurers could buy. It is also about what regulators did
about it, and the part most coverage skips: the honest case FOR telematics, and
why the whole thing collapsed over a revenue line worth under $1 million a year.
CHAPTERS
00:00 258 pages
00:26 Be fair to the car first
01:21 Kenn Dahl's file
02:28 The chain: car, automaker, broker, insurer
03:22 What the FTC found — and banned
04:51 The rounding error
05:57 The honest counter-argument
06:57 Where safety ends and surveillance begins
07:24 Four things you can do
08:19 A machine that watches you should say so
SOURCES
FTC, final order against GM and OnStar, 14 January 2026
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/01/ftc-finalizes-order-settling-allegations-gm-onstar-collected-sold-geolocation-data-without-consumers
California Attorney General, $12.75M CCPA settlement, 8 May 2026
https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/when-it-comes-data-privacy-consumers-must-be-driver%E2%80%99s-seat-attorney-general
Kashmir Hill / The New York Times — original investigation, March 2024
The Record — Verisk discontinues its driver behaviour product, June 2024
The Zebra & Consumer Federation of America — telematics savings data
Footage: Pexels (https://www.pexels.com/license/). Narration: local Kokoro TTS.
Full source and licence list is in the pinned comment.
#privacy #cars #insurance #data #FTC
