[weq92f]

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I read an article yesterday about this...it is gaining attention. The general consensus seems to be that the consumer is able to disable this tracking, at least in the case of GM as it is part of their "onstar" program or whatever.

There is evidence that the automakers are sharing/selling this data to insurance companies and that those companies have reacted by raising rates. They are certainly not interested in lowering rates though and I am convinced that if they received favorable data for some client, that data would get lost or ignored.

A more concerning data point in my opinion is the cataloging, storing and selling of license plate location data. In this country we have a growing license plate tracking problem and it is being driven by Laws Enforcement. Law Enforcement agencies contract with private business to obtain real time license plate data both from stationary license plate readers and mobile license plate readers attached to their patrol vehicles. This network of data collection stations funnel the data to central repositories where the data is processed in real time to alert various Law Enforcement agencies when a TARGET plate has been located. That TARGET might be a stolen vehicle, a vehicle with expired registration, a vehicle with no insurance or simply a vehicle of interest to Law Enforcement.

This data repository is owned/administered by the private company, not the police. The police pay to access it, thus driving the demand for more and more data on license plate locations. This data, collected as it is and consolidated represents, in my opinion, a massive privacy concern for the citizenship. The founders of our Constitution couldn't have possible foreseen the level of automated data harvesting and consolidation that we are capable of today and so didn't write protections into the Amendments. That is unfortunate indeed.

-klb