Auto makers are figuring out how to monetize drivers’ data
wsj.com
wsj.com
And every time someone says "but how does it harm me for advertisers to know everything about me?", THIS is the answer. It's not just "finding things you might like to buy". It's "auctioning you off to vendors based on how badly you need the thing." The market is an information game and if one side knows more than the other, then they have an advantage.
Really think it'll stop at helpfully suggesting a nearby gas station, when Station A can just pay $1/customer extra for GM to send people their way instead of to Station B who are charging $1/gallon less but haven't paid extra to GM?
Really think it'll stop there, when GM can get an extra $1/customer by telling Station A that you're critically low on gas and can't make it to another gas station, so they can gouge you $5/gallon and you have no choice to pay it?
Allowing your personal information to be indiscriminately mined and sold is bad for you and this is why.
Or maybe the station owner will demand sexual favors and your first-born child, or that you join ISIS, or that you get out of your car and do a strip-tease beside the road.
This would last about as long as it took the first customer to notice that the previous customer paid $0.01/gallon less than him, whereupon the gas station owner would get a (well-deserved) online lynching.
Not to mention that virtually every gas station I've seen in my life has the price prominently posted on a large display. You think customers wouldn't notice if that were constantly changing?
We won't even go into the over-the-top "charging $5.00/gallon more" scenario. Any station that tried that would be out of business within days.
I'd prefer the dumb maps that do not give my supplier a price advantage even if its a few cents. It adds up significantly over time which is why they'd be willing to pay in the first place.
It would cause a lot if online conspiracy theories and moderate outrage if anyone did find out.
> Not to mention that virtually every gas station I've seen in my life has the price prominently posted on a large display.
If everyone can see the prices of the closest stations on their dash, those displays might vanish because "no-one uses them anyway".
> We won't even go into the over-the-top "charging $5.00/gallon more" scenario. Any station that tried that would be out of business within days.
Like Uber is out of business becauase of surge pricing?
If only one small station is doing it, they might get repercussions. If many stations (or large chains) do it, it might become normalized.
Of course, it won't be presented this way. It'll be presented as 'discounts' (from an inflated base price) for filling up when you're over 50% full, then a lesser discount when over 20% full, etc. And, well, if you didn't bother to take advantage of the discounts then whose fault is that, eh? But it'll be effectively the same.
At the time that I had reason to know such things, there were strict laws around gasoline price signage. Much of it, I imagine, was based around old-school versions of what folks are worried about: price transparency and accuracy. For instance, if you want to raise the price, you must first make absolutely sure that the sign is changed first. Because the state takes a dim view of advertising a price that differs from the pumps.
That was a long time ago, and laws change, but I would guess in this case that the laws haven’t changed much. Point is, the worries might come to fruition, but we’ve been down this road decades before and hopefully we haven’t lost our collective common sense in the meantime.
Source: worked at a couple of gas stations in Indiana in the 80s.
There is a difference between raising the price of a limited resource (Uber vehicles at peak times, or oil prices during a war in the Middle East) and outright gouging.
Most people understand that.
Instead they create search engines that find a series of products that are relevant, though not necessarily a good fit.
I always thought this would be an interesting product that apple should work on. An iPhone search engine that finds products for you. They have the entire market to themselves and bucket loads of money to spend on it.
Apple never was good at that kind of thing, sadly, mostly because they can't attract the best in AI because of their secretive ways. They don't value their employees enough, like Google or Facebook.
MSFT could probably jump into the market to, though, if they made it a part of their OS.
Amazon is unfortunately screwing themselves by going backwards by making money off of ads. It's the beginning of the end for them I think as they get more addicted to that money. The more they leverage it, the less useful they become. Instead they should focus more on fixing their fake review problem.
I'm kind of liking "poisoning the well" on the customer tracking these days, when I'm not working I rarely carry my cellphone but when I do I go so many places there's no value in the data points I generate because it's so random that 8-10 hours of location data can only hinder their algorithms.
Honestly, if I go to a website and later see a related ad to that website -- that's a good thing, right?
Maybe instead of removing tracking, we need something like an industry code where the browser has a great green bar around it saying you're being tracked and here are the benefits.
It reminds me of another situation. I play free game sometimes and I always shake my head in disbelief at the wasted opportunity when they show the interstitial ads that are uninteresting me. With a bit of intelligence, they should be showing extremely high value ads around software security (a personal example) that could lead to serious business. But no, Apple doesn't allow for that.
I don't think this will work for gas stations. The margins are too thin to support discounts large enough to attract customers.
It might work for oil change places... but then GM would be competing with it's own dealership service centers... which it wouldn't do.
I'd be much more worried about detailed ride data being shared with insurance companies. I'm pretty sure insurance companies could figure out from the data whether someone is a safe driver (or not). Or at least they would convince themselves that they could. Might even work. But it would be a hell of a privacy invasion. And imagine the crossover uses for medical insurance... regular visits to drug areas, bam that's a price increase on you health insurance. Same for regularly being parked near bars... chance of drunk driving goes way up.
But if you're known to buy a large Squishee and a copy of Radioactive Man 73% of the time when you fill up between 1:00 and 3:00 PM, the margins look a little better.
Holy crap, everything I read about Uber just makes it seem worse and worse.
The reality is "woohoo, free money." #enable price_gouging.
That argument never really made much sense, though. Battery life is an issue with any mobile device, so if you could do something more efficiently in your app, why wouldn't you be doing it all the time anyway? I could see an argument for some sort of critical "this device is about to shut down" notification, but there's no reason that couldn't require explicit permission when an app asks to use it, and in any case it's much less subject to abuse than a general indicator of battery remaining.
Whenever I've been driving for a few hours it pops up and says "need a break? - checkout these nearby gas stations".
The stations are always Caltex. Always. I'm in Southern Africa and I assume Caltex are the only ones that have paid to be featured like that. (there are plenty of other big brand-name stations around)
So they are monetizing in two directions. First by selling data about your habits you may not even realize they collect then subscription services to features of the car some people expect to just work. GM isn't alone, BMW charges just to use Apple CarPlay in their cars, Audi is near $500 a year for some services offered through the dash display; like updated maps and such.
I think a lot of it came down to people keeping cars longer and manufacturers needing to maintain an income stream
[1] http://www.autonews.com/article/20180430/OEM06/180439972/gm-...
Seems like the likely outcome of these games will be older cars, from before these "innovations", were being kept even longer and start to become sought after.
I do want a plug-in hybrid some day, but I'll likely need a house first. :P
You can, of course, buy only the minimum you need to make it to another station instead.
Fundamentally, what's happening here is a temporary very localized monopoly, that you created by letting your fuel supply get so low. If you put yourself in a situation where you can reach only one fuel supplier, the economic consequences are your own fault.
EDIT to clarify: I'm not trying to argue here, I sincerely don't understand how this is supposed to work.
The solution shouldn't be to always carry extra fuel around. That has various negative consequences: decreasing range, increasing the amount of weight I am moving around. The solution should be not letting them spy on me.
The supplier seeks to remedy that asymmetry.
I thought HN was usually against information asymmetry in the free market? Or does that only apply when it's not to the consumer's benefit?
BTW 5USD/gallon would be actually cheap in Europe.
It's true that modern standards for the mechanics and driving controls in cars are a significant improvement on what I have. Sadly, modern standards for everything else they bundle in these days seem to be a huge step backwards. I want them about as much as I want a "smart" home and a "smart" phone.
It's sad, because I enjoy playing with new technologies and would love to have the benefits of recent advances and devices, but for me the risks and costs in terms of security, privacy and safety are often too high to use a lot of these things. I'm starting to feel like the older relative we all seem to have who doesn't know how to use a computer...
(Edit: Fortunately, as you demonstrated with the separate navigation box you mentioned, there are often good alternatives right now that have to compete on merit because they're not built-in, which aren't necessarily as owner-hostile. I just fear the day when the number of us willing to pay a little extra and give up a little convenience to maintain that independence will be too small to sustain the market.)
If you're working on building the stuff to enable this future, please stop.
> The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man.
> The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With".
> The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes”
I get in:
There is a TCBY just off your route, want a dollar off?
LOL
I will just watch this mess, content with my easy to service, older, dumb car.
The interesting dynamic here will be the features that really help people vs advertizers looking to direct business.
Driving newer cars is a lot more busy experience. Looks like it may just get worse. Bummer. I drive older vehicles for the quiet. At night especially.
Wonder what people will do when the car makes one offer, the phone another, and the other phone in back, yet another one?
I won't be buying any cars new enough, until such time as they are hacked to not do it.
When "voting with your dollar" is impossible, we need to be able to vote with our, y'know, votes. If we can do neither, we need to consider less palatable alternatives.
The EU has already made this business model a non-starter.
I’d pay for a cell data kill switch in my new car.
More practically, though, doesn’t this mean they have to push opt-out updates to any car being driven in California?
The other problem is that they’d likely log the GPS track, and upload it all at once if anyone ever re-enabled cell data, which kind of defeats the whole thing.
Maybe the switch would have to be for all the radios (even FM, Bluetooth, etc, if yo want to be extra tin foil hatty).
Even with that, commercial license plate cameras still would track the car.
I’m beginning to think the only solution is legislative (probably via direct democracy, because Silicon Valley corporate lobbyists are too powerful these days...)
Lo and behold, you're always the product, no matter how many thousands of dollars you're paying.