Data Brokers Are Tracking Your Driving Habits for Insurance Companies

How to Tell if You are Being Tracked

​Car companies are collecting massive amounts of data about your driving – how fast you accelerate, how hard you brake, and any time you speed. These data are then analyzed by LexisNexis or another data broker to be parsed and sold to insurance companies. As a result, many drivers with clean records are surprised with sudden, large increases in their car insurance payments.
 
Kashmir Hill of The New York Times reports the case of a Seattle man whose insurance rates skyrocketed, only to discover that this was the result of LexisNexis compiling hundreds of pages on his driving habits.
 
This is yet another feature of the dark side of the internet of things, the always-on, connected world we live in. For drivers, internet-enabled services like navigation, roadside assistance, and car apps are also 24-7 spies on our driving habits. We consent to this, Hill reports, “in fine print and murky privacy policies that few read.” One researcher at Mozilla told Hill that it is “impossible for consumers to try and understand” policies chocked full of legalese.
 
The good news is that technology can make data gathering on our driving habits as transparent as we are to car and insurance companies. Hill advises:

• See the data your car is capable of collecting with this tool: https://vehicleprivacyreport.com/.

 

• Request your LexisNexis report at: https://consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com/consumer​

 

• Or request your report from another data broker, Verisk, at: https://fcra.verisk.com/#

 
What you cannot do, however, is file a report with the FBI, IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, or the Pentagon to see if government agencies are also purchasing your private driving data. Given that these federal agencies purchase nearly every electron of our personal data, scraped from apps and sold by data brokers, they may well have at their fingertips the ability to know what kind of driver you are. Unlike the private snoops, these federal agencies are also collecting your location histories, where you go, and by inference, who you meet for personal, religious, political, or other reasons.
 
All this information about us can be accessed and reviewed at will by our government, no warrant needed.
 
That is all the more reason to support the inclusion of the principles of the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act in the reauthorization of the FISA Section 702 surveillance policy.