Comment by AnthonyMouse
1 year ago
> No congress-member is going to wake up and be like "gee, I sure wish I would get a few less bribes (campaign contributions) today," or "I sure would like my stock portfolio to decrease in value by doing real oversight on all these companies that are making me rich."
Neither of these is actually applicable here.
GM makes its money from selling cars (and financing for cars). If someone offers them a little extra for the data, they might take it, but they really don't care.
Neither do the insurance companies, except that if their competitors do it then so do they. If any insurance company has the data then they raise rates on the higher risk drivers and turf them to the ones without it, which puts them out of business. But if they're all banned from using it then they're all on a level playing field and again nobody really cares.
All you'd need is a law prohibiting insurance companies from using telemetrics and that would be the end of that. The main lobby against it would be the data brokers in this specific submarket, but they're hardly Big Auto and The Banks.
> All you'd need is a law...
Start asking 5 whys here and see where it takes you. I'm pretty curious what your model of reality is that "5 whys" doesn't make you feel hopeless.
That seems like the kind of law that could actually pass? It only happens if people make a stink about it, because the inertial default is the status quo, but sometimes that's what happens.
Not to me. Sounds like hope as a strategy to me.
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For years, I've been wondering when the data bubble was going to burst.
The whole "we'll make a TV with a $700 BOM and sell it for $600 because the viewing data is so valuable" situation. The "we'll burn valuable customer trust and loyalty for a $40k car because the insurance companies will pay us so much for the monitoring data." The grocery store desperately needing to track individual consumers rather than the aggregate "we sold 500 cans of Spam at this location today"
Civilization somehow managed to work for centuries without having to passively instrument every activity. So we can assume that what's being chased is marginal gains-- slightly better targeting and rates than we could get out of the information we were, as a society, comfortable with being public.
Does it really cover its costs? I always imagined so much of it was institutionalized FOMO-- "we must be data driven because our competitors are"-- and eventually someone's going to run the numbers.