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Onstar may have more devious plans. This comes from a newsletter called "Travel Insider" which usually has pretty accurate information, in this case flavored with a little paranoia:
"...do you know that GM now reserves the right to sell information gained from Onstar monitoring about your vehicle usage, including such things as whether you have your seat belt on or not, the speeds you drive, where and when you drive the car, and potentially many other things too.
A combination of GPS and engine data and the remote monitoring capabilities of Onstar make just about everything to do with your car usage available to them. They can even know if you like to brake hard, accelerate fast, if you get good or bad fuel economy, and so on.
Who would want to buy such information from GM? Insurance companies, for one. There are already apps for smart phones that have been devised by insurance companies, ostensibly to allow you to manage your own driving habits - have a look at 'Driver FB (as in Feedback) for the iPhone from State Farm. Creepily, if you run this app, not only does it score your driving (based on acceleration, braking and cornering), but it even plots on a map exactly where/when you were driving and the locations where your driving was less than optimum.
How would you like insurance companies to raise your premiums based on information direct from your car about your driving habits?
Police departments would also love this information - if they could get real time reports of vehicles being driven hard and fast, late at night, and the locations and ownership details of the vehicles, what's the chance that, in the name of safety, they wouldn't arrange to have an officer and his breathalyzer waiting in your driveway when you got home?
Or maybe they'd just simply send you tickets by mail any time you exceed the speed limit or failed to fasten your seat belt. It is only one step removed from automatic photo-radar tickets at present.
Wait - there's more. GM reserves the right to continue to monitor your behavior even after you've discontinued the Onstar service. Just because you've stopped paying for it doesn't mean it stops working, apparently. It just stops working for you - but may continue working for others."
I don't know if they are pulling info from the old analog system in our '03 SC, but I've been meaning to pull the useless box out of the car anyway. This is another reason to do so.
, Tue, 27 Sep 2011 09:43:02, Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:01:18
, Sun, 25 Sep 2011 20:19:36, Fri, 23 Sep 2011 11:55:56, Sun, 25 Sep 2011 18:43:06, Mon, 26 Sep 2011 06:45:59, Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:26:40, Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:56:31
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