Quote:
Originally Posted by Rogue Leader
Heres the sticking point. Many people are going to automatically believe that the "insurance" part means that they are watching you. Or if you get in a wreck that the first thing they are gonna do is call OnStar and say "how fast was he going"? but in reality that is likely not the case.
OnStar's usage data goes into a database and can be extrapolated into any number of statistics. These statistcs are HUGELY valuable to insurance companies. They can tell where people are driving more, where crashes happen more often (remember Insurer's data is only where they have policies in force and claims, so if theres an area of your state that theres not a lot of policies, their data is low there), average speeds in areas. Having worked for one of the major insurance companies this data is GOLD to them as it allows them to be ultra competitive in an area while still pricing to maintain a profit.
Is it theoretically possible that State Farm can call them up and say "How fast was Bob Jones going at 5:15 PM on Wednesday", I'm sure anything is possible, but this scenario sounds highly unlikely, and based upon the exact words in their disclosure the only thing you really would need to worry about is law enforcement, and I would bet thats only in criminal case proceedings. They don't have time to call OnStar about your fender bender, they have bigger fish to fry.
When it comes to Criminal Cases, I'd hope none of us ever have that issue anyway 
Now I'm gonna put my flame jacket on for the onslaught of replies that tell me I'm an idiot, I don't know what I'm talking about, OnStar and the government is out to get us all, the insurance companies are out to get us all, and my tin-foil hat must be defective. |
Haha... no need to put your flame suit on.
I didn't give the long explanation like you did, of how the data will be used, but I did have it all written at one time
(backspace, backspace, backspace)... I then figured it wasn't necessary, as common sense tells us they are not going to ask what speed Bob was driving @ 6pm on Tuesday September 6th, 2011.
Although I was thinking that the gps tracking data might be useful as well, in some fashion... maybe not to an insurance company, but to someone. There is a lot of very useful data collected by Onstar, and they would be stupid to just sit on it.