Your GM vehicle is listening to you and knows your habits and what you search for to offer you the ads that are relevant to your habits.

In a world that’s more connected than ever and with news of different videos that surface of events that we might have thought of as private, it seems there’s almost nowhere that we can be away from cameras, listening devices, or items that are tracking our habits. Sometimes we know of the activities going on behind the scenes and other times we have no idea at all. 

It’s Not a Game of Hide and Seek

The old rule for hide and seek was that if you couldn’t see the person searching for you, there was a good chance they couldn’t see you either. That wasn’t always the case, but it worked pretty well most of the time. While driving on the road isn’t a game of hide and seek, the fact that our vehicles are more connected than ever means that a company that wants to understand our habits better, certainly can learn more about us when we drive.

The GM Study of What We Listen to

GM recently conducted a three-month study of customers that had vehicles equipped with the in-car Wi-Fi system. The idea was to learn more about the radio listening habits of these drivers to understand whether or not there was a relationship between what the drivers listen to and what they buy. More companies are conducting surveys in this manner in order to package the right type of advertising for the audiences of different shows, types of music, and even search results online. Targeted advertising is often more effective than a broad range of advertising for companies.

The Results are Kept Anonymous

GM is extremely cognizant of the fact that the data collected during this study needs to be kept under wraps. The data size collected was conducted across more than 90,000 vehicles on the road with the Wi-Fi system that’s installed in the vehicle. While the fact that your vehicle might be listening to you and the manufacturer could be collecting some data can be unnerving, this is the direction we’re headed with more vehicles and items that are connected around the globe. There’s a chance this activity could eventually go too far.

An Innocence Lost

As amusing as it is for those of us that grew up before smartphones and the internet to talk about the fact that our dumb activities were conducted at a time when you had to have an actual eye-witness account to find out what you’d done, the truth is, there doesn’t seem to be any privacy left in the world. Are we going to enter a world in which we receive a speeding ticket via text message because the sensors in our phone show that we’re driving above the speed limit? Will automakers continue to monitor our habits and report these to public forums that pay for the results in the future? Privacy may be lost for good, and that’s something we need to consider about the future of driving on the road.