Connected cars can become a real privacy nightmare, but we mustn’t lose sight of certain apps that are supposedly designed to improve our driving experience and are actually nothing more than a cover for tracking our driving style and sell this data to insurance companies.

This information can contain very important details about the way we drive and is of great value to insurers as it allows them to have a solid data base on which to determine the risk they are taking when insuring different drivers. For example, if subject A drives more aggressively, constantly braking and accelerating, and another subject B drives more calmly, without braking and accelerating, it is clear that the first subject will pose a greater risk than the second.

Connected cars can collect and sell this information, but there are also smartphone apps capable of doing the same. Life360, MyRadar, and GasBuddy are some of the apps they have optional driving analysis functions. They use the smartphone’s sensors for monitoring and therefore can also consume more battery.

Based on this information, some platforms create profiles of drivers who have been assigned a specific score. According to Arity, he has around him 40 million active connections in the United States through this type of application. It is true that these features are optional, but the problem is that they are normally activated with the consent required from the user through a very long contract and with boring language that, as you may have imagined, most users He doesn’t bother to read.

This means that a large proportion of these 40 million active connections will be made without the user’s actual consent, as the user accepts the contract without bothering to read it, while others believe that they are only sharing “certain information”and they never imagine that this includes their driving habits.

This problem seems to be mainly affecting the United States, but in Europe we need to be on the lookout because it may only be a matter of time before they become popular. You already know that information is power, and our data has important value for certain companies, especially those that are them very difficult to access, for example driving habits. Any Arity app collects this data, so it’s best to avoid it.