712
Toyota Owner Didn’t Know His Car Was Talking To Insurers Until He Saw His Rates
(www.carscoops.com)
How would the Toyota CEO not know about this? Weird. /s
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
712 points (99.3% liked)
World News
52236 readers
2362 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
my country recently got a new behavioral car insurer. their very first move? running brainwashing 0.5 second ads on popular TV channels, that just flashes thrir logo quickly, and has just enough time to announce the name of the company. I'm not exaggerating. absolute parasite scumbags, every one of them must burn.
I don't want to drive traffic to their site, but this one is it: https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://drivello.hu/
stear clear from them, they have shown they are here for deception money, zero good intentions.
Yeah, I'm fucking done with cars. Can't afford em anyway.
Next: Insurance premiums rise if you cannot be tracked and verified to be a safe driver.
In a sense that already exists, as I'm pretty sure there are extra plan benefits if you opt-in to more surveillance.
My Farmer's agent offered a discount, I forgot how much, maybe 15% to use their app and location services. It was a few years back, I told them to get stuffed.
These behaviors will only get worse, unless we change the system. We just need to help each other understand that, and then execute it!
My car is 26 years old, truck is 30... No internet connectivity there, and yet my rates going up steadily every year with nothing on my driving record. 🙄
This is calculated by the odds of your car breaking(higher as the car ages/parts become more expensive), the chances you are going to get into an accident (go higher as you age up after 30 something), and the chances another driver will crash into you without your fault(this saw a large increase after COVID, people just started driving worse for some reason I don't know). All of this means that you will pay more for insurance and it 100% isn't your fault.
They charge you extra since they can't sell your data.
Yup. Older cars costing more to insure is yet another poor tax.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Honestly if a car has any form of internet connectivity built in, it should raise so many red flags before you even sit down to talk financing.
Good luck finding a modern car that doesn't, I just yank out the power to the modem
I wouldn't mind doing this on my vehicle. Elaborate?
Searching for your car model + 'disable modem', 'remove cellular', 'physically remove 5g', etc. Will often come up with guides for specific vehicles.
In my car, it's just a separate board you can just unplug.
There might be a dedicated fuse, also. If so, that would be the easiest solution
my rates do seem high. I had a wreck a few years back but it was a dented door and fixed just fine. I work from home so I dont drive all that much, and the car is cheap. But it does have telemetry. I wonder if I should just bridge a resistor across the onstar antenna terminals
Casually reading, you could put a 50ohm or larger resistor there.
You will have a better result removing/disabling the module completely. There are several searchable tutorials based on the vehicle module.
load more comments
(1 replies)
So, OnStar, for decades now, has had cellular activity whether you were paying for it or not. They just used to be careful about not selling data. But even if the user didn't pay and the manufacturer didn't sell, those models are trackable by ISP.
load more comments
(5 replies)
What amazes me is how many people not only willingly giving up their privacy without any understand of what it means to do so or the implications of it, but also so many have a defense of 'if you are in public you have no right or expectation of privacy at all'.
This is bullshit. While you have a reduced expectation of privacy by virtue of being in public, the fact that your movements are alp documented so completely either by private or public entities without warrants, your face and expressions and dress scanned, and even videos you watch on your phone based on some flock cameras I have seen is an outrage.
People have a right to sometimes just go out and disappear for a while. I used to do it all the damn as a teenager and very young adult. I didnt run away from home or skip school, but I needed genuine alone time to think and let my mind and body feel free for a moment and give myself a minor mental reset. This is impossible if I am on camera all the damn time. The last thing I want is to take a walk through some artsy parts of town or a park and then get ads on 'want to escape? Here are some nice vacation spots to go to', or get ads on shit just because I did some window shopping or in-store browsing.
And then there is this shit. How all that spying affects you financially and maybe even professionally as AI now is reviewing CVs and you better damn well believe that they will be integrating all information on you if you apply anywhere.
And for the 'this prevents crime' shit no it does not. Crime resolution rates have been dropping throughout even the wealthiest most surveillance heavy countries. A study from around 20 years ago in the UK showed thay the places with the most cameras don't have less crime or more solved crimes than those with less cameras. More funding for police and more police tools have ironically lead to a massive reduction in murder rate resolution in the US and elsewhere. Which is surprising snd terrifying... because just how many innocent people have been put in prison in the past without anyone knowing?
It is entirely about social control. Have you ever wondered why protests seem to be less effective and there aren't that many revolutions or successful coups as there were last century? That is why. (And yes I am aware they still happen, but they are much harder to pull off)
The best example I've heard is, if I wait outside your house and follow you around everywhere you go, every single time you leave the house, even though you're "in public," that's still a crime and it's called "stalking."
load more comments
(2 replies)
Spyware in our cars? This is unacceptable.
YEAR OF THE LINUX CAR
2036 maybe
load more comments
(9 replies)
Time to make data sharing illegal. If it is technically needed, the industry needs to have a written contract with the user, which describes in detail which data is shared. It must be a separate contract from anything else, and one each for each industry partner.
"T&Cs update : please agree to 80 pages of impenetrable legal jargon before you can continue to use your vehicle"
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(14 replies)
When do companies ask for consent? Look at Google and incognito mode. Look at 23&me, I can go on. And nobody sees anything done about it. We are numbers. Not people. That's our world
Funny that 23andMe is the Google founders wife’s company.
load more comments
(20 replies)
There won't just be an "AI" bubble burst if this surveillance tech bros crap goes on for too much longer. Everyone wants to be an overlord. No one just wants to make a reasonable healthy profit anymore.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Another reminder why I chose to own a bicycle.
I used to dream to have a car, but the more I grew up, the more I realize just how fucking hard it is to have one, especially paperwork and driving demands more situational awareness, of not just the space around the car but also other vehicles on the road.
Not an option for many of us. Even in the city, where I've gotten around on bicycle for years and years with no car before, it was a hostile environment, and motorists hate bicyclists with a passion. I didn't ride in the street either like in the lane holding up traffic either. But many would go out of their way to hit you, including police. I was too quick for them though.
load more comments
(13 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Maybe it's time to create some rules about data brokering? It's not really about tracking and consent, it's about who can sell what data about whom to what parties.
It's become an enormous business, it deals with you and I, it delights in living in the shadows, and it is almost completely unregulated. I don't really care if Toyota records my data, I care that it's allowed to sell it or share it.
I think a reasonable first step would be that all data about a specific person belongs to that person and nobody else. We have rules about photos, we need to expand them to data brokering, because the problem is the same: if you can be identified and placed, you are at risk.
load more comments
(7 replies)
view more: next ›