Texas Sues Allstate Over Its Collection of Driver Data

Share This Post


The State of Texas sued Allstate on Monday, accusing the insurer of illegally tracking drivers by way of their phones through a subsidiary called Arity that claimed to have the “world’s largest driving behavior database.”

“Allstate and Arity paid mobile apps millions of dollars to install Allstate’s tracking software,” Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, said in a statement. “The personal data of millions of Americans was sold to insurance companies without their knowledge or consent in violation of the law. Texans deserve better and we will hold all these companies accountable.”

Allstate and Arity did not respond to requests for comment.

The New York Times reported last year that information about people’s driving behavior was being collected via smartphone apps, such as Life360 and GasBuddy, and sold to Arity, an analytics company founded by Allstate. Arity was able to analyze the data collected from people’s smartphones to determine how often they sped, braked suddenly or were distracted by their phones while driving. It used that analysis to give them driving risk scores.

“Insurers then used that consumer’s data to justify increasing their car insurance premiums, denying them coverage, or dropping them from coverage,” according to the attorney general’s lawsuit, which accuses the companies of violating the state’s privacy laws.

According to the state lawsuit, filed in District Court of Montgomery County, Arity has the location, movement and driving data of more than 45 million Americans who “were never informed about, nor consented to,” the continuous collection and sale of their data.

Texas also sued General Motors last year over the collection of consumers’ driving data, following a report by The Times that G.M. and other automakers were selling information about people’s driving to the insurance industry.



Source link

spot_img

Related Posts

DARPA’s in-space manufacturing program advances with two teams selected for orbital demos

WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency...

Would you stop using OpenAI if Elon Musk took it over?

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the...

Nykaa’s Q3 net profit jumps 52% to Rs 26.4 crore

FSN Ecommerce, the parent company of fashion and...

Decoding OpenAI’s Super Bowl ad and Sam Altman’s grandiose blog post

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the...

Workshops set for online advertising code of conduct

The DSA says that the Commission should prepare...

Oxford Scientists Say They’ve Achieved Quantum Teleportation

Researchers at the University of Oxford say they've...
spot_img