I never thought that the telephone companies would hand over phone records of its customers to the government but it happened. How will this information be used without our knowledge?

What is the next step in this type of personal vehicle data recording? Inter-vehicular audio recordings for examination prior to accidents?

Your car isn’t phoning home… There are 100s of reasons why that isn’t happening but I won’t bother to get into them…

They most likely made an assumption… If you do the math, that works out fairly close…

Assume average 20,000/year… 11 months would be ~18,400… You don’t want to do targeted mailings to your customer base every month… So you approximate… So let’s say you mail out 3-4 times per year.. Your 11th month would be July (Sept – Aug would be 1 year… So July would be 11 months)… Now assuming they send their letters every 4 months… They would send them in Jan. May, Sept…. They want to get you before your year is up so they lump you into the May mailing.. Now they don’t want to call may the 1 year because that’s the earliest point on the list and the average is 20,000 so 50% are less than that and 50% are more than that… So they are looking at either the 10th or 11th month… If people are driving less… (which you could assume given public opinion on global warming), then they may want to play it safe and pick the 11th month… So the take the 11 months at ~1666/month and they get ~18400…

It covers most of their customer base and requires only 3 mailings per year… Now this may be a bit of a stretch but it’s probably just something like that.

I drive 90 miles a day to work, round trip, so I’m a high mileage guy. I bought the car last September, so it had around 18500 miles on it the middle of last week. And I get this letter today, with service coupons, that says “Our records indicate your Mazda has approximately 18,400 miles.”

This car hasn’t been to the dealership since I bought it.

Is my car phoning home? They can’t be estimating, or they’d show a much lower mileage number.

I’m not necessarily a #2 person, but I don’t like how easily we can put things like a VIN on that device, have it always report data (even if it loops over itself regularly), slap in an always-on GPS, and so on. You can make initiatives like this become a privacy invasion very quickly, and of course all in the name of protection from terroris…I mean…insuranc…I mean public safet….err….that kind of stuff.

Then again, I see a few stoplights in my area getting new “photo enforced” units installed, which makes me very happy. I really hate when people speed through an intersection that just turned red. But then again, do people who bend/break laws and/or endanger other people deserve to have their privacy infringed upon more? Or are we just limiting the ability to lie and increasing our ability to gather data?

Thanks for posting this! I was almost hoping my car was involved in this, but I’m not so sure yet (Mitsubishi).