Car companies are tracking drivers’ data and selling it to third-party data brokers — leaving their customers to suffer the consequences.
R.J. Cross
Director, Don’t Sell My Data Campaign, PIRG
A new investigation found that GM, Honda, Kia, Subaru, Hyundai and Mitsubishi are tracking drivers’ data on everything from when they drive to how hard they hit their brakes.
At least they’re guarding that data and only using it to make their cars safer, right?
Wrong.
Right now, some of the biggest car companies are tracking millions of drivers’ data, sneakily selling it to third-party brokers, and leaving their customers to suffer the consequences.
The consequences we’ve seen so far are scary, such as insurance companies jacking up rates with no explanation. But the secretive wheeling and dealing of consumers’ personal data means that there’s a world of data breaches, identity theft and targeted scams right around the corner.
What information does your car computer track?
Cars and their connected apps know a lot about their drivers. They know how far you go, the start and end time of your trips, how hard you brake, how quickly you accelerate — and they may be tracking that information without drivers’ knowledge.
One data broker has detailed driving data on more than 10 million drivers.
Overnight and without explanation, one of these drivers found that his insurance had spiked by 21%. Why? Because GM had sold his driving data to a third-party broker, which compiled 130 pages of his driving behavior and sold it to his insurance company.
What does it mean when a company sells your data?
After automakers collect the data, third-party brokers sell that data to other companies — in this case, insurance companies — that use it against consumers without them knowing it.
The consequences could span far beyond insurance rates, though. With every secret handoff from data broker to buyer, we’re more at risk for data breaches, identity theft or targeted scams.
Your data includes personal information about you, your habits, behavior and preferences. If that information — your identity — gets into the wrong hands, it can be used against you.
How do I opt out of car data collection?
Unfortunately, much of the data-collecting technology that your vehicle uses can’t be opted out of. Most new cars today will have some type of location-tracking technology included.
Consumers shouldn’t have to worry that their car’s computers or connected apps are sharing their data with other entities. It’s time for car companies to reverse course by committing to not sharing or selling consumer data for anything other than what consumers are expecting — a functional car and safe driving experience.
Sign our petition to tell automakers to stop sharing your data.
September 2, 1885 A mob of white coal miners, led by the Knights of Labor, violently attacked their Chinese co-workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming, killing 28 and burning the homes of 75 Chinese families. The white miners wanted the Chinese barred from working in the mine. The mine owners and operators had brought in the Chinese ten years earlier to keep labor costs down and to suppress strikes.Chinese fleeing Rock Springs The unfortunate story and illustrations of the scene (scroll down)
September 2, 1945 Revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam a republic and independent from France (National Day). Half a million people gathered in the capital of Hanoi to hear him read the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, which was modeled on the U.S. Declaration of Independence. note: Ho Chi Minh translates to ‘He Who Enlightens’ Read about how it was influenced by the U.S. Declaration
September 2, 1966 On what was supposed to be the first day of school in Grenada, Mississippi—and the first day in an integrated school for 450 Negro children—the school board postponed opening of school for 10 days because of “paperwork.” Nevertheless, the high school played its first football game that night. Some of the Negro kids who had registered for that school tried to attend the game but were beaten, and their car windows smashed.
September 2, 1969 Vietnamese revolutionary and national leader Nguyen Tat Thanh (aka Ho Chi Minh), 79, died of natural causes in Hanoi. Uncle Ho, Ho Chi Minh Ho and his struggle for Vietnamese independence
Palestinian villages in the West Bank are seeing an increase in illegal settler attacks since October 7, 2023, the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Some of the settlers are attacking farms and killing livestock. NBC News’ Hala Gorani has more on the increase in violence.
From David Beckham’s poreless skin to the tastes of Queer Eye’s original Fab Five, metrosexuality marked an essential step toward a more open masculinity.
(This came from a magazine Janet linked a few days ago. I’m sitting and reading around in it today, and this struck me, especially in light of certain dark comments made over the past few years by the Republican VP nom. So I’m posting for juju. Or mojo. Mostly humorous spite, on my part. NVM me and enjoy the story.)
2004 Was So Gay is Them’s look back at a pivotal year for queer history and pop culture. Read more from the series here.
“Precise, smooth, and powerful:” the sexual energy rippling through Gillette’s 2004 ad campaign nearly leaps from the page — not because razors were suddenly sexy, but because its star, David Beckham, was known at the time as “the biggest metrosexual in Britain.” With a freshly shaved head, glistening muscles, and a green-tipped razor in hand, the image cemented what the world already knew, by way of a £40 million global ad campaign. This British soccer star — this man who wore pink nail polish and, occasionally, his wife’s panties — was seen as the peak of masculinity that year, and nobody else came close. As Gillette’s tagline went, Beckham was “the best a man can get.”
Beckham may have been the gold standard for The Metrosexual, a “type” of man that entered the popular consciousness in the mid-2000s, but really the inspiration for the movement looked more like Stefon from Saturday Night Live. The character, played by Bill Hader, stopped by Weekend Update with highlights in his side-swept hair and Ed Hardy’s rhinestone regalia covering his body to let viewers in on the hottest new spots in nightlife. Stefon’s outfits were modeled after 2000s nightlife looks, a fitting visual metaphor for the chaotic, homoerotic overtones of the early 2000s.
Much like the fictitious clubs Stefon gushed over, metrosexuality had everything. There were the menswear bibles you had to subscribe to (Details, Esquire, and GQ); must-have fashion labels (from Paul Smith and Hugo Boss to Dolce & Gabbana); and, of course, grooming brands like Axe body spray, which launched in the U.S. in 2002. On TV, the metrosexual movement was dominated by the likes of Queer Eye’s “Fab Five,” who burst into straight men’s homes like a glitterati SWAT team, and by Stacy London and Clinton Kelly on What Not to Wear, the more composed (but equally bitchy) spiritual sister in the makeover reality show genre.
Men had been Yassified, remade in His image; “His” being, if it weren’t clear by now, a fashion-conscious, grooming-obsessed gay man. Yes, the homoerotic undertones of metrosexuality weren’t exactly subtle, but it was the 2000s, damnit, and men were allowed to be a little fruity and high maintenance as a treat. For those caught in the metrosexualmania, the fad might’ve felt like a flash of lightning: suddenly there, lighting up every follicle and pore. Google search results for the phrase exploded from 25,000 in mid-2002 to nearly a million by the end of 2005. But the term had roots far beyond its early 2000s heyday, first entering the cultural lexicon via the self-proclaimed “daddy” of metrosexuality, Mark Simpson, and his seminal 1994 essay, “Here Come the Mirror Men: Why the Future is Metrosexual.”
Written as a taxonomy on fascinating, capitalist animals who’d just discovered oil-free moisturizer and form-fitting pants, Simpson’s essay announced the arrival of the “[m]etrosexual man, the single young man with a high disposable income, living or working in the city (because that’s where all the best shops are), is perhaps the most promising consumer market of the decade […] he’s everywhere, and he’s going shopping.” Or put more succinctly: “Metrosexual man is a commodity fetishist: a collector of fantasies about the male sold to him by advertising.”
The notion that you should spend more time and money on clothes, grooming, and fitness wasn’t exactly reinventing the wheel. What made metrosexuality unique wasn’t its deep roots in capitalism, but rather its flirtation with queering masculinity in a way that felt fundamentally new. This was a tectonic vibe shift that democratized desire, cracking open the door for straight men to edge into femininity. Metrosexuality’s origin was also fundamentally shaped by the HIV pandemic, which spawned its own obsession with self-image. LGBTQ+ people — and particularly gay men — idolized gym-hardened bodies and obsessed over looking affluent and “healthy.”
The rise of the “metrosexual” may have been a straight thing, but the through lines of these two movements ran concurrently, separated more by who you wanted to sleep with and less by what designer brand you went shopping for. We may feel trapped today in a timeline that’s more metro than ever, but the newness and, frankly, the edginess of metrosexuality 20 years ago was historic — especially as it grew from that tiny 1994-era seedling into a blossoming flower.
Like Simpson’s read of heterosexuality in 90s menswear magazines being “so self-conscious, so studied, that it’s actually rather camp,” it was the self-serious, studied, and camp character of Patrick Bateman in 2000’s American Psycho that finally put the nail in the coffin of the 1990s’ dominant, grungy aesthetic. The film about full-time Wall Street hotshot and part-time murderer, played perfectly by a svelte and smug Christian Bale, rewrote the codes of the New Man for a new decade within its first 10 minutes. In an opening monologue that feels created in a lab for future metrosexuals to studiously replicate, Bateman walks through a morning routine that includes ice-pack facials, a thousand stomach crunches, deep pore cleanser lotion, water-activated gel cleanser, honey almond body scrub, exfoliating gel scrub, herb-mint facial masque (leave on for 10 minutes), moisturizer, anti-aging eye balm, and aftershave lotion with no alcohol (“because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older.”) By the time the film shows him studying himself in a mirror, flexing his muscles as he mindlessly fucks a woman, the codes of this new kind of man were crystallized.
By 2004, “metrosexual” had been crowned “Word of the Year” by the American Dialect Society. Naturally, culture was flooded with glistening bodies, clouds of cologne, hardened hair gel, and at least five pairs of queer eyes regularly dissecting and rebuilding straight guys. These habits and inclinations toward presenting health and wealth have hardened with the passing of time, like a particularly sculpted torso. To put this in more Shakespearean terms: Metrosexuality by any other name (say, a looksmaxxing alpha male, or muscle gay) smells just as strongly of whatever scent we’re being marketed that day. Just like in 2004, turn on the TV or open a fashion publication’s homepage, and you’ll be knocked on your ass by capitalism’s consumptive frenzy; the major difference now is the somehow more relentless push to sculpt, shop and spend, driven into hyperdrive by our social media feeds. No matter if you’re gay, straight, femme, or them, we’re bombarded by messaging that tells us to work out, dress better, and start an 84-step skincare routine. My algorithm seems to hit me with a barrage of perfectly toned, sexually ambiguous guys every time I doomscroll.
It doesn’t take an armchair anthropologist to tell you that every trend, no matter how culturally ingrained it seems, will fade out over time. See “demure,”“Brat,” and whatever microtrend TikTok’s algorithms push today. As culture shifted and economics crashed, so did the desire to spend exorbitantly on grooming. The word “metrosexual” now feels as dated as Carson Kressley and the other original Fab Five members I simply cannot remember, but its cultural impact has lived on; every subsequent movement owes a debt to the metrosexual — from hipsters and their gallons of beard oil all the way to streetwear bros with sneaker collections rivaling even Carrie Bradshaw.
Metrosexuality’s chokehold on the 2000s taught men to be more comfortable in their femininity, but in the 20 years that have passed, our cultural understanding of manhood has splintered. There is the darker side, filtering metrosexuality’s obsessive grooming into a toxic, warped worldview dominated by obsessively coiffed, overly buff, and deeply insecure influencers. This is the side where young men are breaking their legs to be taller and smashing their jaws to be more “alpha.”
But luckily, it’s not all broken bones and toxic trauma. There’s a more healthy, nuanced exploration of modern masculinity that leans into the queerer side of our metrosexual forefathers. One that has allowed rockstars like Harry Styles to grace magazine covers in womenswear, release a gender-neutral beauty brand (Pleasing), and say, “I think there’s so much masculinity in being vulnerable and allowing yourself to be feminine” in a 2018 interview with fellow softboy Timothée Chalamet. You can see it during a night out as you spot straight men with painted nails and crop tops dancing with their girlfriends. You can see it in the celebrity role models of Steve Lacy, Paul Mescal, and Josh O’Connor — the latter helping launch both the “rat boy” and “fruity boy” micro-trends. This particular flavor of New Man is united in an embrace of and comfort with the duality of their feminine and masculine sides — and, notably, not separated by sexuality. Omar Apollo, Steve Lacy, Frank Ocean, and Tyler, the Creator meld effortlessly with the likes of Jaden Smith and the airbrushed perfection of K-pop supergroup BTS.
It has been thirty years since the “metrosexual” emerged and twenty years since its cultural reign. As we continue to navigate this modern era, redefining what it means to be a man, we’d do well to remember just how many boundaries metrosexuality broke down. Sure, it may be responsible for the poisonous clouds of Axe body spray we endured and ushered in a new era of hyper-commodification, but it also brought newfound sexual confidence and liberation to masculinity that taught us that it’s okay to be a little gay. Had it not been for our metrosexual forefathers (and the queers that guided them), who knows what rigid sartorial hellscape we’d all be living in today.
Snippet (it’s not a long piece, and it’s full of info.)
Let’s be clear about what Kansas Republican legislative leaders are doing with their planned overhaul of budgeting: They are launching a personal and political power grab against Gov. Laura Kelly.
They have never accepted or respected her mandate. Despite Kelly winning a second term and having two years left to go, they have continually attempted to usurp the executive branch’s authority. They have tried a constitutional amendment and prohibiting her ability to negotiate Medicaid contracts. Now they’re going after her yearly state budget proposal.
Usually, the Legislature begins its yearly budget process with a proposal from the governor. Her office submits it when lawmakers arrive for the annual session, in January. Now an interim committee wants to start the process earlier, as soon as October of the previous year.
In this new process, the governor’s budget would be a suggestion, not a starting point.
And never mind that it’s a direct attack on Kelly. House Speaker Dan Hawkins, R-Wichita, assured the audience that these changes had nothing to do with the governor.
“This process has nothing to do with the governor,” he said at the meeting earlier this month, according to Kansas Reflector reporter Tim Carpenter. “If you’re going to focus on the governor, probably not the wisest thing to do, because this process has happened over time with many, many different governors.”
He was contradicted by Senate President Ty Masterson, R-Andover, who let the proverbial cat out of the figurative bag.
“You’ll have a Republican governor, for example, or somebody you trust, and you trust the administration to build the budgets, and then you kind of rubber stamp stuff,” Masterson said. “And, then, you switch, and you have (the) opposition party and then there’s all that same power.”
Oh. So it’s like that, then.
(snip-More; also a vid of the sausage becoming sausage)
First some content warning; the article has a warning that it references rape. The article is below, but I’ll leave some space here; the first mention is in the first sentence beneath their warning. The article will be beneath the Xs; I can’t get formatting to leave space. Also, Sen. Marshall lies like a Trump.
Amber Dickinson speaks on reproductive rights at the “Kansas Women for Harris” rally Aug. 22, 2024, in Leawood. (Grace Hills/Kansas Reflector)
LEAWOOD — Amber Dickinson took a personal and vulnerable stand for reproductive freedom as she talked publicly for the first time about being raped.
Before her speech Thursday in Leawood at a rally of “Kansas Women for Kamala Harris,” only a handful of people knew she is a survivor. Through tears, she explained that she was worried she would stand in front of strangers and cry, when she was supposed to be strong.
“But whose definition of strong are we obligated to adhere to? It is time that women create their own definition of strength,” Dickinson said. “Because strength is not sexually abusing women like Donald Trump. Strength is not belittling women like J.D. Vance.”
Dickinson, a political science professor at Washburn University who has written opinion columns for Kansas Reflector, joined speakers who highlighted the ways Harris’ and former President Donald Trump’s policies affect Kansans. The rally was a counter-protest to Vance’s nearby fundraiser, where Republicans claimed he raised $1.5 million.
Dickinson spoke on reproductive rights, highlighting experiences of women in Oklahoma, a neighboring state with a total abortion ban. She spoke of a fetus found in an Oklahoma college residence hall bathroom. She said this is what the future looks like “if you allow wicked men like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump get what they want from us.”
After Dickinson spoke on reproductive rights, other women spoke on gun safety and funding in public schools.
Kristen Blackton, a former middle school teacher and part of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said she witnessed the rise of mass shootings in schools, resulting in her students asking her: “Can you protect us?”
“In our state, in Kansas, the rate of gun deaths has increased 48% from 2013 to 2022 and gun violence also disproportionately affects communities of color, with Black people in Kansas being over two times more likely to die by guns than white people in Kansas,” Blackton said. “This is not normal.”
A child paints a “we’re with her” sign at the “Kansas Women for Kamala Harris” rally on Aug. 22, 2024, in Leawood. (Grace Hills/Kansas Reflector)
She talked about legislation introduced by Rep. Linda Featherston, D-Overland Park, that would make safe storage of firearms a requirement. Blackton and other Moms from the group pushed for the bill, which failed to advance.
“Do you know why? We currently have a Republican supermajority in Topeka,” Blackton said. “This means that Republican lawmakers often act like they have no need to listen to their constituents and work across the aisle to improve the lives of Kansans.”
Rep. Mari-Lynn Poskin, D-Leawood, spoke about Moms for Liberty, a group that is known for challenging books in public schools.
Poskin praised Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend formerly a whites-only school after Brown v. Board, as a Civil Rights icon. Poskin said she donated copies of “Ruby Bridges’ Walk to School,” a children’s book written by Bridges, to local elementary schools.
“Moms for Liberty attempted to ban this sweet book from the second and third grade curriculums in the state of Tennessee,” Poskin said. “And if you don’t think it’s coming here, you’re wrong.”
Ten miles away from the Democratic women rally, at Indian Hills Country Club in Mission Hills, Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance dined with donors who paid $5,000 to $50,000 to attend. Former U.S Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Kansas U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall and Oklahoma U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin also were part of the fundraiser.
Mike Brown, chairman for the Kansas Republican Party, called the dinner a “huge success” in the party’s weekly newsletter Friday. Brown said more than 300 people attended, and raised $1.5 million.
On Tuesday, Marshall told KWCH, a radio station in Wichita, that he has heard from Kansans whose top concerns are inflation, border security, and government overregulation.
Chinese fleeing Rock Springs
Uncle Ho, Ho Chi Minh
