Discuss.
9 replies (most recent on top)
Data gathering and selling will continue. Whether Ford will actually profit from it is debatable.
The directive was to collect and store in perpetuity every piece of data that could be gathered. Why? because we are behind in data collection and data mining and don’t know what data might be useful to Ford or what data could be sold to others. Many meetings were held to brainstorm on opportunities for data selling.
There is a large staff of people presenting different findings from the gathered data, and proposing money making schemes. The majority of in house proposals are junk, based on correlation not causation type of a thing. Ergo why Ford must sell the gathered data to companies that have a wider scope of drivers data, or purchase additional driver data to augment their data. The rub is: cell phone data already has nearly all the location data Ford wants to sell, which limits the value of the data Ford is gathering. The primary data customers are dealerships, gas stations, insurance companies, law enforcement and other government agencies.
On more than one occasion leadership has stated that they believe legislation will catch up with current behaviors. In the US that is probably true given the money being spent on lobbyists.
Agreed. These are automakers, not tech companies. Those claiming to be tech companies are falling significantly short.
I happen to know many instances where these OEMs and their engineers, are taping together stuff just to make it work. They aren't doing a great job troubleshooting. They work too quickly, that the old issues are simply that, old issues. They're moving light speed beyond that unto new issues.
Bro-in-law in OEM engineer, and he's ALWAYS putting out fires. As one engineer use to tell me "It's not engineering, we're just lucky our sh*t works."
What data is being sold and who's buying it?
Data First means people last.
I was at Chrysler or FCA, they have a state of the art technology for gathering vehicle data. The intention was to use the data for tracking quality issues the the field. However they couldn't have been less interested in tracking and root causing quality issues. Just the same old same old, go to meetings and report BS that "sounds good" to management. Millions spent to implement this system and it went to the wayside. Typical. BTW, Ford is way behind in this technology.
In 2017 Ford began an internal program where they asked for employee volunteers to setup their Ford vehicle with a wireless link through the OBDII port and a cell phone. It would record hundreds of parameters and then upload the data via the cell phone to the Ford data base.
All of the auto manufactures now have similar wireless access to their vehicles ECU's to pull this data. Besides for development and monetization purposes, I believe the goal is to give all makes of vehicles the ability to communicate with to each other to further reduce accidents. Additionally, this is the first step to safely integrate autonomous vehicles into society.
At some point I think federal law will take the choice out of the consumers hands regarding the OEM's ability to acquire the vehicle data. That is just my opinion though.
Agree. Will not purchase a vehicle (if I can help it) where I can't lock out data collection.
MetaFord
Not with my data. If I can’t opt out, I can’t drive a Ford.