Manufacturers of connected cars are sharing way more data than customers
 may realize, the New York Times reported Monday, and that's only half the 
problem. According to the report, automakers may be sharing statistics about 
customer driving habits with their insurance companies directly. If you drive 
a car with built-in telematics in a way that you'd rather your insurance company 
not know about, you may want to keep reading. 

So far, the Times has only linked the activity to instances where customers
 voluntarily opt into various connected features, but how customers agree 
(not to mention whether they understand exactly what they're agreeing to)
 varies by manufacturer. In the cases of OEMs like Tesla, who provide their 
own insurance either in-house or via a partnership, customers are made aware 
that the service will monitor their driving behavior. Some third-party insurers 
even offer electronic monitoring devices that interface with the universal 
on-board diagnostic (OBD) port located on every mass-market vehicle. 

In other instances, however, the data collection is less transparent. 
NYT called out General Motors in particular for sharing data with third 
parties with little (or ambiguous) documentation. GM's optional OnStar 
Smart Driver service offers to track customer driving habits, ostensibly 
to help them behave more safely and economically, but does not obviously 
disclose that the collected statistics may end up in databases like LexisNexis 
that are available to insurance companies. Multiple owners of high-performance 
GM vehicles claimed they were targeted by insurance companies for rate hikes 
after taking their cars to the track while the service was active. In some 
cases, those customers may have been enrolled in the service at the dealership 
as part of a larger OnStar bundle. 

Other automakers acknowledged arrangements with third-party data collection 
firms, but in more limited and situational contexts.