Thursday, October 18, 2018

GM’s data mining is just the beginning of the in-car advertising blitz

It wasn’t until The Detroit Free Press reported on General Motors’ radio-tracking program — which monitored the listening habits of 90,000 drivers in the Los Angeles and Chicago areas for three months in late 2017 — that it became clear that the future of targeted advertising in cars is… well, it’s practically already here.

GM captured minuted details such as station selection, volume level, and ZIP codes of vehicle owners, and then used the car’s built-in Wi-Fi signal to upload the data to its servers. The goal was to determine the relationship between what drivers listen to and what they buy and then turn around and sell the data to advertisers and radio operators. And it got really specific: GM tracked a driver listening to country...

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