The Asset

“My car works for me.” Interesting theory. You bought the vehicle; the vehicle studies the buyer. This case makes one structural claim and holds it: the connected car is sold under the vocabulary of ownership — my car, my asset, my possession — while it operates as a continuous data-extraction platform that profiles the driver and ships the profile onward. The vocabulary names you the owner; the relation makes you the subject. Assets depreciate. Data appreciates. And when a regulator finally read the relation instead of the brochure, it found a buyer who had never knowingly agreed to any of it.

§01 — The move named

The temptation is to read this as a story about one carmaker behaving badly. That reading is available, and it is not the reading this series is for. Strip the brand out and a familiar grammar remains — the one named in Case 28 · The Partner, now on the consumption side. There, the vocabulary of enterprise (“be your own boss”) laundered a controlled wage relation. Here, the vocabulary of ownership (“my car,” “my asset,” “possession”) launders a surveillance-extraction relation. The sharp move is the role inversion: the buyer assumes they are the agent — owner, purchaser, the one being served — while the relation positions them as the product, studied and sold.

Name the structure before the evidence. The car is the richest consumer sensor platform most people will ever own: cameras, microphones, precise GPS, accelerometers, the phones and contacts they pair to it. Case 23 drew the abstract chain — legibility into data-power, Zuboff’s brokers; this is that chain as a thing in your driveway with a payment book.

• P1 Connected features are real and many are genuinely wanted — navigation, crash response, over-the-air fixes. Grant it in full.
• P2 The same vehicle is a continuous sensor platform that profiles the driver: where, when, how, and increasingly who (Mozilla rated cars the worst product category for privacy it has ever reviewed).
• P3 “Ownership” does not make the buyer the agent of that relation: the freedom to buy the car is not control over what it harvests, or over who it tells.
• P4 The harvested data is sold downstream — driving behaviour to brokers to insurers — under an enrolment the owner never knowingly agreed to. The laundering is the ownership-vocabulary over an extraction relation, with the agent-inversion concealed at the point of sale.

Counter: when a product is sold to you as something you own, ask the question the word is built to skip — what does it take from me, where does it send it, and did I ever knowingly say yes?

§02 — Subject analysis: you

Reading about the mechanism is one thing; meeting it is another. The console below is a working data extractor. It profiles you, right now, from the handful of signals a browser exposes — your clock and region, your device, how your cursor moves, how you scroll, where you linger, what you select. It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing it derives is sent anywhere; it asks for no location; it is erased the instant you leave. That restraint is the only thing separating this page from a connected car — which derives the same class of profile from a vastly richer sensor suite and ships it onward, to brokers and insurers.

Counter: the difference between this page and your car is one network call — the one this page refuses to make and your car makes continuously.

§03 — The relation, on the record

Set the brochure aside and read the relation as researchers read it. In 2023 Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included reviewed 25 major car brands. Every one failed — a first in the guide’s history — and Mozilla called cars “the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed.”primary

Of 25 brands, none let drivers meaningfully control the collection; the great majority reserved the right to share or sell it. This is not one rogue manufacturer; it is the category. The car is, by default, an instrument pointed at its owner.primary

Counter: a feature describes what a product does for you; a data policy describes what it does with you. When the two disagree, the policy is the relation and the feature is the wash.

§04 — The tell: the regulator read the relation

The cleanest tell is not an advocate’s; it is a regulator’s findings of fact. Through OnStar’s “Smart Driver” feature, General Motors collected drivers’ precise geolocation and driving-behaviour data roughly every three seconds and sold it to third parties — including the consumer reporting agencies LexisNexis and Verisk — which fed it to insurers, who raised premiums. The US Federal Trade Commission charged that GM did this through a “misleading enrolment process,” failing to clearly disclose the collection and sale, and without consumers’ informed consent.primary

GM and OnStar collected drivers’ precise geolocation and driving behaviour and shared it without consumers’ informed consent; the order bars sharing such data with consumer reporting agencies for five years, and for twenty years requires affirmative express consent before collecting or disclosing connected-vehicle data.FTC, order finalised 14 Jan 2026 — In the Matter of General Motors LLC and OnStar, LLC

Note what the sanction is, and is not. It is not a fine — no money changed hands. It is a behavioural order: a five-year ban on selling the data to consumer reporting agencies; a twenty-year requirement of express, informed consent; and a duty to let owners access, delete, and opt out, and to disable precise geolocation. The regulator’s core finding is the whole case in three words — no informed consent. The buyer believed they had bought a car and a safety service; the agent-inversion was concealed by the enrolment screen. That concealment is the laundering, found as fact.

You bought the vehicle. The vehicle studies the buyer. The enrolment screen kept the second sentence quiet.

Counter: “you agreed to the terms” is a claim about a screen, not about understanding. Ask whether the consent was informed — and who designed it not to be.

§05 — The named lens: behavioral futures

The model underneath has a name, and the series reports it as a named lens. Shoshana Zuboff calls it surveillance capitalism: human experience is claimed as free raw material, rendered into behavioural data, and the surplus beyond what’s needed to improve the product is sold into markets that trade in predictions — behavioural futures. The farmer harvests one crop a season; the platform harvests location, habits, purchases, contacts and routines every day. One sells grain. The other sells a forecast of what you will do, to whoever will pay to know — or to nudge it.

It is named here, attributed, and offered as the frame — not adopted as a verdict on any single feature. The platform’s narrower claim survives without the full theory: whatever one concludes about surveillance capitalism in general, the specific word “ownership” launders a relation that the data policies in §03 and the FTC’s findings in §04 will not support. This is the consumer-side twin of Case 23’s ratchet, sitting in your driveway.analysis

Counter: “data” sounds inert; “behavioural futures” names the trade. Ask not “what do they collect?” but “what are they selling, and is it a prediction about me?”

§06 — What this does and does not claim

It does not claim every car spies on everything always, that connected features are worthless, or that owners get nothing — many features are real and wanted, and §01’s P1 grants it. It does not claim the in-browser extractor in §02 is anything but a local demonstration: it sends nothing and keeps nothing. It alleges no illegality beyond the conduct a regulator has already found — and even there, the sanction was a consent order, not a finding of crime.

It claims this: a continuous data-extraction relation is sold under the vocabulary of ownership; the word “own” is made to carry an authority over the relation that the buyer does not have; the harvested data is sold downstream to brokers and insurers; and where a regulator read the relation instead of the brochure, it found that the consent was never informed. You bought the vehicle. The vehicle studies the buyer.

Counter: the honest test is the network call. Show a connected car that derives your profile and keeps it on the device — as this page does — and the word “own” comes true. Until then, it is the wash.

§07 — The asset, named

Strip it to the structure. No villain is required and only one is named, by a regulator. A manufacturer sells a possession. A telematics feature, enrolled through a screen the buyer skims, extracts precise location and behaviour. A data broker buys it; an insurer prices on it. Each step is ordinary and, mostly, lawful — and the integration is a person who paid to be profiled, named the owner of the very instrument pointed at them. That is the definitional dodge run on the meaning of property: you hold the depreciating asset; the appreciating one — the behavioural profile — is held, and sold, by someone else.

This is the point the right-to-repair movement has been making from the other side of the same object. Its most visible advocate, repair-shop owner and campaigner Louis Rossmann, has spent years documenting the slow disappearance of ownership: products remotely disabled, functions revoked by a post-sale change to a licence agreement, hardware locked against the person who paid for it. His Consumer Rights Wiki catalogues exactly that — “post-sale EULA modifications and remote hardware disabling” — and in 2025 he turned the same lens on data, protesting the mining of customers’ information for sale to brokers. Where Zuboff names what is extracted, the repair movement names what is withheld: they are one relation seen from its two ends — you hold the object; someone else holds the control, and the data.verify

It sits beside Case 28’s role-inversion and Case 23’s data-power ratchet, and it answers the ad’s own slogan in its own words. Ownership isn’t possession; it’s participation — they meant it as a boast. When the next thing you “own” arrives wired to a sensor suite — a car, a doorbell, a watch, a television — read it against the extractor in §02. If the data stays on the device, the word “own” is true. If it is sold onward, you are not the owner. You are the asset.

You hold the asset that depreciates. Someone else holds — and sells — the one that appreciates: you.