Given the widespread public backlash over OnStar's plan to keep tracking people after they'd canceled their service -- and to potentially sell aggregate info to advertisers -- it appears that OnStar did what many people expected and backed away from the plan. It may have helped that a bunch of Senators had raised some questions about the legality of the move in the first place. The new plan will leave tracking as an option, but only on an opt-in basis, rather than an opt-out basis. As OnStar's President explained it, "We realize that our proposed amendments did not satisfy our subscribers." That's PR-speak for "we totally screwed up."

GM subsidiary OnStar is apparently alerting its customers that even if they decide to cancel their service in the future, OnStar will still track information about them -- and, of course, potentially sell that data.

“What’s changed [is that if] you want to cancel your OnStar service, we are going to maintain a two-way connection to your vehicle unless the customer says otherwise.”

OnStar is spinning this as a plan to make it "easier to re-enroll" as a customer, but it also seems to admit that there's demand out there for the data that OnStar collects, so it has plenty of incentive to get more such data, even from non-customers. Of course, they don't even seem to acknowledge the creepiness factor of canceling a service, and then still having that service track your every move.

Way back in 2003, there was some discussion around the idea of having a "remote stop" feature on car telematics systems, in case a car gets stolen. There were some serious worries about how this could make things dangerous for other drivers on the road, but two years ago, OnStar enabled just such a service, and now we've heard about it being used on a carjacked car. OnStar "disabled the gas pedal," remotely, thus forcing the car to slow down, and allowing the cops to catch the carjacker (after he fell into a pool while running from the cops). While effective in helping to catch this guy, you still have to wonder about the safety of remotely stopping a car like that.

GM continues to expand the features of its popular OnStar system with a new service that's been talked about for years, that would allow the company to automatically stop a stolen car remotely. The last time we spoke about such a concept, it was four years ago -- and there were a lot of people worried about the idea. However, that may have been because it was the police asking for the right to stop cars remotely, rather than an individual using a private service (and they were also interested in using it to control speeders). In this case, the service would first alert the car thief that it's known they're driving a stolen car (and potentially that the police are on their way), and that OnStar is about to stop the automobile. It would then slowly halt the car -- though the driver could stop the car themselves at any time. The police apparently are excited about the possibility of this ending some high speed chases (and certainly making it easier to retrieve the car), but you have to wonder what happens if the service is hacked or malfunctioned.