Today, I want to conclude my mini-series around the new AEMP/AEM Telematics Standard with a few thoughts on the ownership of the generated telematics data. These thoughts are not specific to the standard but touch on telematics and its data in general.

I hope you enjoyed what kind of exciting conclusions can be drawn from only a few data points and came up with some more ideas. But a mandatory perquisite is that the data are uploaded into the Internet. More specific often uploaded to servers operated by the machine manufactures. This does not change with the new telematics standard. So, this might raise at least two concerns. Firstly, a general concern that someone (malicious) externally hacks the servers and steals data. Secondly, I heard a few times that contractors might get concerned that the telematics data are used against them. For example, there might be concerns that using the machine at or above specification might lead to a loss of guarantee.

I want to focus on the concern that the data might be used by manufactures and dealers. Contractors are not the only ones with this concern, Farmers are also concerned and there are issues around data ownership (including privacy) in the car industry and the related insurance industry, which holds back the creation of sustainable offerings. Caterpillar’s CEO Mr. Oberhelman mentioned in an interview that “'the sky’s the limit on the availability of that data and how we all use it, but the benefit has to be the customer'”. I might be hyper-aware, but his statement could be understood in such a way that it does not ease the concerns around the data use.

To be fair, I think Mr. Oberhelman statement is driven by his wish to generate benefits to his customers. In general, the interest from manufactures, dealers and rental companies is understandable. For example, manufactures can learn how their machines are used in real working conditions and use this knowledge to design better machines. Another often cited example is that dealers and manufactures can help their customers with preemptive or proactive maintenance. As they get operating data from machines, they can predict a component failure (even if it is hasn’t reached any limit yet) and schedule maintenance, which reduces unpredicted (and therefore often costly) machine downtime.

On a side note, telematics build a direct relationship between machine owners and manufactures. Before there was often only a relationship between the dealer and the machine owner. So there might be even concerns from dealers that they are left out or in this case left out with data.

I believe, it is a very interesting question whether the concerns outweigh possible benefits from sharing the data and I assume that every machine or fleet owner has to find its own personal answer. As shown, there are benefits and potential drawback for both options. A possible way is implemented by John Deere (and other companies), which allow machine owners to opt-out to share their data.

One final thought towards the future. In 2014 a bill has been introduced into the Senate of California requiring car manufactures to allow owners to see what data their cars generates and decide with whom they want to share the information. Actually, owner could decide to store the data on a 3rd party server. This bill is heavily opposed and it is in the car industry, but it shows that legislation tries to catch-up. So, maybe something like this will become standard for the construction industry as well in the future.

So, what do you think, who owns the data?