TRUE CAR and ZAG Cyber Bandits, Parasites or Good for the Car Business?
Jim Ziegler asks...
I am hearing a lot of discussion about True Car and ZAG. I continually scratch my head and wonder if desperate dealers are doing the marketing limbo "How Low Can You Go?"
Are we so bad at what we do that we have to line up and pay vendors to lose money? AND, who is giving these people access to your data that is used against you?
Who owns these companies and what might be their ulterior motive? Sometimes I ask questions to which I already know the answer.
Am I wrong?
What do you think... JIM
Jim Ziegler's Guidance and Recommended Action Plan:
Ten Areas We Need to Concentrate on to Bring This Monster to It's Knees...
- Government investigation of ALL Data Aggregators taking consumer information from dealers' DMS. Sadly enough, dealers who do business with TrueCar are exposed to liability charges. Cut off all access to unecessary data, no matter who takes it from the dealers DMS and make it illegal to "resell identifiable consumer data" and "transactional data".
- Educate Your Fellow Dealers; If anyone takes financial transactional data, they expose the dealer that allowed it to violations, especially if it is passed on to other vendors or shared.
- Educate Consumers to what they're doing with their information...
a. You buy a car from a dealer, do you really want your personal information, and maybe even your financial information, passed along and sold and shared by "God knows who?"
b. These People Charge the Dealer $300 which the dealers have to build into the deal
c. Your Privacy and the Security of your Information could theoretically compromise your identity if you do business a company that takes data from the dealership. - Educate Investors and potential investors they could possibly be mislead if anyone is telling them this is a safe investment because of all of the dealers pushing back, associations pushing back, and government regulators in many states coming after TrueCar's business model as NOT compliant, in some cases they're saying it is Not Legal.
- AMEX, USAA and all of their affiliates do not want the bad consumer relations this push back is creating with their members and customers.
- Cancel your dealership's Affilation with TrueCar. Tell people with TrueCar certificates that YOU don't honor TrueCar and you feel the company is NOT reputable. Educate consumers as to perceived data exposure if they buy from a TrueCar dealer. Make sure that each consumer knows that using TrueCar actually increases their vehicle cost by $300 to $400.
- Make the dealers selling at huge losses take all of those deals. Big problem right now is too many Nissan Dealers and others are taking huge losers to get the factory money. The TrueCar reverse-auction business model will continually push those numbers down until the factory money is non-existent. Consumers need to hear from many dealers, "We don't do TrueCar"
- Keep calling your National and State Dealer Associations demanding they get involved and stay involved... No excuses.
- Get the Manufacturers into the game. If GM, Ford, Toyota, and other majors change the rules about how we advertise and do business to protect the dealers, we can cut off their ability to set pricing. So keep it up at every dealer meeting. Call your Dealer Council Members and protest to your factory reps. Tell the manufacturers, if they want showroom and facility improvements, we need the ability to make fair profits.
- Tell everyone you know. Educate other dealers and industry people. Watch the Painter interviews... I believe this is the first time a vendor has publicly announced they intend to bring down the dealers and hijack our business, taking our profits and starving us out with our own data. Painter has said manufacturers and dealers should go bankrupt and he, in his God-like way "will control distribution..."
When the TrueCar-Yahoo Deal kicks in we need to stand firm and "Just Say No" we don't honor TrueCar deals.
Read this article as a reference: http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F20110831%2FFIN...
AND, if you doubt the mission... read this... http://www.zag.com/websiteASSETS/whitepapers/ZAG-WhitePaper3.pdf
Comment
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Comment by Stick Bogart on February 16, 2012 at 10:41am -
In these days your private information like your address, your buying hobbits, your banking info such as your account numbers and your social security number all should be very well protected, There is a company called Truecar that brings or trys to lead car buyers to dealers so this company called Truecar can get a bird dog fee up to $400. They contract with dealers across the country so they have more dealers to lead car buyers to, Not that you can't find a dealer on your own. Now lets chat about Privacy, YOUR PRIVACY.. What happens to your private info if you do business with a dealer and use Truecar. Truecar when they sign a c
Yeah Truecar does not charge you, the car buyer the fee of up to $400, but they charge the dealer that whacked fee. The dealer will then pass that fee on to you the car buyer. Then Truecar now has access to your private info. Now will they SHOW YOU what they do with your info ? I tha not. I am willing to bet that your PRIVATE INFO will be sold TIME and TIME AGAIN.................................. Good Luck using Truecar.
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Comment by Stick Bogart on February 16, 2012 at 10:40am
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In these days your private information like your address, your buying hobbits, your banking info such as your account numbers and your social security number all should be very well protected, There is a company called Truecar that brings or trys to lead car buyers to dealers so this company called Truecar can get a bird dog fee up to $400. They contract with dealers across the country so they have more dealers to lead car buyers to, Not that you can't find a dealer on your own. Now lets chat about Privacy, YOUR PRIVACY.. What happens to your private info if you do business with a dealer and use Truecar. Truecar when they sign a c
Yeah Truecar does not charge you, the car buyer the fee of up to $400, but they charge the dealer that whacked fee. The dealer will then pass that fee on to you the car buyer. Then Truecar now has access to your private info. Now will they SHOW YOU what they do with your info ? I tha not. I am willing to bet that your PRIVATE INFO will be sold TIME and TIME AGAIN.................................. Good Luck using Truecar.
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Comment by Thomas A. Kelly on February 16, 2012 at 5:49am
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Look at "scraps" of info as pixels... the more pixels you assemble in the correct order the clearer the PICTURE becomes of who you are looking at. They do not need every pixel to determine everything they need for a definitive match. Their software rates every scrap of info and assigns a value.... all in an instant, what was never intended to be seen (known) by the well intended keeper of the data (us) becomes clearly identifiable. TrueCar and others have hidden behind carefully selected words like... "we don't", but they never say "we never have" or that their affiliates, partners, or others that they contract with "do not", or "have not" or "will not"...each time one of us close in on these details and ask for an answer they disappear from the forums, all of a sudden they "get busy"...they hit and run....each and every time. Downstream affiliations are at work here I suspect and it is time for the affiliations to be exposed. The Data Bank is being robbed. TrueCar is waiting outside in the get away car. Because they are not standing at the window with the gun, they claim they are not robbing the bank. We need to frame tough questions and get straight answers. STOP THE DATA LEAKS. .
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@ Keith.....so very true.
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Comment by David Ruggles on February 15, 2012 at 11:20pm
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I really don't need to know or understand all of the particulars about whether or not TrueCar/Zag poaches information from a Dealer's DMS to know that Scott Painter is on public record that he believes Dealers and their sales people ARE the "bad guys" and an unnecessary link in the distribution chain. Michael Dell made a similar statement, and I have NEVER bought anything from Dell. JD Power made a similar comment and had to sell his company. He didn't even attend his own company's hospitality reception at NADA shortly after he made the statement.
Then there is the curious case of Steve Girsky. Not only did he address a number of Dealers at NADA a few years back, he was the driver of selling the "Toyota High Through Put" model to President Obama and the Auto Task Force, which resulted in the Dealer terminations. So where is he now? Vice Chairman of the new GM.
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Comment by James A. Ziegler on February 15, 2012 at 11:19pm
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Michael tries to tell me TrueCar hasn't hired a PR Firm to spin their lies.... Then what is this...
http://www.prweekus.com/pages/login.aspx?returl=%2Ftruecar-selects-...
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TrueCar first, the rest will fall like dominoes....
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Comment by David T. Gould on February 15, 2012 at 11:04pm
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Jim, I know this is not likely to happen, but could we (you) forget about TrueCar just for say (24 hours). In that time give an honest attempt at communicating with informed individuals in our business about George O'Sullivan's post.
If he (I agree strongly with him) is correct, we (you) can chop the head of this snake in one shot.
TrueCar, all of them... ONE SHOT.
I believe I recall Keith saying in a past post Kill the data, Kill the monster or something similar. (I will remove this if I am incorrect)
I will volunteer, here and now, to speak with individuals who are looking for a similar solution. DTG
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Jim, Do you just want to fight with TrueCar? I am confident that based on information from this thread that there are a LOT of other culprits taking advantage of auto dealerships and their customers data.
I would prefer that George's comment not get pushed off the front of this post by the rehashing of known facts. Re-Posted: (again)
Comment by George O'Sullivan 2 hours ago
Due directly to the conversations here and other sites. We recently ran security checks and found one of the very few companies that we allow access to our DMS, downloading info they had no need for. After cutting them off, and investigating we discovered that:
A. They had subcontracted out the data extraction to a third party.
B. Our contract was pretty specific about what information the company that we contracted with could extract.
C. The third party company that was extracting the data was pulling all the data they could.
When we contacted the company we were contracted with, they claim they are only getting the data we contracted with them for. (Probably true). When we contracted the Data Pulling company, they claimed they just used standard reports and only passed along the data that was required. When asked what they did with the rest of our data they said nothing, it is held for 30 days and then deleted. (Most likely not true).
Here was the key issue, we told the primary company what they could take, but we do not have a contract with the company that actually dialed into our database!!! This was our fault, the contract allowed for 3rd parties. The loophole is that since the third party company that dialed in passed along only the information that was contracted the contract was not violated. And as long as not of the Personal identifiable information isn't passed along to anyone they will not violate the agreement.
However, now a large chunk of our recent deal data sits on the server of a company that we do not have a contract with. Though they cannot use the PII everything else is there, and the loopholes are big enough to drive a truck through. They assured us they would never pass any data along without permission, that we should just trust them, they are a big company and do this for lots of dealers. I have never known a large company to take extra time to do something repeatedly, and take up resources without a payoff. But, they are learning the "Scott Painter" wink and nod.
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Michael tries to tell me TrueCar hasn't hired a PR Firm to spin their lies.... Then what is this...
http://www.prweekus.com/pages/login.aspx?returl=%2Ftruecar-selects-...
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