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 Michael Paulson on January 16, 2012 at 9:38am
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"TrueCar says shoppers last year bought about 235,000 vehicles through the Web site from 5,200 dealer franchises.
Last week TrueCar reported 4,200 franchises."
Great Job! Down 1000 dealerships now!
"If a discount of, say, $2,000 below sticker is offered for a specific vehicle and that vehicle is not available at the dealership, TrueCar said the $2,000 discount would be available on any vehicle of the same nameplate."This shows how little understanding Scott Painter has of the way dealerships operate. Say you have a listing for a 2011 unit with a $6000 rebate on it. If you strip it down to invoice (say another $2000 off, that would be a dicount of $8000 and you would still be at invoice value. This is a very likely scenario. According to Painter's plan, this would mean that you can get $8000 off any vehicle of the same make? "$2,000 discount would be available on any vehicle of the same nameplate."
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Comment by Thomas A. Kelly on January 16, 2012 at 4:02am
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@ James, When you say: " I would hate to think USAA is sharing identifiable data, or any data for that reason with TrueCar." The tail end of that statement is the most important...Many people share UNIDENTIFIABLE data and think it is OK...But when a mountain of unidentifiable data is collected from many different sources then fed to the "secret sauce software"....the matches start falling into place and what was once scattered, innocent bits of unrelated, unidentifiable data becomes a clear picture of who bought what, where they bought it and what they paid, vin specific, and whether or not they wore clean boxers the morning they bought it.
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Comment by James A. Ziegler on January 15, 2012 at 10:16pm
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That's the point Scott, keep pulling threads and the sweater begins to unravel.... Step one is bringing everything into the daylight... Step two is bringing in the investigations...Step three is locking down the data.
You know Scott Painter at TrueCar said they get information from "Insurance Companies"
AND they have support, backing and a financial relationship with USAA.
USAA is handling the finances, insurance, even retirement and investment accounts of a lot of people, and mostly military. I would hate to think USAA is sharing identifiable data, or any data for that reason with TrueCar. Whether they are or not is only intelligent speculation scenario role play, I might be wrong so I won't say definitively yet.
Shouldn't that be investigated and brought into the sunlight if such a relationship were to actually exist?
The tentacles run deep in many directions. You are going to be surprised when it comes out on these blogs WHO is selling dealership data to hostile companies.
Right now I am asking questions, some of which I do know the answers already...some I do not. We are going to stack up a ton of documentary proof in coming weeks.
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Comment by SCOTT TYNER on January 15, 2012 at 7:53pm
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HomeNet joined TrueCar? My word! Is this true? And if you check out HomeNet's About Us Page you'll see that they are
"a wholly-owned subsidiary of Autotrader.com"
So if HomeNet partners with TrueCar and HomeNet is part of AutoTrader, what's that say for...oh I don't even wanna think of this!
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HomeNet Partnering with TrueCar, the ultimate Double-Cross, now we have to tel dealers to beware of both of them...
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I HAVE A NEW BLOG HERE, PLEASE GO IT AND POST TOO...DO NOT ABANDON THIS BLOG, BUT START THE NEW ONE WITH EMOTIONAL ZEST.
http://www.dealerelite.net/profiles/blogs/the-data-police-have-arrived
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IS HOMENET DOING BUSINESS WITH TRUECAR?
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Keeping our eye on TrueCar... it's time to broaden the focus.
If TrueCar is allowed to resume business in back into Virginia with a subscription-based model... THEN THERE IS NO NEED FOR THEM TO HAVE ACCESS TO THE DEALERS DATA OR DMS ACCESS.
Do all dealers pay TrueCar the same subscription rate? High-volume and low volume dealers alike?
Will they still be calling and sending dealers emails demanding they lower their prices?
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Interesting concept....."Data Laundering", Data Washing", from what I can gather, the U.S. has been slow to react to the concept so that it can take advantage of the process and gather info indirectly to get past the fourth amendment...
From: US gov't data-laundering: using corporate databases to get around p...
By Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/2010/01/25/us-govt-data-launder.html
“They are in the business of acquiring information, not from the information's originator (the first-party), nor from the information's anticipated recipient (the second-party), but from the unavoidable digital intermediaries that transmit and store the information (third-parties). These fourth-party companies act with impunity as they gather information that the government wants but would be unable to collect on leaks on Its own due to Fourth Amendment or statutory prohibitions.”
I can think of a private corporation or two who would also benefit from second, third, and fourth party data handlers….Kind of like washing a title, pass it around enough and sooner or later it will pop up clean….or…. the mortgage company scandal where they really don’t know where the mortgage originated because they get passed so often….or… you can just send the private info overseas if you are in a hurry. I am not an attorney. I am not accusing anyone or any corporation of anything in this post but rather exploring the possibilities of data leaks.
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"Insatiable hunger for data"...sound familiar?
I believe the following to be accurate. I am not an attorney.
“Offshoring” - personal data sent to low-cost labor markets by using companies internationally, originally done to lower costs.
The rightful owner of the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) does not have to be notified when it is sent outside of the country.
An intended benefit for data driven companies may be to re-access PII after it has been outside of the U.S.
Protection against identity theft through U.S. laws ceases to exist once PII is sent overseas.
Five questions I think we should have answers to before contracting with a vendor who will have access to our customers data:
- Has the vendor/service provider, parent company or any subsidiaries suffered any breaches in data privacy or data security involving PII in the last 5 years?
- Does the vendor/service provider, parent company or any subsidiaries “offshore” (send outside of the United States) PII data to a foreign land to be processed in any way beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. Privacy laws?
- Does the vendor/service provider, parent company or any subsidiaries repurpose (convert for use as another format or product) PII data for other uses such as marketing purposes?
- Does the vendor/service provider, parent company or any subsidiaries resell PII to skip tracers, collection agencies, lawyers, or marketing lists?
- Does the parent company or any subsidiaries of the vendor/service provider resell information for marketing purposes or sell information for profit?
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