OnStar not always invited along

OnStar, General Motors' GPS eye in the sky, has seen the light. On Tuesday the company backed off an outrageous plan to continue tracking former customers' vehicles, and collecting data on their whereabouts and driving habits, even after they canceled the service.

Opposition to the intrusive plan -- including from among OnStar's 6 million customers and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) -- prompted the company to abandon it before it began.

The episode demonstrates that the public is justifiably wary of the expanded ability technology gives companies and governments to snoop into our lives. Many people voluntarily share all sorts of information via social networks and global positioning systems, but our privacy should still be protected from unbidden intrusions.

The OnStar plan was particularly egregious because it involved tracking things such as speed, location and driver seat-belt usage in vehicles whose owners no longer had a business relationship with the company. Former customers would have had to explicitly ask for the connection to be shut off. And OnStar reserved the right to sell the information it amassed to other companies. It said the aggregated data would be anonymous, but that would have been difficult to guarantee.

OnStar now says it will continue to collect data only if a former customer expressly asks it to. That opt-in arrangement is the right way to go.