As the world watched as the United States decided who would become the next leader of the free world, Massachusetts also voted on a less guarded but very important proposal: Maintained.

Question 1 passed with a resounding 74.9% of the vote, a celebrated victory for consumer rights advocates and a bitter defeat for automakers and some supporters of data security.

The right to repair is the notion and movement to ensure that consumers have the ability to repair and modify things they have purchased on their own or through a repair shop of their choice. In Massachusetts, the law primarily concerns auto repair.

In 2013, Massachusetts passed a Motor Vehicle Repair Right Act that gave independent repair shops the same access as dealerships to vehicle information used to diagnose and ultimately repair problems. This law ultimately resulted in a national standard.

However, the 2013 law left out wireless telematics data – real-time updates from various sensors in a car that transmit data to manufacturers’ private servers, such as Rob Stumpf explains in The Drive.

This data was previously delivered through physical ports that individuals and repair shops could access, but as cars have become more computerized, more data is sent wirelessly to owner-dealers and no one else.

In 2019, the number of vehicles with telematics data worldwide reached $ 28.5 million, an industry that McKinsey says will grow to a $ 750 billion industry by 2030.

“Eight years ago, [telematics was used for] a little more than OnStar. Here we are in 2020 and the telematics platform is used for daily repairs and reports, ”says Glenn Wilder of Wilder Brothers Tires along the Boston coast in North Scituate, Massachusetts. “It puts independent repairers at a disadvantage not being in this loop,” he says.

Wilder sees the adoption of Question 1 as a victory for small businesses like his and for consumers.

“It’s honestly basic economics,” says Tommy Hickey, now director of Massachusetts Right to Repair Coalition after serving as a local coordinator in the years leading up to the 2013 law.

If there are no independent repairs, people are forced to go to dealerships and when there is only one option, convenience decreases and prices rise. Ensuring that independent repairers are allowed to evolve as cars evolve is of the utmost importance, otherwise [automakers] circumvent a law passed by voters 86 percent, ”Hickey says, referring to the original 2013 question.

It’s also good for small businesses. In 2020, there were approximately 233,400 repair shops in the United States, an increase of 1.7% over the previous year.

Adopting Question 1 requires that, by model year 2022, manufacturers who sell vehicles with telematics systems in Massachusetts equip them with a standardized open data platform. It is this platform that makes vehicle data directly accessible to owners and independent repairers, giving them the ability to extract important mechanical data and perform diagnostics.

This applies to some members of the data security community, like Bryan Reimer of MIT. He is concerned about data security – the central argument of one of Question 1’s staunchest opponents, the Coalition for Safe and Secure Data, supported by donations from manufacturers like Toyota and Ford.

“We are talking about very complex mechanical and software systems that can no longer be separated from the fundamental safety of vehicles,” he says. Reimer wonders where the responsibility will lie when repairs impact safety – who is responsible if a repair causes a safety component to malfunction? – as well as all the vulnerabilities that the process of transferring data in independent repair shops could open to hacking. An October report from The Tufts Center for State Policy Analysis has found that data privacy concerns are minimal until location data and personal information fall into the categories of data that the law requires of automakers.

Ultimately, Reimer sees the issue more as a lack of enforcement of the 2013 law when it comes to violators like Tesla rather than a need to change what’s written.

Meanwhile, voters in Massachusetts have given themselves the drive equivalent of the option to choose a cheaper, unbranded iPhone cord to charge your phone and transfer its contents rather than paying the premium for an Apple cord.

“The idea that your local repairman is going to use your data for bad purposes is not well conceived. Right now the dealership has all of this information. Who do you trust the most – a dealership or your local guy who knows your name and who you are? “Wilder wonders.