An article in the Wall Street Journal (June 1, 2011) describes the use of electronic monitoring of heavy equipment (bulldozers, dump trucks etc) to decrease costs.  One contractor claims that his excavators were idling 48 % of the time in use as against an average of 35 % across contractors. Brining the idling in line with the average is estimated to generate savings in fuel, depreciation and operating costs of $ 50 K to $ 100 K per year.   The revenues associated with electronic tracking of fleets is estimated to be $ 2 billion a year.  Manufacturers like Caterpillar claim that such on line tracking can be used to adjust designs of fuel tanks and plan for parts demand.  Should such online tracking and associated savings be monitored by the user or the manufacturer ?  Should the use be “paid” for the data by the manufacturer or is the manufacturer aggregation of average performance across customers the useful data for the user ? Can insurance companies use this data to write better policies for users ?