13 ms·

To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology

168 points by mcone 3y ago

two2two 3y ago
"Among other things..." Like speeding? Like traffic-light cameras, this will result in unintended consequences at scale. But hey, more data!
aidenn0 3y ago
It feels to me more and more like you need to be rich to afford living without bartering away your personal information. I'm getting to be middle aged now, and have noticed a fatalistic attitude towards this by gen Z; kind of "it's impossible to maintain privacy, so I might as well milk my loss of privacy for all it's worth." And I'm wondering now if that's not completely correct.
- Casteil 3y ago
  Frankly, it's exhausting to try keep your life private. The sheer number of different ways your privacy can be violated via modern cars, phones, computers, social media, surveillance/facial recognition, IoT devices (including 'smart' TVs), etc. is quite staggering. Definitely seems like a losing battle. My retirement plan is a remote cabin in the woods.
  - eptcyka 3y ago
    Not only exhausting, it's also damaging one's social life, since preserving privacy is often making one the odd one out.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- javajosh 3y ago
  It may appear that way, but even privacy-for-profit schemes are illusory. The devices still send the data, it is still collated. Eventually this will effect the elites personally and negatively, someone will slip up with their parallel construction, and then we'll see real change in the US. Sadly, not before then.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  No you can just get a cheaper car. You can get one for like $5k and the insurance won't be a lot. Just get minimums.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    Do cheaper cars really lead to lower liability premiums?
    - renewiltord 3y ago
      No, you have to pay those anyway. But it will lower the total spend and so you'll have money available to pay them. You don't have to be rich or anything. I live in San Francisco, and insurance for my Subaru Forester costs me $1.2k/yr and I have comprehensive coverage. So if someone were to buy a $10k car and instead chose a $5k car, it'll be as if insurance were cut to $700/year for the next 10 years! If you value your privacy, that's a solution.
      - louthy 3y ago
        > I live in San Francisco, and insurance for my Subaru Forester costs me $1.2k/yr and I have comprehensive coverage Wow, that’s crazy high. In the UK my Porsche 911 (992) is cheaper to insure than that! (Without an insurance tracker) Anyone know if US insurance generally much higher (than other comparative nations)? Or is SF an anomaly?
        aidenn0 3y ago
        I have comprehensive insurance for my car and it's about $850/yr. I'm also in California, but not near SF.
        renewiltord 3y ago
        About $868 of that is for "Comprehensive" and "Collision" coverage, if it helps. It's possible it's just me, though. I've crashed my car once, and been hit on my motorcycle. In general, given that, I would assume it's more because of that than in general since I'm obviously a high risk driver. When I set my address from San Jose to San Francisco (I used to store the car at my friend's) it went up $200/yr so that's the SF premium for Geico at least. How much do you pay?
- rkagerer 3y ago
  Even if you're rich it's difficult.
- Hermitian909 3y ago
  It's true, and it's not great, but I think the flip side of this is that as I get older I find myself increasingly paying for the anti-social behavior of others. There are lot of nice customer service things that are only possible if people don't abuse them: solid warranty/return programs, high quality phone reps, etc. But you need people who adhere to the social contract, the kind of people who don't, say, buy a $3,000 TV for a single super bowl party and then return it. I actually desperately want some way to tell many of these companies "I am a responsible human being who respects social contracts" - all solutions I can think of violate my privacy but we'll find out what's worse...
  - don-code 3y ago
    Is respect for social contracts really all that's necessary? I don't see it as adversarial, so much as I see it as "normal _and_..." for many vendors. For instance, even if I could buy a TV and then return it for free, why not return it and charge a fee? Most people are willing to pay the fee, even if they wouldn't return it, so what's the incentive for any vendor to not charge the fee?
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Because they really don't like the TV for some reason/ Or an expensive purchase that should last for years falls apart after 9 months? Leaches who have made many companies cut back on generous return policies with "my ten year old coat is worn out, replace it" are basically turds who make life worse for other people. ADDED: Furthermore, research has has shown (e.g late pickups at daycare) that when you add a fee to an anti-social behavior it can actually make the behavior more likely because it's now a transactional activity.
      - Gordonjcp 3y ago
        > (e.g late pickups at daycare) I've often wondered how well it would work if you went "right well, if you pick them up 15 minutes late today, you've got to pick them up 15 minutes early tomorrow", or "... drop them off 15 minutes late tomorrow".
- RajT88 3y ago
  I think for the most part, you can't really monetize your own data. You can just trade it away for "free" services. Unless I've missed something... Sidebar: The government is buying all your data from data brokers. We should all collectively submit FOIA requests to get copies of it, to create an undue burden on them doing so. Maybe they'll scale it back.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  think of it more like the Hunger Games and all behaviors are explained
- NotYourLawyer 3y ago
  I’m reasonably rich and would pay good money not to be tracked. It’s not really an option.
  - hysan 3y ago
    I’ve started seeing ads for companies that try to get your data removed from sites and data broker.[1] I don’t know how effective they are but we’ve reached an age where there is a clear market for privacy. That feels very dystopian. [1] https://incogni.com/ https://incogni.com/
    - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
      I’ve heard of this one too. I’m too cynical to believe it’s legit though.
    - GrinningFool 3y ago
      ... which on its home page tracks to google analytics, tag manager, and the payment services provider paddle.
- abhayhegde 3y ago
  I hate how true this is! A case in point is also apps like Ibotta or Fetch which reward you based on your shopping data. Sell your shopping patterns, earn money! Rich can protect their privacy.
  - topposter32 3y ago
    You are also describing credit cards. That's the trade you made to get a 1-2% reward.
  - marvin 3y ago
    It makes sense that one's privacy is a valuable asset one can sell.
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  Even if you were to pay the fee or drive a gas car, or you pay for the 'better' insurance to not be tracked, your movements are still recorded everywhere with ALPR cameras.
  - uoaei 3y ago
    If not your car itself.
- vGPU 3y ago
  But at the same time, I feel like this creates opportunities for enterprising individuals. How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost? Of course, I’d much rather prefer that stuff like this didn’t exist to start with. The older I get the less patience I have for messing with this junk. All of my cars are now idiot-cars thanks to the death of 3g, and I pull antennas and SIM cards ever since the onstar eavesdropping scandal.
  - NoraCodes 3y ago
    > How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost? Wouldn't that be fraud?
  - helsinkiandrew 3y ago
    > How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost? A lot of the monitors for older cars (that don't have 'tracking' built in) just plug into the cars OBD2 port and the CAN bus data - and is extremely hackable by anyone thats used an Arduino. It would be much harder to interfere if the monitor is wired in or using its own GPS to monitor speed and distance travelled though. https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/01/15/researcher-says-progressive-insurance-dongle-totally-insecure/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/01/15/resea...
  - astura 3y ago
    Insurance fraud is a crime. Not only that, but insurance companies don't cover claims when the policy was obtained by fraud.
- ssss11 3y ago
  I think the people who say “the public doesn’t care about privacy” are either completely ignoring the fact that most people will give it up if it means the product is cheaper (because, financial survival) or they are deliberately pushing the agenda.
- bmj 3y ago
  My auto insurance provider (in the US) has never even offered such a tracking program to me (and I know my current rates are pretty reasonable/in line with other companies). Maybe it's because of my history with the provider (I'm 50 and they've been covering me since I was 16)?
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  And if you are rich, you don't actually get privacy, just the illusion of it. I have dumb electronics that are way less intrusive than their luxury versions.
pbj1968 3y ago
To make money, people agree to sit at a desk nine hours a day. Water wet.
AnAnonymousDude 3y ago
Recently were shopping insurance providers for our brick and mortar business that has a few delivery vehicles, and MANY of the commercial insurers are requiring that their apps be used to monitor employee driving behavior. I hadn't shopped for insurance in quite awhile and was shocked at how prevalent this requirement seemed to be.
- bsder 3y ago
  I'm kind of torn on this. On the one hand, I hate the intrusiveness, that's a huge minus. On the other hand, commercial drivers are subject to all kinds of perverse business incentives--too many hours driving, poorly maintained fleets, etc.--and if the insurance companies can stamp those out, that's a plus.
- luma 3y ago
  Nearly all CDLs in the US are operating with an ELB of some sort and have been for a while now. Trucking is a different world.
mholt 3y ago
Utah views EV drivers as tax evaders because they don't buy gas. So they have a "deal" for EV drivers: pay an exorbitant registration fee (hundreds more than other vehicles) or install an OBD device in your car and carry a surveillance app to be charged for how much your vehicle is driven [0]. The measurement route requires 2 separate accounts with 3rd parties, one of which has your payment information on file. Given that states can't even get voting right [1], this is not the future I wanted. (Plus, we should be incentivizing EV purchases at this stage, not punishing them.) (Heck, they put my marriage license on a blockchain for some dumb reason. I didn't even want it on a blockchain!) [0]: https://roadusagecharge.utah.gov/ https://roadusagecharge.utah.gov/ [1]: Basically anything by https://twitter.com/jhalderm https://twitter.com/jhalderm
- throwaway1777 3y ago
  That actually kinda makes sense. EVs should pay their share to use the roads too.
  - loeg 3y ago
    (Gas taxes are a relatively small fraction of roads funding, for what it's worth.)
    - kbenson 3y ago
      I'd be interested in seeing the numbers, and how they slice it up (whether they're completely treating federal roads separately or using it for the total, etc), as at $0.364 per gallon in Utah, it seems like it results in a large amount to put towards funding something, so it would be interesting to track where it's going.
      - loeg 3y ago
        Utah’s cent per mile program treats all roads the same, including roads outside of the state.
        3y ago
throwaway1777 3y ago
Old news tbh
- andersrs 3y ago
  Yes. 5-7 years ago I used to work for a vehicle telemetry SaaS company. It was explained to me that most of the Brazil market was for govt mandated tracking.
celeritascelery 3y ago
A few years ago our insurance would give us a discount if we added a small monitoring device to the car for 2 months. We agreed and at the end of the time we mailed it back to them. Now we have switched companies and the new one doesn’t have a discreet device, but instead want me to install an app that has 24 hour access to my location on my phone. That was too much for me. So instead a bought the cheapest android phone I could find, and installed the app on that and left it in the car.
- troupe 3y ago
  Did it give you any significant discount? A few people I know that did something similar ended up saving $2 per year. If you bought a phone I'm guessing your discount was much higher.
  - celeritascelery 3y ago
    it saved me about $30 a month.
phkahler 3y ago
First it's a discount. Then it's a penalty for not playing. Then it's just everyone.
oatmeal1 3y ago
This is one of the least bad invasions of privacy I've seen. It shifts the burden of insurance premiums more towards those likely to cause accidents, and incentivizes people to minimize dangerous behavior behind the wheel. There are actual benefits to responsible people, and to society at large, which is not something you frequently see with invasion of privacy.
- clumsysmurf 3y ago
  Probably safe to assume that this feed will be sold to Lexis Nexis or Acxiom, etc. From there, who know how it will be used for or against you in whatever sphere of life, at whatever time.
  - WirelessGigabit 3y ago
    That would be problematic when the system is linked to a car and not the driver.
    - rationalist 3y ago
      Just like tracking is linked to a phone and not its owner.
- imgabe 3y ago
  Assuming the data is only ever used for its stated purpose and not anything else…
  - oatmeal1 3y ago
    The data collected here is just as likely to be misused as data that's collected that doesn't lead to any societal benefits.
  - don-code 3y ago
    The data doesn't need to be used now, today, for this purpose. What happens when an insurance company foists a new privacy policy on you, the insured, saying that it'll be using back data that it's collected for new purposes? To my knowledge, there are no laws on the books in the US that prevent that kind of behavior (ex-post-facto only applies to the legal system), and I'd imagine few would change insurance providers because of a privacy policy change.
samtho 3y ago
This reads like an article from /r/ABoringDystopia that showcases, among other things, technology that was suppose to improve people’s lives is actively weaponized against them. What worries about this from a consumer level is that the insurance companies are not required to disregard old data. If you got a speeding ticket or other minor infraction, it will eventually drop off of your driving record as far as your insurance is concerned. Which makes sense and seems more fair because you are not necessarily the same driver you were two years ago. My concern is that they will keep this data in the aggregate and indefinitely penalize drivers with insurance rates that don’t actually reflect their present risk during a policy term.
- don-code 3y ago
  Massachusetts has a concept of "managed competition" to avoid exactly this: http://www.mass.gov/doc/autoinsuranceexecsummarypdf/download http://www.mass.gov/doc/autoinsuranceexecsummarypdf/download
nimih 3y ago
The headline seems quite disingenuous when the article is based on a study that puts the adoption rate of these surveillance technologies at around 14%.
don-code 3y ago
How do these apps work, in practice? The article states: > If you’re at the wheel focused on the road, but someone in the passenger seat is changing the music on your phone, the app may think it’s observing distracted driving and count it against you. Is the app running on the car, or on the user's phone, which somehow detects that the user is driving a car? Is there some way that a paired phone (Bluetooth - or maybe this is a feature of CarPlay / Android Auto) can tell a car that it's being used?
- jagged-chisel 3y ago
  State Farm sends a Bluetooth beacon that you pair with your phone. Each car gets a beacon. Whichever beacon is closest is the car you’re in. The app on the phone uses gps and accelerometer data to determine driving behavior. Presumably the stream of data is sent to the insurance company at some point.
  - mikro2nd 3y ago
    And if you don't have a phone?
    - hippari2 3y ago
      I don't think this works anymore, COVID tracking apps basically said fyou if you don't have a smartphone, or even when your phone is old enough that the app doesn't work.
sramam 3y ago
I'm a holdout on this tech for privacy reasons. Wonder how self-incriminating that is - at some tipping point of adoption, not opting in becomes THE negative signal. Outside regulation to limit retention and prevent misuse of data is there even a longer term option here? Perhaps I should capitulate early and save more money.
menus 3y ago
I cannot find the source but I recall reading that telematics insurance causes more incidents as it makes drivers afraid of braking hard, knowing that any maneuver by you to avoid a deranged driver is counted against you. I can only find anecdotal references https://www.quora.com/Does-Progressive-Auto-insurance-actually-want-me-to-wreck-That-snapshot-GPS-device-beeps-every-time-I-hit-the-brake-to-avoid-hitting-the-drivers-who-pull-out-in-front-of-me https://www.quora.com/Does-Progressive-Auto-insurance-actual...
4rt 3y ago
This has been extremely common in the UK for about 10 years - especially for young drivers. I warned my nephew off it but sure enough, he took the £200 (£1400 to £1200) discount on insurance. His insurance was cancelled because they say he did over 35mph in a 30 zone, so now his insurance premiums are £2000+ because he has to declare he has a history of having an insurance policy cancelled.
- switch007 3y ago
  Damn that is shady as hell. Enticing with a small discount then boom, guaranteed increased premiums for years. The big comparison websites are complicit too as they list those policies along the others in a table sorted by price, not making much of a deal about the risks etc and how different the policy is
thedougd 3y ago
In NC we have mandatory yearly safety inspections. To renew your registration you must pass inspection. It would be easy for them to use the odometer reading at the inspection to assess a road use tax. We do already pay a gas tax and a yearly property tax at the state and local level for cars plus a sales tax on new cars.
crmd 3y ago
When I tried this a few years ago, the unit beeped when it sensed braking or lane changes it didn’t like. It beeped constantly in the course of normal New York City defensive driving. I found myself running more than one red light to avoid the “hard braking” beep. It completely eliminated any enjoyment of the new car I sacrificed to save up for. After 3 months I was horrified to get an email with a list of time stamped infractions and an offer for a 15% reduction in my premium. Yeah, no. I switched to Geico, cut my premium in half, and vowed never to willingly trade surveillance for an insurance discount.
- schultzie 3y ago
  I had the same experience. The beeline that Progressive's snapshot device did actively encouraged worse driving behavior in a city. I could see it being more beneficial in rural communities where there's less erratic driver behavior, but in a major US city it was doing me no favors.
- Gordonjcp 3y ago
  We have similar devices on our vehicles at work. I can tell you that they don't work on Landrover Defenders, because they are reading about half way to "OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING" just sitting in the car park with the engine idling.
  - LanceH 3y ago
    They have a point. There is probably an expensive repaid coming on from sitting sitting in the car park idling.
    - Gordonjcp 3y ago
      I'm not sure how you'd get them from the car park to moving down the road without switching the ignition on. Is there some trick to going from a switched-off stationary vehicle to 30mph without some ramping up in between?
hysan 3y ago
Yup, I saw that offer with my auto-insurance provider and despite knowing how much data they’d be harvesting, I was still tempted to do it. Insurance just costs so much. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect driving record for almost 2 decades. Costs just slowly creep up just like everything else. It feels like we’re in a world where privacy and data ownership is a luxury reserved for the wealthy.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
It's starting to feel like Europe. In Belgium you couldn't drive a miles without being recorded on some ALPR camera. Speed cameras everywhere. And the current rage is average speed cameras. So they take your photo on an on-ramp and when you take the exit they'll calculate the average. Above the speed limit: ticket. With no way of facing your accuser in court. The machine said so...
- mixmastamyk 3y ago
  That’s a dystopia right there. Would quit my job before participating in that.
  - _trampeltier 3y ago
    Why is this comment downvoted? I think is pretty fair to say "I would quit my job before participating in that". More tech workers should say "NO" to so much BS today. Tech does give us so much good things, but we drive full speed into a new kind of slavery.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  I've heard about that for tunnels. Do you have a source for three on-ramp/off-ramp version?
- rpodraza 3y ago
  So you're claiming these are inaccurate? Do you have any other solutions for speeding? I think these are still much better solution than a device that tracks your location all the time.
  - trgn 3y ago
    Speed limiters on cars. Limiters on acceleration would be good too.
- thecopy 3y ago
  What is the problem? That you cannot break the law without consequence? Car-drivers have a strong sense of entitlement that i never have seen in other non-radical groups.
belval 3y ago
Is this considered new? In Canada I had an app on my phone for 100 days which tracked accelerations/break/speed. Sure it felt intrusive-ish, but the program was not mandatory so seems like a win-win. I got a 22% discount (got 96/100!) and now the app is off my phone. I would not recommend it if you don't live in the suburbs though. Slow and steady is the name of the game, ideally you want light traffic and mostly empty roads.
- skummetmaelk 3y ago
  Thanks for contributing to the dystopia for your own minor financial gain.
geitir 3y ago
hypothetically it’s pretty easy to fake the odb reader versions of these. Just buy a male to 2 female odb splitter, strip one and hook a 9 volt battery and usb charger to the power wires. Plug your device into your car and turn it on, wait for device to blink green, attach 9 volt and unplug, carry inside and plug in usb charger to the wall.
- getmeinrn 3y ago
  Might want to rethink posting about committing insurance fraud.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    They said "hypothetically" so they're good /s
    - getmeinrn 3y ago
      Ah, they edited it. Must be why I'm eating downvotes now :)
  - BeFlatXIII 3y ago
    Imagine a society where insurance fraud was so rampant that it regularly got jury nullified as normal behavior.
rektide 3y ago
I hate this but man am I tempted. I take my old car out for like 2k miles a year. I think of getting rid of it but it takes so little time & money to keep around, and it's great being able to do occasional road trips. Otherwise I'd totally get rid of it. Insurance is the biggest cost, but pretty cheap all-in-all. Given how little it's used, and given what a generally chill driver I am, I do think I deserve a better deal. Then again, it's old & I don't think it has OBD, so I'm probably not eligible anyways.
PlunderBunny 3y ago
Waiting for insurance companies to 'team up' and 'exploit synergies' with car companies to 'enhance revenue', so that this stuff it built in, and you don't get to turn it off.
Tade0 3y ago
My relative in the UK got a black box because insurance for beginner drivers is pretty high. Her summary is that punishing hard braking is counterproductive. Her relative also had it for three months, but after that the insurance company said he would be better off without it.
Lolaccount 3y ago
"For a small convenience, or a few pennies saved ... we'll give up our entire world".
RobotToaster 3y ago
We should start calling this stuff what it is, meatspace spyware.
otter-in-a-suit 3y ago
I've both worked on systems like that professionally and built some myself just for fun to play with GPS/geospatial data/streaming etc (fun tech). I'd _never_ want something like that installed in my vehicle. First off, you're usually relying on ODB-2 + GPS + usually some type of streaming backend, which means you're looking at 2 unreliable (or, at least, hard to _interpret_) sources of data delivered and presumably analyzed by a notoriously tricky delivery mechanism (near-real time streaming), which has a tendency to be too much to handle for the notoriously non-"tech" insurance world. The chances that data is being interpreted quite differently to what's happening on the road, but yet is treated as a source of truth for your premium model!, is certainly not zero. Even if you assume these companies handle all that properly (or outsource it), these data sets are some of the creepiest by their very nature - not only can you trivially determine somebody's home address by analyzing frequency of the reverse-geocoded data points (or any other geospatial features you derive), you can also determine any other patterns within a person's life - schedules, work location & employer, health habits (do they go to the gym or a bar? do they only ever leave to go to the grocery store?) etc., not to mention all the data ODB-2 gives you about actual driving behavior. And guess what, you can't use synthetic data for testing for much of this (I tried), so we would up testing these systems with real data, albeit with employees who volunteered. A home address is arguably not that sensitive, given that that is public record if you own your home and your insurance company has that data anyways, but the patterns + all the other metadata + all the "public" data that is out there ready for purchase about the average American, now you have something close to a personality profile that would make your average marketing exec (or, potentially, bad government actor) squeal in delight.
- louwrentius 3y ago
  How is this different from the phone in your pocket?
  - stravant 3y ago
    Value proposition. What are you going to do, _not_ walk around with a phone in your pocket?
whoomp12342 3y ago
no we dont. How about insurance figures out their own stuff
mercurialsolo 3y ago
This isn't new . We all agreed to be the product and give our data away for free product access .
jononomo 3y ago
All you people worried about privacy should consider the fact that every thought you have and dream you dream is recorded in your DNA and will be read out before the world when you stand in judgment before God.
programmertote 3y ago
I read a comment here saying that they didn't like Progressive Snapshot, so they switched to Geico and cut their rate in half. This is my most recent anecdote as a different experience. I was paying $620 (for 6 months) with Geico while letting them monitor my driving via my cell phone. The premium never went down although I had 110 scores in their EasyDrive app (In driving for over 11 years in the US, I never had an accident and never filed any claim car insurers; I always drive defensively and never got any ticket either). What I found was EasyDrive app is always punishing me for bad driving practices like running red light (again, the same experience some has mentioned here with Progressive) in fear of registering a hard-brake event; and worse, slowing down excessively to turn the corners (basically, surprising the cars behind me and risking them bumping into my car) because EasyDrive thinks ONLY IF you go below 15 mph then you are doing the cornering right. I guess these EasyDrive developers (or rule makers) never drove on a real road, and found that usually 20mph is the safe way to go about turning on the right corner. Regardless, I got 15% premium bump in the renewal despite having 110 EasyDrive score (I think Geico raised their premiums by a very high percentage in CA as well; I live in FL and have been using Geico for all the years I've been driving in the US). That pissed me off and I explored other options, and finally got Progressive for $570 for six months. The sacrifice I have to do for this lower rate is to subscribe to their Snapshot program. I used my phone and have been driving for over a month. The relief (good thing) about using Snapshot app is that it doesn't monitor your cornering score. However, like some mentioned here, it still promotes bad driving behavior like running yellow/red light in fear of hard-brakes. It also seems to be a bit proactive in determining what a hard-brake is (again, I'm using their phone app) because I registered 2 hard-brakes (the only two hard brakes that I have recorded so far in about 1.5 months of driving) on my grocery trip. I swear I didn't do any hard brakes (or maybe at most once) because I know the road pretty well and I usually do grocery runs in early mornings on weekends when there are very few cars on the road. I know I got much cheaper ($570 vs. $710) rate from Progressive now just because I am a new customer. I am pretty sure come next or next, next renewal, they'll jack up my premiums like what Geico did, and then I'll have to switch to yet another insurer like musical chair game. I wish that the car insurers actually have a more accurate, realistic, non-intrusive tech to monitor the driving habits (e.g., the ones who don't use turn signals when turning right/left or changing lanes, which really could cause accidents) and ACTUALLY give discounts to drivers like me who are very careful with their driving (plus, my wife and I drove a total of 6050 miles in the last year). This is all to say that the risk-reward distribution system with car insurance companies is still inefficient.
jonstewart 3y ago
A far better solution than historical GPS tracking by insurance companies (backed by bad/noisy) would be for cars to impose a hard +10% cap on speeding.
garphunkle 3y ago
I like to joke that as usage based insurance goes to infinity, we all become uninsured drivers... Each insurance company uses the telematics differently. While the pricing model is regulated, it is not public. There is a substantial difference company-to-company I think this is an instance of HN-confirmation bias. We all hate monitoring, so a study or article that says UBI and behavioral modification is harmful appeals to us.
SavageBeast 3y ago
A former girlfriend of mine came home one day with one of these devices plugged into her car. She was the kind of person who just said "yes" to whatever was on the form and she simply picked the lowest price option. My head immediately goes to the scenario where theres been some kind of an accident. Maybe it's a fender bender or maybe a pedestrian was hit. In one case you have a couple damaged cars and a deductible. In the other case you're facing down a manslaughter charge and even if you're not at fault it's going to ruin your life. So now imagine law enforcement has access to your cumulative driving habits/traits and the last 20 minutes of driving that day. Imagine the insurance company has processed that data for its own purpose and assigned some kind of (totally arbitrary and contrived) "aggressive" or "risk" rating to certain actions etc. Law enforcement now has a prepackaged report that will invariably say you're a terrible driver. Of course the data collected is going to say that as the insurance companies aren't in business to charge people LESS money. Now, whether or not you were or were not driving in a reckless manner, theres data to make a case with and nobody is perfect. That data may or may not reflect the reality of the situation and even so, prosecutors are known to take the easy route to boost their own stats. Now imagine a prosecutor looking for an easy win has a prepackaged report of biased information from the insurance company? This whole thing seems like a way to possibly save a trivial amount of money in exchange for an increased likelihood of Really Bad Things happening to you.
- ngc248 3y ago
  >>> save a trivial amount of money in exchange for an increased likelihood of Really Bad Things happening to you Nowadays, everything they come up with is like this.
- tokai 3y ago
  The only issue with your scenarios is that nobody will ever get in trouble for killing a pedestrian.
  - Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago
    That’s a disingenuous hot take. There’s a lot of discussion to be had about balancing Justice and societal/personal costs but you’ve gone and skipped past all of that.
Waterluvian 3y ago
I tried this with an app. They offered 2% off after a month of data collection. I called and turns out my insurance was already so “low” that 2% is the most it would have ever offered. I dunno about elsewhere but in Canada, insurance is like tech job salaries, the only real way to get the best deal is to change providers every few years.
- LanceH 3y ago
  > the only real way to get the best deal is to change providers every few years. I had Farmers for about 5 years in a row. It started off at $440/6months and ended up at $900/6months -- on the same two cars (comprehensive on only one of them). I tried calling them up and asking why my insurance was going up when the amount they were actually covering was going down due to depreciation. They avoided my calls and lost my business. Now I'm trying to deal with the legalities of having a child in college in another state, but no car.
- mr337 3y ago
  It is the same in USA as well. After about 2-3 years one needs to yearly check out competitive rates. I have a hunch that the risk is the longer they keep you the more likely to have an accident they have to pay out. So if you are a good customer, no claims for 3 years your engagement with them has been very profitable. If they keep you for another year and you have an claim then that engagement is unprofitable. Just a hunch as insurance math is complicated.
droopyEyelids 3y ago
I got this from Liberty Mutual and it was an awesome mutually beneficial agreement. Liberty Mutual only records your behavior for one quarter, and then gives you a discount for as long as you hold your policy. I ended up with a permanent 28% discount! It analyzes your driving based on four factors: total miles drive, how fast you accelerate and decelerate, and whether you drive in the wee hours. I found the temporary loss of privacy to be totally reasonable and an excellent tradeoff.
- trgn 3y ago
  Considerate driving should be rewarded. Great to see in action.
1231112315123 3y ago
My experience with telematics-enabled driving is quite positive. I'm saving 30% easily, simply by driving relaxed. I don't think I'm giving away much personal data: The insurance set up a separate legal entity that performs the ranking, with a easy-to-read EULA that rules out selling data. My insurance is using the Cambridge Mobile Telematics modules.
JTbane 3y ago
I wouldn't agree to these kinds of devices simply because they are cheap junk that can damage your car. https://www.kiro7.com/news/insurance-tracking-device-blamed-car-damage/82088181/ https://www.kiro7.com/news/insurance-tracking-device-blamed-...
hospitalJail 3y ago
Sounds good to me. Maybe they will see that highway speeds are too low and I get to save money. Although its going to be really awkward when they find out my home address and kid's daycare.
gwbas1c 3y ago
> Insurance companies may think you’re a higher-risk driver if you’re accelerating fast, braking aggressively, making sharp turns, using your phone while you drive, coming home at 3 a.m., taking dangerous roads or simply driving a lot. Is there any proof that any of these behaviors actually correlate with tangible risk? (I mean, I can understand that "simply driving a lot" increases risk.) Personally, I'd be more interested in cars with cameras using machine learning to build a risk profile of other cars. I'm not the only person who sees dangerous behavior all the time. It would be interesting if I could sell a stream from my cameras to a company that builds risk profiles based on observed behavior.
- elif 3y ago
  Anecdotally, when Tesla implemented safety score as a voluntary activity to unlock FSD, my gamer brain kicked in and couldn't not pursue a high score. The result is that I went from an extremely anxious and aggressive driver (which is 90% of american drivers) to completely ambivalent to my arrival time and obsessively approaching intersections cautiously and giving time for drivers that cut me off. I do think that a key component for success is near real-time feedback so it feels like a game and not a speeding ticket in the mail.
- asoneth 3y ago
  I have no idea whether the current telematics algorithms are any good at assessing risk. However, with a large enough corpus of training data including years of telematics on drivers with and without insurance claims it certainly seems like it should be possible to build models that can make much more accurate risk assessments than they can with the data they currently collect such as age, zipcode, and past accidents. Put another way, I would be surprised if there was zero correlation between driving behavior and insurance claims.
- LanceH 3y ago
  Casualty insurance companies just want the numbers, then to set the markup, then profit. They've filled out that elusive intermediate step. If it means finding a way to get a customer a discount then that's ok, as long as they have the customer. The biggest factor they can monitor is verifying miles driven. Miles driven, unsurprisingly, has a bigger impact than virtually anything else someone signing up to be monitored would be guilty of.
T3RMINATED 3y ago
[dead]
blackbear_ 3y ago
The only way I would even consider to have one of these things is if the insurance premium would be reduced proportionally to how much I (don't) drive. Only use the car on Sundays? Pay 1/7 of the price. But of course prices can only go up.
- zucked 3y ago
  I think you can get something similar to this nowadays even from the big insurance companies. I thought I remembered some startups doing micro-transaction insurance policies that started and ended with each new trip -- did some searching and found that Allstate has something similar: https://www.allstate.com/auto-insurance/milewise https://www.allstate.com/auto-insurance/milewise You pay a small retainer fee ($1.50/day) and then a per mileage fee. This requires the use of a logging device which also impacts your per-mile rate depending on your driving. I haven't dug into the nuts and bolts of this, but I wonder how well you are covered when the vehicle is not in motion - parked in garage, on the street, etc. At least in my area parking in public can be a risky option between the hit and runs, catalytic converter theft, break-in, etc.
nonethewiser 3y ago
Ever since covid and working remotely I drive about 20% of what I used to. I'm guessing this device wont recognize that and reduce my bill to 20% the original amount.
- 1231112315123 3y ago
  My insurer's app sometimes complains I drive too few to determine my driving style, hence, cannot grant a discount. However the system averages the whole year, taking months into account where this actually did work. For 200km / Month it's working just fine. Below that sometimes fails.
- zucked 3y ago
  (x) Doubt
bparsons 3y ago
Car drivers are used to constantly breaking the law, endangering pedestrians and other road users and seeing zero consequences. Even in cases of hit and run homicides, the driver rarely faces jail time. https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-time-rarely/story?id=61845988 https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-t... Technology could play a big role in ensuring people actually follow the rules and are held accountable for criminal negligence causing injury or death.
kbos87 3y ago
There's no such thing as a device that only "saves you money" - insurers are going to use the data to give you a discount one minute, and take it away the next. My insurance already shows a line item for a "safe driver discount" - I'm sure it's only a matter of time until I have to fork over my data to "keep" the "discount" they've already built into their list price. Great case in point, Tesla insurance dings people for "late night driving" - https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/10xaj74/do_not_drive_after_10_pm_tesla_insurance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/10xaj74/do_not...
Steven420 3y ago
Some people were born to be serfs
kornhole 3y ago
Privacy to the weak and transparency to the powerful cannot be achieved while companies put the poorer in these positions of lower price if you agree to be surveilled. How do we fix this?
penguin_booze 3y ago
When I got my UK driving insurance, I was in my 30s. By that time, I had been driving for many years elsewhere. Even then, I remember the first year's rather eye-watering. IIRC, it was just under GBP 1000 - the price of a rickety used car in UK. Soon, I discovered that Aviva had a plan for which you can signup: you download the app, and leave that active (data and location) while driving. The app monitors your driving pattern for aound 200 miles. Then it scores you out of 10. I felt smug that I scored 9.7 (IIRC). And, as promised, I got a rather neat discount on my insurance. IIRC, it came under GBP 300. I just wanted to say that alternatives like the above exists. Aviva continued to quote me lowest, until this year. I had to move away because, it happend to me, too, what happens to every loyal customer in the UK: deals popup elsewhere that are available only to new customers. So, exploring switching providers every now and then, is worthwhile.

168 points by mcone 3y ago

"Among other things..." Like speeding? Like traffic-light cameras, this will result in unintended consequences at scale. But hey, more data!

aidenn0 3y ago

It feels to me more and more like you need to be rich to afford living without bartering away your personal information. I'm getting to be middle aged now, and have noticed a fatalistic attitude towards this by gen Z; kind of "it's impossible to maintain privacy, so I might as well milk my loss of privacy for all it's worth." And I'm wondering now if that's not completely correct.

Casteil 3y ago
Frankly, it's exhausting to try keep your life private. The sheer number of different ways your privacy can be violated via modern cars, phones, computers, social media, surveillance/facial recognition, IoT devices (including 'smart' TVs), etc. is quite staggering. Definitely seems like a losing battle. My retirement plan is a remote cabin in the woods.
- eptcyka 3y ago
  Not only exhausting, it's also damaging one's social life, since preserving privacy is often making one the odd one out.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
javajosh 3y ago
It may appear that way, but even privacy-for-profit schemes are illusory. The devices still send the data, it is still collated. Eventually this will effect the elites personally and negatively, someone will slip up with their parallel construction, and then we'll see real change in the US. Sadly, not before then.
renewiltord 3y ago
No you can just get a cheaper car. You can get one for like $5k and the insurance won't be a lot. Just get minimums.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  Do cheaper cars really lead to lower liability premiums?
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    No, you have to pay those anyway. But it will lower the total spend and so you'll have money available to pay them. You don't have to be rich or anything. I live in San Francisco, and insurance for my Subaru Forester costs me $1.2k/yr and I have comprehensive coverage. So if someone were to buy a $10k car and instead chose a $5k car, it'll be as if insurance were cut to $700/year for the next 10 years! If you value your privacy, that's a solution.
    - louthy 3y ago
      > I live in San Francisco, and insurance for my Subaru Forester costs me $1.2k/yr and I have comprehensive coverage Wow, that’s crazy high. In the UK my Porsche 911 (992) is cheaper to insure than that! (Without an insurance tracker) Anyone know if US insurance generally much higher (than other comparative nations)? Or is SF an anomaly?
      - aidenn0 3y ago
        I have comprehensive insurance for my car and it's about $850/yr. I'm also in California, but not near SF.
      - renewiltord 3y ago
        About $868 of that is for "Comprehensive" and "Collision" coverage, if it helps. It's possible it's just me, though. I've crashed my car once, and been hit on my motorcycle. In general, given that, I would assume it's more because of that than in general since I'm obviously a high risk driver. When I set my address from San Jose to San Francisco (I used to store the car at my friend's) it went up $200/yr so that's the SF premium for Geico at least. How much do you pay?
rkagerer 3y ago
Even if you're rich it's difficult.
Hermitian909 3y ago
It's true, and it's not great, but I think the flip side of this is that as I get older I find myself increasingly paying for the anti-social behavior of others. There are lot of nice customer service things that are only possible if people don't abuse them: solid warranty/return programs, high quality phone reps, etc. But you need people who adhere to the social contract, the kind of people who don't, say, buy a $3,000 TV for a single super bowl party and then return it. I actually desperately want some way to tell many of these companies "I am a responsible human being who respects social contracts" - all solutions I can think of violate my privacy but we'll find out what's worse...
- don-code 3y ago
  Is respect for social contracts really all that's necessary? I don't see it as adversarial, so much as I see it as "normal _and_..." for many vendors. For instance, even if I could buy a TV and then return it for free, why not return it and charge a fee? Most people are willing to pay the fee, even if they wouldn't return it, so what's the incentive for any vendor to not charge the fee?
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Because they really don't like the TV for some reason/ Or an expensive purchase that should last for years falls apart after 9 months? Leaches who have made many companies cut back on generous return policies with "my ten year old coat is worn out, replace it" are basically turds who make life worse for other people. ADDED: Furthermore, research has has shown (e.g late pickups at daycare) that when you add a fee to an anti-social behavior it can actually make the behavior more likely because it's now a transactional activity.
    - Gordonjcp 3y ago
      > (e.g late pickups at daycare) I've often wondered how well it would work if you went "right well, if you pick them up 15 minutes late today, you've got to pick them up 15 minutes early tomorrow", or "... drop them off 15 minutes late tomorrow".
RajT88 3y ago
I think for the most part, you can't really monetize your own data. You can just trade it away for "free" services. Unless I've missed something... Sidebar: The government is buying all your data from data brokers. We should all collectively submit FOIA requests to get copies of it, to create an undue burden on them doing so. Maybe they'll scale it back.
yieldcrv 3y ago
think of it more like the Hunger Games and all behaviors are explained
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
I’m reasonably rich and would pay good money not to be tracked. It’s not really an option.
- hysan 3y ago
  I’ve started seeing ads for companies that try to get your data removed from sites and data broker.[1] I don’t know how effective they are but we’ve reached an age where there is a clear market for privacy. That feels very dystopian. [1] https://incogni.com/ https://incogni.com/
  - NotYourLawyer 3y ago
    I’ve heard of this one too. I’m too cynical to believe it’s legit though.
  - GrinningFool 3y ago
    ... which on its home page tracks to google analytics, tag manager, and the payment services provider paddle.
abhayhegde 3y ago
I hate how true this is! A case in point is also apps like Ibotta or Fetch which reward you based on your shopping data. Sell your shopping patterns, earn money! Rich can protect their privacy.
- topposter32 3y ago
  You are also describing credit cards. That's the trade you made to get a 1-2% reward.
- marvin 3y ago
  It makes sense that one's privacy is a valuable asset one can sell.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
Even if you were to pay the fee or drive a gas car, or you pay for the 'better' insurance to not be tracked, your movements are still recorded everywhere with ALPR cameras.
- uoaei 3y ago
  If not your car itself.
vGPU 3y ago
But at the same time, I feel like this creates opportunities for enterprising individuals. How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost? Of course, I’d much rather prefer that stuff like this didn’t exist to start with. The older I get the less patience I have for messing with this junk. All of my cars are now idiot-cars thanks to the death of 3g, and I pull antennas and SIM cards ever since the onstar eavesdropping scandal.
- NoraCodes 3y ago
  > How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost? Wouldn't that be fraud?
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago
  > How hard could it be to feed fake data into said dongle and enjoy the lower cost? A lot of the monitors for older cars (that don't have 'tracking' built in) just plug into the cars OBD2 port and the CAN bus data - and is extremely hackable by anyone thats used an Arduino. It would be much harder to interfere if the monitor is wired in or using its own GPS to monitor speed and distance travelled though. https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/01/15/researcher-says-progressive-insurance-dongle-totally-insecure/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/01/15/resea...
- astura 3y ago
  Insurance fraud is a crime. Not only that, but insurance companies don't cover claims when the policy was obtained by fraud.
ssss11 3y ago
I think the people who say “the public doesn’t care about privacy” are either completely ignoring the fact that most people will give it up if it means the product is cheaper (because, financial survival) or they are deliberately pushing the agenda.
bmj 3y ago
My auto insurance provider (in the US) has never even offered such a tracking program to me (and I know my current rates are pretty reasonable/in line with other companies). Maybe it's because of my history with the provider (I'm 50 and they've been covering me since I was 16)?
hospitalJail 3y ago
And if you are rich, you don't actually get privacy, just the illusion of it. I have dumb electronics that are way less intrusive than their luxury versions.

pbj1968 3y ago

To make money, people agree to sit at a desk nine hours a day. Water wet.

AnAnonymousDude 3y ago

Recently were shopping insurance providers for our brick and mortar business that has a few delivery vehicles, and MANY of the commercial insurers are requiring that their apps be used to monitor employee driving behavior. I hadn't shopped for insurance in quite awhile and was shocked at how prevalent this requirement seemed to be.

bsder 3y ago
I'm kind of torn on this. On the one hand, I hate the intrusiveness, that's a huge minus. On the other hand, commercial drivers are subject to all kinds of perverse business incentives--too many hours driving, poorly maintained fleets, etc.--and if the insurance companies can stamp those out, that's a plus.
luma 3y ago
Nearly all CDLs in the US are operating with an ELB of some sort and have been for a while now. Trucking is a different world.

mholt 3y ago

Utah views EV drivers as tax evaders because they don't buy gas. So they have a "deal" for EV drivers: pay an exorbitant registration fee (hundreds more than other vehicles) or install an OBD device in your car and carry a surveillance app to be charged for how much your vehicle is driven [0]. The measurement route requires 2 separate accounts with 3rd parties, one of which has your payment information on file. Given that states can't even get voting right [1], this is not the future I wanted. (Plus, we should be incentivizing EV purchases at this stage, not punishing them.) (Heck, they put my marriage license on a blockchain for some dumb reason. I didn't even want it on a blockchain!) [0]: https://roadusagecharge.utah.gov/ https://roadusagecharge.utah.gov/ [1]: Basically anything by https://twitter.com/jhalderm https://twitter.com/jhalderm

throwaway1777 3y ago
That actually kinda makes sense. EVs should pay their share to use the roads too.
- loeg 3y ago
  (Gas taxes are a relatively small fraction of roads funding, for what it's worth.)
  - kbenson 3y ago
    I'd be interested in seeing the numbers, and how they slice it up (whether they're completely treating federal roads separately or using it for the total, etc), as at $0.364 per gallon in Utah, it seems like it results in a large amount to put towards funding something, so it would be interesting to track where it's going.
    - loeg 3y ago
      Utah’s cent per mile program treats all roads the same, including roads outside of the state.
      - 3y ago

throwaway1777 3y ago

Old news tbh

andersrs 3y ago
Yes. 5-7 years ago I used to work for a vehicle telemetry SaaS company. It was explained to me that most of the Brazil market was for govt mandated tracking.

celeritascelery 3y ago

A few years ago our insurance would give us a discount if we added a small monitoring device to the car for 2 months. We agreed and at the end of the time we mailed it back to them. Now we have switched companies and the new one doesn’t have a discreet device, but instead want me to install an app that has 24 hour access to my location on my phone. That was too much for me. So instead a bought the cheapest android phone I could find, and installed the app on that and left it in the car.

troupe 3y ago
Did it give you any significant discount? A few people I know that did something similar ended up saving $2 per year. If you bought a phone I'm guessing your discount was much higher.
- celeritascelery 3y ago
  it saved me about $30 a month.

phkahler 3y ago

First it's a discount. Then it's a penalty for not playing. Then it's just everyone.

oatmeal1 3y ago

This is one of the least bad invasions of privacy I've seen. It shifts the burden of insurance premiums more towards those likely to cause accidents, and incentivizes people to minimize dangerous behavior behind the wheel. There are actual benefits to responsible people, and to society at large, which is not something you frequently see with invasion of privacy.

clumsysmurf 3y ago
Probably safe to assume that this feed will be sold to Lexis Nexis or Acxiom, etc. From there, who know how it will be used for or against you in whatever sphere of life, at whatever time.
- WirelessGigabit 3y ago
  That would be problematic when the system is linked to a car and not the driver.
  - rationalist 3y ago
    Just like tracking is linked to a phone and not its owner.
imgabe 3y ago
Assuming the data is only ever used for its stated purpose and not anything else…
- oatmeal1 3y ago
  The data collected here is just as likely to be misused as data that's collected that doesn't lead to any societal benefits.
- don-code 3y ago
  The data doesn't need to be used now, today, for this purpose. What happens when an insurance company foists a new privacy policy on you, the insured, saying that it'll be using back data that it's collected for new purposes? To my knowledge, there are no laws on the books in the US that prevent that kind of behavior (ex-post-facto only applies to the legal system), and I'd imagine few would change insurance providers because of a privacy policy change.

samtho 3y ago

This reads like an article from /r/ABoringDystopia that showcases, among other things, technology that was suppose to improve people’s lives is actively weaponized against them. What worries about this from a consumer level is that the insurance companies are not required to disregard old data. If you got a speeding ticket or other minor infraction, it will eventually drop off of your driving record as far as your insurance is concerned. Which makes sense and seems more fair because you are not necessarily the same driver you were two years ago. My concern is that they will keep this data in the aggregate and indefinitely penalize drivers with insurance rates that don’t actually reflect their present risk during a policy term.

don-code 3y ago
Massachusetts has a concept of "managed competition" to avoid exactly this: http://www.mass.gov/doc/autoinsuranceexecsummarypdf/download http://www.mass.gov/doc/autoinsuranceexecsummarypdf/download

nimih 3y ago

The headline seems quite disingenuous when the article is based on a study that puts the adoption rate of these surveillance technologies at around 14%.

don-code 3y ago

How do these apps work, in practice? The article states: > If you’re at the wheel focused on the road, but someone in the passenger seat is changing the music on your phone, the app may think it’s observing distracted driving and count it against you. Is the app running on the car, or on the user's phone, which somehow detects that the user is driving a car? Is there some way that a paired phone (Bluetooth - or maybe this is a feature of CarPlay / Android Auto) can tell a car that it's being used?

jagged-chisel 3y ago
State Farm sends a Bluetooth beacon that you pair with your phone. Each car gets a beacon. Whichever beacon is closest is the car you’re in. The app on the phone uses gps and accelerometer data to determine driving behavior. Presumably the stream of data is sent to the insurance company at some point.
- mikro2nd 3y ago
  And if you don't have a phone?
  - hippari2 3y ago
    I don't think this works anymore, COVID tracking apps basically said fyou if you don't have a smartphone, or even when your phone is old enough that the app doesn't work.

sramam 3y ago

I'm a holdout on this tech for privacy reasons. Wonder how self-incriminating that is - at some tipping point of adoption, not opting in becomes THE negative signal. Outside regulation to limit retention and prevent misuse of data is there even a longer term option here? Perhaps I should capitulate early and save more money.

menus 3y ago

I cannot find the source but I recall reading that telematics insurance causes more incidents as it makes drivers afraid of braking hard, knowing that any maneuver by you to avoid a deranged driver is counted against you. I can only find anecdotal references https://www.quora.com/Does-Progressive-Auto-insurance-actually-want-me-to-wreck-That-snapshot-GPS-device-beeps-every-time-I-hit-the-brake-to-avoid-hitting-the-drivers-who-pull-out-in-front-of-me https://www.quora.com/Does-Progressive-Auto-insurance-actual...

4rt 3y ago

This has been extremely common in the UK for about 10 years - especially for young drivers. I warned my nephew off it but sure enough, he took the £200 (£1400 to £1200) discount on insurance. His insurance was cancelled because they say he did over 35mph in a 30 zone, so now his insurance premiums are £2000+ because he has to declare he has a history of having an insurance policy cancelled.

switch007 3y ago
Damn that is shady as hell. Enticing with a small discount then boom, guaranteed increased premiums for years. The big comparison websites are complicit too as they list those policies along the others in a table sorted by price, not making much of a deal about the risks etc and how different the policy is

thedougd 3y ago

In NC we have mandatory yearly safety inspections. To renew your registration you must pass inspection. It would be easy for them to use the odometer reading at the inspection to assess a road use tax. We do already pay a gas tax and a yearly property tax at the state and local level for cars plus a sales tax on new cars.

crmd 3y ago

When I tried this a few years ago, the unit beeped when it sensed braking or lane changes it didn’t like. It beeped constantly in the course of normal New York City defensive driving. I found myself running more than one red light to avoid the “hard braking” beep. It completely eliminated any enjoyment of the new car I sacrificed to save up for. After 3 months I was horrified to get an email with a list of time stamped infractions and an offer for a 15% reduction in my premium. Yeah, no. I switched to Geico, cut my premium in half, and vowed never to willingly trade surveillance for an insurance discount.

schultzie 3y ago
I had the same experience. The beeline that Progressive's snapshot device did actively encouraged worse driving behavior in a city. I could see it being more beneficial in rural communities where there's less erratic driver behavior, but in a major US city it was doing me no favors.
Gordonjcp 3y ago
We have similar devices on our vehicles at work. I can tell you that they don't work on Landrover Defenders, because they are reading about half way to "OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING" just sitting in the car park with the engine idling.
- LanceH 3y ago
  They have a point. There is probably an expensive repaid coming on from sitting sitting in the car park idling.
  - Gordonjcp 3y ago
    I'm not sure how you'd get them from the car park to moving down the road without switching the ignition on. Is there some trick to going from a switched-off stationary vehicle to 30mph without some ramping up in between?

hysan 3y ago

Yup, I saw that offer with my auto-insurance provider and despite knowing how much data they’d be harvesting, I was still tempted to do it. Insurance just costs so much. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect driving record for almost 2 decades. Costs just slowly creep up just like everything else. It feels like we’re in a world where privacy and data ownership is a luxury reserved for the wealthy.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

It's starting to feel like Europe. In Belgium you couldn't drive a miles without being recorded on some ALPR camera. Speed cameras everywhere. And the current rage is average speed cameras. So they take your photo on an on-ramp and when you take the exit they'll calculate the average. Above the speed limit: ticket. With no way of facing your accuser in court. The machine said so...

mixmastamyk 3y ago
That’s a dystopia right there. Would quit my job before participating in that.
- _trampeltier 3y ago
  Why is this comment downvoted? I think is pretty fair to say "I would quit my job before participating in that". More tech workers should say "NO" to so much BS today. Tech does give us so much good things, but we drive full speed into a new kind of slavery.
barbazoo 3y ago
I've heard about that for tunnels. Do you have a source for three on-ramp/off-ramp version?
rpodraza 3y ago
So you're claiming these are inaccurate? Do you have any other solutions for speeding? I think these are still much better solution than a device that tracks your location all the time.
- trgn 3y ago
  Speed limiters on cars. Limiters on acceleration would be good too.
thecopy 3y ago
What is the problem? That you cannot break the law without consequence? Car-drivers have a strong sense of entitlement that i never have seen in other non-radical groups.

belval 3y ago

Is this considered new? In Canada I had an app on my phone for 100 days which tracked accelerations/break/speed. Sure it felt intrusive-ish, but the program was not mandatory so seems like a win-win. I got a 22% discount (got 96/100!) and now the app is off my phone. I would not recommend it if you don't live in the suburbs though. Slow and steady is the name of the game, ideally you want light traffic and mostly empty roads.

skummetmaelk 3y ago
Thanks for contributing to the dystopia for your own minor financial gain.

geitir 3y ago

hypothetically it’s pretty easy to fake the odb reader versions of these. Just buy a male to 2 female odb splitter, strip one and hook a 9 volt battery and usb charger to the power wires. Plug your device into your car and turn it on, wait for device to blink green, attach 9 volt and unplug, carry inside and plug in usb charger to the wall.

getmeinrn 3y ago
Might want to rethink posting about committing insurance fraud.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  They said "hypothetically" so they're good /s
  - getmeinrn 3y ago
    Ah, they edited it. Must be why I'm eating downvotes now :)
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  Imagine a society where insurance fraud was so rampant that it regularly got jury nullified as normal behavior.

rektide 3y ago

I hate this but man am I tempted. I take my old car out for like 2k miles a year. I think of getting rid of it but it takes so little time & money to keep around, and it's great being able to do occasional road trips. Otherwise I'd totally get rid of it. Insurance is the biggest cost, but pretty cheap all-in-all. Given how little it's used, and given what a generally chill driver I am, I do think I deserve a better deal. Then again, it's old & I don't think it has OBD, so I'm probably not eligible anyways.

PlunderBunny 3y ago

Waiting for insurance companies to 'team up' and 'exploit synergies' with car companies to 'enhance revenue', so that this stuff it built in, and you don't get to turn it off.

Tade0 3y ago

My relative in the UK got a black box because insurance for beginner drivers is pretty high. Her summary is that punishing hard braking is counterproductive. Her relative also had it for three months, but after that the insurance company said he would be better off without it.

Lolaccount 3y ago

"For a small convenience, or a few pennies saved ... we'll give up our entire world".

RobotToaster 3y ago

We should start calling this stuff what it is, meatspace spyware.

otter-in-a-suit 3y ago

I've both worked on systems like that professionally and built some myself just for fun to play with GPS/geospatial data/streaming etc (fun tech). I'd _never_ want something like that installed in my vehicle. First off, you're usually relying on ODB-2 + GPS + usually some type of streaming backend, which means you're looking at 2 unreliable (or, at least, hard to _interpret_) sources of data delivered and presumably analyzed by a notoriously tricky delivery mechanism (near-real time streaming), which has a tendency to be too much to handle for the notoriously non-"tech" insurance world. The chances that data is being interpreted quite differently to what's happening on the road, but yet is treated as a source of truth for your premium model!, is certainly not zero. Even if you assume these companies handle all that properly (or outsource it), these data sets are some of the creepiest by their very nature - not only can you trivially determine somebody's home address by analyzing frequency of the reverse-geocoded data points (or any other geospatial features you derive), you can also determine any other patterns within a person's life - schedules, work location & employer, health habits (do they go to the gym or a bar? do they only ever leave to go to the grocery store?) etc., not to mention all the data ODB-2 gives you about actual driving behavior. And guess what, you can't use synthetic data for testing for much of this (I tried), so we would up testing these systems with real data, albeit with employees who volunteered. A home address is arguably not that sensitive, given that that is public record if you own your home and your insurance company has that data anyways, but the patterns + all the other metadata + all the "public" data that is out there ready for purchase about the average American, now you have something close to a personality profile that would make your average marketing exec (or, potentially, bad government actor) squeal in delight.

louwrentius 3y ago
How is this different from the phone in your pocket?
- stravant 3y ago
  Value proposition. What are you going to do, _not_ walk around with a phone in your pocket?

whoomp12342 3y ago

no we dont. How about insurance figures out their own stuff

mercurialsolo 3y ago

This isn't new . We all agreed to be the product and give our data away for free product access .

jononomo 3y ago

All you people worried about privacy should consider the fact that every thought you have and dream you dream is recorded in your DNA and will be read out before the world when you stand in judgment before God.

programmertote 3y ago

I read a comment here saying that they didn't like Progressive Snapshot, so they switched to Geico and cut their rate in half. This is my most recent anecdote as a different experience. I was paying $620 (for 6 months) with Geico while letting them monitor my driving via my cell phone. The premium never went down although I had 110 scores in their EasyDrive app (In driving for over 11 years in the US, I never had an accident and never filed any claim car insurers; I always drive defensively and never got any ticket either). What I found was EasyDrive app is always punishing me for bad driving practices like running red light (again, the same experience some has mentioned here with Progressive) in fear of registering a hard-brake event; and worse, slowing down excessively to turn the corners (basically, surprising the cars behind me and risking them bumping into my car) because EasyDrive thinks ONLY IF you go below 15 mph then you are doing the cornering right. I guess these EasyDrive developers (or rule makers) never drove on a real road, and found that usually 20mph is the safe way to go about turning on the right corner. Regardless, I got 15% premium bump in the renewal despite having 110 EasyDrive score (I think Geico raised their premiums by a very high percentage in CA as well; I live in FL and have been using Geico for all the years I've been driving in the US). That pissed me off and I explored other options, and finally got Progressive for $570 for six months. The sacrifice I have to do for this lower rate is to subscribe to their Snapshot program. I used my phone and have been driving for over a month. The relief (good thing) about using Snapshot app is that it doesn't monitor your cornering score. However, like some mentioned here, it still promotes bad driving behavior like running yellow/red light in fear of hard-brakes. It also seems to be a bit proactive in determining what a hard-brake is (again, I'm using their phone app) because I registered 2 hard-brakes (the only two hard brakes that I have recorded so far in about 1.5 months of driving) on my grocery trip. I swear I didn't do any hard brakes (or maybe at most once) because I know the road pretty well and I usually do grocery runs in early mornings on weekends when there are very few cars on the road. I know I got much cheaper ($570 vs. $710) rate from Progressive now just because I am a new customer. I am pretty sure come next or next, next renewal, they'll jack up my premiums like what Geico did, and then I'll have to switch to yet another insurer like musical chair game. I wish that the car insurers actually have a more accurate, realistic, non-intrusive tech to monitor the driving habits (e.g., the ones who don't use turn signals when turning right/left or changing lanes, which really could cause accidents) and ACTUALLY give discounts to drivers like me who are very careful with their driving (plus, my wife and I drove a total of 6050 miles in the last year). This is all to say that the risk-reward distribution system with car insurance companies is still inefficient.

jonstewart 3y ago

A far better solution than historical GPS tracking by insurance companies (backed by bad/noisy) would be for cars to impose a hard +10% cap on speeding.

garphunkle 3y ago

I like to joke that as usage based insurance goes to infinity, we all become uninsured drivers... Each insurance company uses the telematics differently. While the pricing model is regulated, it is not public. There is a substantial difference company-to-company I think this is an instance of HN-confirmation bias. We all hate monitoring, so a study or article that says UBI and behavioral modification is harmful appeals to us.

SavageBeast 3y ago

A former girlfriend of mine came home one day with one of these devices plugged into her car. She was the kind of person who just said "yes" to whatever was on the form and she simply picked the lowest price option. My head immediately goes to the scenario where theres been some kind of an accident. Maybe it's a fender bender or maybe a pedestrian was hit. In one case you have a couple damaged cars and a deductible. In the other case you're facing down a manslaughter charge and even if you're not at fault it's going to ruin your life. So now imagine law enforcement has access to your cumulative driving habits/traits and the last 20 minutes of driving that day. Imagine the insurance company has processed that data for its own purpose and assigned some kind of (totally arbitrary and contrived) "aggressive" or "risk" rating to certain actions etc. Law enforcement now has a prepackaged report that will invariably say you're a terrible driver. Of course the data collected is going to say that as the insurance companies aren't in business to charge people LESS money. Now, whether or not you were or were not driving in a reckless manner, theres data to make a case with and nobody is perfect. That data may or may not reflect the reality of the situation and even so, prosecutors are known to take the easy route to boost their own stats. Now imagine a prosecutor looking for an easy win has a prepackaged report of biased information from the insurance company? This whole thing seems like a way to possibly save a trivial amount of money in exchange for an increased likelihood of Really Bad Things happening to you.

ngc248 3y ago
>>> save a trivial amount of money in exchange for an increased likelihood of Really Bad Things happening to you Nowadays, everything they come up with is like this.
tokai 3y ago
The only issue with your scenarios is that nobody will ever get in trouble for killing a pedestrian.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago
  That’s a disingenuous hot take. There’s a lot of discussion to be had about balancing Justice and societal/personal costs but you’ve gone and skipped past all of that.

Waterluvian 3y ago

I tried this with an app. They offered 2% off after a month of data collection. I called and turns out my insurance was already so “low” that 2% is the most it would have ever offered. I dunno about elsewhere but in Canada, insurance is like tech job salaries, the only real way to get the best deal is to change providers every few years.

LanceH 3y ago
> the only real way to get the best deal is to change providers every few years. I had Farmers for about 5 years in a row. It started off at $440/6months and ended up at $900/6months -- on the same two cars (comprehensive on only one of them). I tried calling them up and asking why my insurance was going up when the amount they were actually covering was going down due to depreciation. They avoided my calls and lost my business. Now I'm trying to deal with the legalities of having a child in college in another state, but no car.
mr337 3y ago
It is the same in USA as well. After about 2-3 years one needs to yearly check out competitive rates. I have a hunch that the risk is the longer they keep you the more likely to have an accident they have to pay out. So if you are a good customer, no claims for 3 years your engagement with them has been very profitable. If they keep you for another year and you have an claim then that engagement is unprofitable. Just a hunch as insurance math is complicated.

droopyEyelids 3y ago

I got this from Liberty Mutual and it was an awesome mutually beneficial agreement. Liberty Mutual only records your behavior for one quarter, and then gives you a discount for as long as you hold your policy. I ended up with a permanent 28% discount! It analyzes your driving based on four factors: total miles drive, how fast you accelerate and decelerate, and whether you drive in the wee hours. I found the temporary loss of privacy to be totally reasonable and an excellent tradeoff.

trgn 3y ago
Considerate driving should be rewarded. Great to see in action.

1231112315123 3y ago

My experience with telematics-enabled driving is quite positive. I'm saving 30% easily, simply by driving relaxed. I don't think I'm giving away much personal data: The insurance set up a separate legal entity that performs the ranking, with a easy-to-read EULA that rules out selling data. My insurance is using the Cambridge Mobile Telematics modules.

JTbane 3y ago

I wouldn't agree to these kinds of devices simply because they are cheap junk that can damage your car. https://www.kiro7.com/news/insurance-tracking-device-blamed-car-damage/82088181/ https://www.kiro7.com/news/insurance-tracking-device-blamed-...

hospitalJail 3y ago

Sounds good to me. Maybe they will see that highway speeds are too low and I get to save money. Although its going to be really awkward when they find out my home address and kid's daycare.

gwbas1c 3y ago

> Insurance companies may think you’re a higher-risk driver if you’re accelerating fast, braking aggressively, making sharp turns, using your phone while you drive, coming home at 3 a.m., taking dangerous roads or simply driving a lot. Is there any proof that any of these behaviors actually correlate with tangible risk? (I mean, I can understand that "simply driving a lot" increases risk.) Personally, I'd be more interested in cars with cameras using machine learning to build a risk profile of other cars. I'm not the only person who sees dangerous behavior all the time. It would be interesting if I could sell a stream from my cameras to a company that builds risk profiles based on observed behavior.

elif 3y ago
Anecdotally, when Tesla implemented safety score as a voluntary activity to unlock FSD, my gamer brain kicked in and couldn't not pursue a high score. The result is that I went from an extremely anxious and aggressive driver (which is 90% of american drivers) to completely ambivalent to my arrival time and obsessively approaching intersections cautiously and giving time for drivers that cut me off. I do think that a key component for success is near real-time feedback so it feels like a game and not a speeding ticket in the mail.
asoneth 3y ago
I have no idea whether the current telematics algorithms are any good at assessing risk. However, with a large enough corpus of training data including years of telematics on drivers with and without insurance claims it certainly seems like it should be possible to build models that can make much more accurate risk assessments than they can with the data they currently collect such as age, zipcode, and past accidents. Put another way, I would be surprised if there was zero correlation between driving behavior and insurance claims.
LanceH 3y ago
Casualty insurance companies just want the numbers, then to set the markup, then profit. They've filled out that elusive intermediate step. If it means finding a way to get a customer a discount then that's ok, as long as they have the customer. The biggest factor they can monitor is verifying miles driven. Miles driven, unsurprisingly, has a bigger impact than virtually anything else someone signing up to be monitored would be guilty of.

T3RMINATED 3y ago

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blackbear_ 3y ago

The only way I would even consider to have one of these things is if the insurance premium would be reduced proportionally to how much I (don't) drive. Only use the car on Sundays? Pay 1/7 of the price. But of course prices can only go up.

zucked 3y ago
I think you can get something similar to this nowadays even from the big insurance companies. I thought I remembered some startups doing micro-transaction insurance policies that started and ended with each new trip -- did some searching and found that Allstate has something similar: https://www.allstate.com/auto-insurance/milewise https://www.allstate.com/auto-insurance/milewise You pay a small retainer fee ($1.50/day) and then a per mileage fee. This requires the use of a logging device which also impacts your per-mile rate depending on your driving. I haven't dug into the nuts and bolts of this, but I wonder how well you are covered when the vehicle is not in motion - parked in garage, on the street, etc. At least in my area parking in public can be a risky option between the hit and runs, catalytic converter theft, break-in, etc.

nonethewiser 3y ago

Ever since covid and working remotely I drive about 20% of what I used to. I'm guessing this device wont recognize that and reduce my bill to 20% the original amount.

1231112315123 3y ago
My insurer's app sometimes complains I drive too few to determine my driving style, hence, cannot grant a discount. However the system averages the whole year, taking months into account where this actually did work. For 200km / Month it's working just fine. Below that sometimes fails.
zucked 3y ago
(x) Doubt

bparsons 3y ago

Car drivers are used to constantly breaking the law, endangering pedestrians and other road users and seeing zero consequences. Even in cases of hit and run homicides, the driver rarely faces jail time. https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-time-rarely/story?id=61845988 https://abcnews.go.com/US/hit-run-drivers-kill-people-jail-t... Technology could play a big role in ensuring people actually follow the rules and are held accountable for criminal negligence causing injury or death.

kbos87 3y ago

There's no such thing as a device that only "saves you money" - insurers are going to use the data to give you a discount one minute, and take it away the next. My insurance already shows a line item for a "safe driver discount" - I'm sure it's only a matter of time until I have to fork over my data to "keep" the "discount" they've already built into their list price. Great case in point, Tesla insurance dings people for "late night driving" - https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/10xaj74/do_not_drive_after_10_pm_tesla_insurance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModelY/comments/10xaj74/do_not...

Steven420 3y ago

Some people were born to be serfs

kornhole 3y ago

Privacy to the weak and transparency to the powerful cannot be achieved while companies put the poorer in these positions of lower price if you agree to be surveilled. How do we fix this?

penguin_booze 3y ago

When I got my UK driving insurance, I was in my 30s. By that time, I had been driving for many years elsewhere. Even then, I remember the first year's rather eye-watering. IIRC, it was just under GBP 1000 - the price of a rickety used car in UK. Soon, I discovered that Aviva had a plan for which you can signup: you download the app, and leave that active (data and location) while driving. The app monitors your driving pattern for aound 200 miles. Then it scores you out of 10. I felt smug that I scored 9.7 (IIRC). And, as promised, I got a rather neat discount on my insurance. IIRC, it came under GBP 300. I just wanted to say that alternatives like the above exists. Aviva continued to quote me lowest, until this year. I had to move away because, it happend to me, too, what happens to every loyal customer in the UK: deals popup elsewhere that are available only to new customers. So, exploring switching providers every now and then, is worthwhile.