Is Your Driving Being Secretly Scored? The insurance industry, hungry for insights into how people drive, has turned to automakers and smartphone apps like Life360.
Is Your Driving Being Secretly Scored? The insurance industry, hungry for insights into how people drive, has turned to automakers and smartphone apps like Life360.
The insurance industry, hungry for insights into how people drive, has turned to automakers and smartphone apps like Life360.
LOL I always knew that creepy Life360 shit would come back to bite people in the ass eventually.
Nah it was biting people long before that, those tracker apps are practically purpose built to enable abusive relationships and family dynamics.
My daughter has been trying to get me to install this for years. My refusal has been vindicated! I kept telling her I don't trust it. And she drives like me and her premiums are nuts even for her age and she's been lucky and has a great driving record.
Driving behavior analysis, or telematics, as the insurance industry calls it, could be better for consumers, leading to personalized rates that are more fair. Plus, if people have to pay more for their risky driving, they may drive more cautiously, leading to safer roads. But this will happen only if drivers are aware that their behavior is being monitored.
I'm so sick of this shit.
Just like the stop sign cameras, this only increases safety by penalizing and then monetizing minor mistakes that humans make. This is not about safety, it's about maximizing income through technological micromanaging of drivers who have not caused an accident and were not in danger of causing one.
You'd also have to be a damn fool not to realize that all the data they're collecting may not apply to their rate structure today, but in the future that rate structure will change, and suddenly a history of driver data you let them gather about you goes from being unremarkable to indicative of a problem.
The shareholders are demanding a blood sacrifice, so rates suddenly go up for people that have a driver score beneath a certain threshold where previously that threshold was higher.
Or some new bullshit study comes out claiming people that listen to podcasts while driving are infinitesimally more likely to cause an accident than people that listen to music, and whoops, Michael Barbaro has been your constant companion on every morning commute for the last 4 years. That's a pattern of risky behavior.
And if they think that this monitoring is going to help anything when people know about it, they need to learn about Goodharts' Law:
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
As soon as this becomes a thing people will get anxious and petty about it, and they will start trying to game the system, and that system gaming will take some portion of their focus away from driving and guess what, that's going to make them worse drivers.
That's what we did. We were told the negative criteria were frequent driving, night driving, and all the driving BS you'd expect - hard stops, fast corners, etc. The company used a phone app, so we only installed it on my phone, had it disabled most of the time, and enabled it once or twice a week for a painfully slow drive to the grocery store just around the corner.
We had an amazing score which resulted in... No discount! We actually paid more. We got some bullshit low percentage off which was simultaneously offset by a mid-year rate increase. They claimed they had to reevaluate our rates any time they added a discount. Total bullshit.
I drive my car like I stole it. I will continue to drive my car and beat on it like it owes me money. I will never put a dongle in my obd2 port from my insurance company. I will never have any stupid app I don't need on my phone and my car is no longer hooked up to onstar. Fuck that. You put that shit in your car, you will never see lower rates, you'll just see smarter advertising. However, if you drive like me, I'm sure they'll charge you more or drop you.
UPS drivers have been dealing with telematics for 20+ years. It tracks stuff like whether you back before you park or afterwards. How far you back. If your seatbelt is being used. If your cargo door is open while driving. Vehicle speed. Etc.
You WILL be observed and your behavior WILL be profitable. Failure to comply will result in a fine.
This is actually the thing that gives me most privacy assurance. My car company does offer this as an insurance product to themselves, transparently. Since they’re honest about this part of it, and have less profit incentive to those of us who don’t agree, I’m a bit assured that they are not motivated to sell my data to my actual insurer
If you think your insurance company isn’t selling your data to other companies, you are in for a surprise.
My insurance company, for example, requires so many permissions for their app, just to show my insurance coverage. I refuse to use it because they don’t need my contacts, calendar, use details, phone information, location, network status, and whatever else they are asking for. They have no use for this information, so why would they collect it? Oh right, because they are greedy and consider customers to be multiple revenue streams.
Part of the privacy policy for using the app is agreeing to be a product for them. Hard pass. I give them more than enough money considering they have never paid out a single fucking penny for anything (tho we’ll see how I feel tomorrow when the adjuster comes out to inspect the storm damage to my roof - probably the same.)
If a scammy company like insurance is doing a thing, you can bet they are not being benevolent. They are taking whatever you give them and it will fuck you eventually.
If only we had lawmakers that kept greedy corporations in check, instead of bickering over bullshit.
Lawmakers seem to have developed a strangely keen interest in where exactly we put our dicks and the very personal repercussions of any new genetic material created from any of this dick placement. They don't seem to have any time at all for corporate abuse of the populous at large. I guess the problem perhaps is that while corporations are people, they don't have dicks?
Greedy corporations pay the lawmakers to bicker over bullshit instead of regulating them.
Our insurance company offered a rate reduction if we installed a device on the cars to monitor how we drove. It we met whatever metric they set we’d get a discount for “safe driving”.
Hell no. I’m paying full price to not have them looking over my shoulder while driving.
Because you know that the data will be sold, or even used to classify your risk as a driver and potentially raise your rates. There’s nothing altruistic about these companies.
To anyone who doesn't believe you and thinks they might actually he able to get better rates through an app like that...
You know how health insurance companies charge hefty premiums with ridiculously high copays, but you figure "If I really need something covered, though, they'll pay it and I won't go bankrupt", but yet they still find a way to have so few scruples that they'll fight you on the services you have them billed for because they are a corporation beholden to shareholders and will do everything in their power to hang onto every single dollar possible?
Your car insurance is provided by a corporation.
It's a scam, anyway. I did it once with Progressive when I got my first car. Had good ratings, was promised a solid discount. Next bill comes and it's the same amount as the previous bill. I call them and they say that the rate went up but with the discount it conveniently went back to the old rate.
That’s some bullshit.
I've had the same experience with a different insurance provider. In a different country.
They're all the same.
I tried it once. Installed the app on my phone. The error rate in the data they collected was ridiculously high. Get a phone call while driving? Welp, now it says you were on the phone for 45 seconds. Playing music through the stereo? No, you were clearly using your phone the entire time. Phone slides around on the console? You clearly must have mashed the brakes.
I decided that the best way for them to determine I was a safe driver was the fact that I haven't had an accident claim in years.
"wait, you said you'd protect me. i got into a fight right in front of you and you didn't help at all!"
"oh but i did, boss. i was going to join in and kick your ass as well but decided to protect you from my ass kicking and stood still instead"
The article photo looks like these three women have slowed down to get a good look at me as I struggle to keep my food away from three hungry raccoons in my underwear (me in my underwear, not the raccoons) on my front lawn next to a bouncy castle the raccoons have all but taken over at this point.
Honestly at that point how much can you guarantee that none of those raccoons has been inside your underwear, at least partially with a claw or something?
At the rate things are going they probably will take your underwear as well.
I can see it, in slow-mo, the girl on the back would take out her phone and started recording; The car windows slowly rolled up.
The girl in the passenger seat clearly has a look of "we knew this was going to happen", too.
I just want to be able to corner hard and accelerate hard and do some spirited driving in a safe area without that info getting sold to insurance companies…
Jokes on them, I drive recklessly as hell and in twenty years am at fault for zero accidents, while my wife hates driving with me and drives incredibly cautiously and has been at fault in accidents. Can the algorithm see past 'this person accelerates quicker therefore should have a higher premium" because otherwise I feel like the old system was working. It was frustrating to pay more as a young male driver, but I've proven myself and my abilities behind the wheel and wish to continue to pay accordingly.
It's pretty well established that women tend to get into more accidents than men, but they tend to be minor fender benders that don't cost all that much, while men tend to cause accidents very rarely, but when we do, multiple vehicles are destroyed and people die, and that's a great deal more expensive in the long run. So you haven't had an at fault accident in 20 years, doesn't mean you won't destroy a school bus tomorrow.
Well just because it's on my schedule doesn't mean I'll get to it, anyway.
Im sure they can. Insurance companies love data. While someone like you might fly under their radar with crash statistics, it might be worthwhile to flag you as low risk for crash, but if in a crash high risk for multi-fatility crash. This would mean a bigger potential payout for them and they might want to risk adjust you. I'd advocate that just about anyone should try to protect their own data and avoid sharing this info with insurance companies.
"but I don't need privacy, I don't have anything to hide!"
Nope, because I drive an 03 Jetta lol
Edit: I’m also quite selective about the stuff I install on my phone, and nothing has “always on” location data.
They're also buying tracking data from phone apps, so you'd need to make sure you're not running any of those either.
Now they can track your account through car tax records since you said that.
Next time say you drive a 1992 Pontiac Fiero
I drive a bicycle
Not in the same detailed minute-by-minute tracking of where you've been.
My driving is being non-secretly scored, I have an app just for that. Currently it just complains that I have power saving mode on all the time, so I don't know if it's not working or if it is and I just can't see the results anymore. (I'm not turning off power saving mode.)
Does it actually tell you the results? I'm curious how they score your driving, and how effective it is. The scariest things I see on the road are things like:
- distracted driving
- tailgating
- lack of awareness
I don't see how they'd measure how safe a driver you are.
Perhaps it's just that people are more careful when they know they're being monitored, and safe drivers are more likely to opt in?
For each trip it tells you things like how often you touch your phone, what % of the trip you spent using your phone, and how many times you braked hard (which is a proxy for things like tailgating or general inattentiveness, since it can't see the road). Mostly it seems to be a "don't use your phone" score. There's an overall score, and you can see how big your discount is, but the score itself is largely meaningless without the ability to compare to other drivers.
Tailgating is actually pretty easy to measure - there are specific patterns of braking and acceleration.
Innatention may be measurable too. For example, if an inattentive driver frequently drifts from the center of the lane and makes small quick corrections periodically, that would be apparent from accelerometer data.
Nah, mine is pretty upfront about it. You can even opt in to get a device that plugs into your car to give them even more data to lower your premium if you're actually a good driver. That shit started when I was still in high school, too. Nobody else remember Flo from Progressive hawking these things?
There are legal hurdles to raising rates based on this data. The simple and obvious solution is to set the starting price as the worst-case driver scenario, then discount down from that.
It's the exact same thing, but worded different.
and do you have one of those? Because form what I hear they beep when you're being a good drive too and you end up being a worse (than good) driver trying not to get the beeps
I had one years ago... It never made a sound. It just recorded how I drove and I started getting safe driver discounts on my insurance.
Gotta admit I’m curious why you think that.