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Car is spying on you, leading to higher insurance rates

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Re: Car is spying on you, leading to higher insurance rates

#61

Post by sneak »

jajko wrote: post #18
exe34 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? Or do you mean that you don't know how to stop those things? My kindle WiFi is permanently off. I use a usb cable. It stops it from downloading adverts to p*ss me off. My projector doesn't have a WiFi chip. It has an hdmi cable to my laptop. My laptop runs a pared down Linux, the only thing on it that spies on me is Google Chrome. That's a trade-off I'm comfortable with, since I use pihole to block the…

Do you know what basic OS runs on your network card? Bios? Wifi router? Internet provider's whole infrastructure with built-in advanced deep packet inspection? It has been mentioned here in the past - in US there comes a guy (some 3-letter agency, probably NSA), installs new black box at ISP, and goes, nobody has a clue what that thingie does, mandated by law. That was before providers decided to just sell data thems…

ISP DPI doesn’t affect me, every packet that leaves my house is wireguard.

Re: Car is spying on you, leading to higher insurance rates

#62

Post by hagbard_c »

Pokerface777 wrote: post #2

What isn't spying on you nowadays?

What isn't spying on me is nearly everything I use which contains the type of hardware that could be used to spy on me. The reason for that is that I keep things like that locked onto their own networks without the capability to reach back to their makers. I self-host more or less all my digital needs so assuming I'm not in the crosshairs of any TLA it is unlikely that there be spies in the server-under-the-stairs. My mobile devices run free software where possible, they are Google/Microsoft/Apple/etc.- free. Of course there does remain that one pain point of the radio firmware which is a closed-source blob and as such open to anyone with the money or governmental power to spy on me. There are also the banks which track financial transactions and the public transport companies which track where I go. When I'm on my bike, motorbike or tractor they're sadly out of luck since these are all old tech without any electronics. We heat the house using a wood-burning stove, I also use one to cook on, we generate more or less all our own electricity - yes, the inverter is also blocked from the 'net so it can not tell Fronius what we're doing here in the woods - but the power meter does spy on us though its radio transponder. I have access to what is supposed to be the same data through the P1 interface, it is theoretically possible to use this data to track whether we're home and what type of equipment (resistive/conductive) we're using. This is made harder when the inverter is running but it is not impossible. So, what is spying on me?

- mobile transponders

- financial institutions

- public transport companies

- power company

Who is trying to spy on me but with a bit of luck mostly thwarted from doing so

- Google/Microsoft/Metafaecesbook/Apple/etc (blocked and/or blended with other user's data)

- internet access provider (swamped with proxied data)

Who is not spying on me?

- vehicles (too old)

- internet-of-things devices (blocked)

Re: Car is spying on you, leading to higher insurance rates

#63

Post by not_a_real_56 »

janandonly wrote: post #38

Here in Holland, we have insurance companies that give you a smartphone app. This app runs in the background and sends your driving statistics to the company. This is sold as a feature with the promise that if you drive better than average, you'll pay less. Source: https://www.anwb.nl/verzekeringen/autoverzekering/veilig-rij...

How does the app know if you are driving or the passenger in a vehicle?

Re: Car is spying on you, leading to higher insurance rates

#64

Post by bonton89 »

janandonly wrote: post #38

Here in Holland, we have insurance companies that give you a smartphone app. This app runs in the background and sends your driving statistics to the company. This is sold as a feature with the promise that if you drive better than average, you'll pay less. Source: https://www.anwb.nl/verzekeringen/autoverzekering/veilig-rij...

In the US I'd just assume that app was hoovering up everything they could, selling it to data brokers and then giving me a small cut back.

Re: Car is spying on you, leading to higher insurance rates

#65

Post by Jimmc414 »

nickjj wrote: post #28
tyingq wrote: post #8

It sounds a bit like the pre-crime angle from Minority Report . Because aggressive drivers with accidents and citations already pay higher rates. This is, I assume, penalizing aggressive driving that hasn't yet resulted in a citation or accident. Or, maybe, penalizing those that drive in riskier areas , regardless of habits? Might be interesting if someone could push for whether anyone's rates went down as a result o…

> This is, I assume, penalizing aggressive driving that hasn't yet resulted in a citation or accident. If there's no context about the situation then how do they differentiate aggressive driving vs reasonable driving? For example if you're in a 2 lane highway and the left lane is clear but you're behind someone doing 40 mph in a 60 mph on the right lane, so you quickly accelerate and switch lanes to pass them. Super…

> Super defensive drivers who happen to also go unreasonably slow cause a lot of problems and traffic.

Unfortunately I think the entities driving this only care about the specific car they are insuring, not the traffic problems indirectly attributable to the insured.

Re: Car is spying on you, leading to higher insurance rates

#66

Post by nickjj »

falcolas wrote: post #60
nickjj wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume they just don't care about exceptions, and just correlate past data to actual claims to adjust their actuarial tables Yep, IMO that's a problem in general. So much is based on case studies in aggregate instead of individuals. The same thing happens with medicine (at least in the US). Just because 200 people in 1 study demonstrated that X year old Y gender people who live in Z have 7.8917% more likelihood t…

> So much is based on case studies in aggregate instead of individuals. Isn't this a good thing? Insurance is about spreading individual risk across a group. Hyper targeting the premiums of individuals according to their individual risk is the exact opposite of spreading risk.

It depends on who you're optimizing for, insurance companies or individual drivers.

Re: Car is spying on you, leading to higher insurance rates

#67

Post by EPWN3D »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #32
hombre_fatal wrote: post #15

Hot take: rapid acceleration and braking are symptoms of bad driving, and bad driving should come with barriers to being on the road with us and landing in our insurance pools. Driving information is fine to collect on public roads, and it should be ubiquitous rather than something collected in secret. Meanwhile in Texas, red light cameras can’t even be used to give tickets anymore.

>>Hot take: rapid acceleration and braking are symptoms of bad driving I might not fully agree with that (that may be what makes it hot take:) I've been driving 30 years now, which means nothing (I firmly disagree with notion that "driving a long time" is the same as "driving well" or "being experienced":). I've taken about half a dozen safety driving courses though, and another half a dozen advanced driving courses,…

I think that proper defensive driving is about identifying risks around you and achieving separation from those risks proactively. That can involve "classic" defensive driving stuff like going the speed limit, staying in your lane, etc. But it can also involve passing a driver who's clearly not paying attention so they (and their decisions) take place behind you, where they can't hurt you.

For example, if I'm behind a vehicle that's constantly braking because the driver is screwing around with their phone, I'm passing the fucker. That vehicle is dangerous and being operated by a moron, and I'm not going to subject myself to that risk. Similarly, if I see a car weaving through traffic in my rearview, I'm going to temporarily close the gap with the car in front of me so that the wannabe street racer doesn't get tempted to swipe in front of me. These are both things that classic defensive driving tell you to absolutely never do, but for me, they mitigate the most proximate risks.

Re: Car is spying on you, leading to higher insurance rates

#68

Post by kelnos »

mint2 wrote: post #50
tyingq wrote: post #8

It sounds a bit like the pre-crime angle from Minority Report . Because aggressive drivers with accidents and citations already pay higher rates. This is, I assume, penalizing aggressive driving that hasn't yet resulted in a citation or accident. Or, maybe, penalizing those that drive in riskier areas , regardless of habits? Might be interesting if someone could push for whether anyone's rates went down as a result o…

Which sounds more fair to use in rating insurance: A. Their credit related data B. Their age C. Their marital status D. Actual data on how they drive I feel like D, actual data on how they drive is the most fair. I think there needs to be mechanisms to contest driving events and also regulations on types of driving data allowed, but I think overall it’s by far the most fair and directly related But actually A B and C…

> I feel like D, actual data on how they drive is the most fair.

Only if you can actually prove a correlation. I think a lot of people, when asked, "do you people who brake and accelerate hard are likely to be in more crashes than people who don't?", most people might think for a second and say, "yeah, sure, that sounds like it would be the case".

But is it, actually? The funny thing is that this data apparently does exist, so it shouldn't be too hard to figure out. But I suspect no one's actually done that.

Re: Car is spying on you, leading to higher insurance rates

#69

Post by kelnos »

cmilton wrote: post #41
nova22033 wrote: post #23

Dahl said that his insurance agent told him the price increase was based on data collected by LexisNexis, which compiled a report tracking each and every time he and his wife drove their Chevy Bolt over a six-month period. You can request your free LexisNexis report https://consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com/request

You can also partially opt-out: https://optout.lexisnexis.com/

This made me chuckle. They have some extra options for California residents, and one reads:

> Partial Opt-Out: Allow for the Sale of My Professional Information but otherwise Do Not Sell My Personal Information

So... sell it... but do not sell it?

Re: Car is spying on you, leading to higher insurance rates

#70

Post by kelnos »

dandy23 wrote: post #45
nkurz wrote: post #42

This seems reasonable to me: if you do things that statistically correlate to being more likely to cause an accident, why shouldn't the insurance company charge you more? And since it's a relatively small group of drivers who cause the most accidents, if we could identify them the majority would see their rates drop. It's an interesting topic, and it would be nice to see more details on the accuracy of the algorithm,…

Apply it to healthcare and rethink. Not saying you are completely wrong, but I think there are other measures to stop bad driving. The whole point of insurance is also the even out the tops and bottoms. If everyone paid their fair share cost for the insurance there would be no point with insurance. You could as well pay the damage yourself when it comes.

I'm not a fan of car insurance company practices, but I don't think this line of reasoning makes sense. Driving safely is directly under each individual's control. Obviously things happen that couldn't reasonably be predicted and avoided, but you can choose to drive 65mph on the highway instead of 85mph, and if that actually does correlate with lower accident rates, then I think it's fair game for insurance to charge differently based on that.

Health outcomes are... more complicated. Yes, there are things you do have control over that can make you more healthy or less healthy, but there are many confounding factors that might make you a big drain on your health insurance provider.

Of course, no way in hell am I going to let insurance companies pry into my life to that degree.

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