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Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

nytimes.com

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Re: Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

#111

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

bluejekyll wrote: post #63
xnx wrote: post #15

As a safe driver, I like the idea of dangerous drivers paying more. There's no good reason the participants should not be aware they are under surveillance though. Sidenote: I wonder if they've considered close follow distance or frequent lane changes as a risk factor.

The thing that’s somewhat ironic here is that the car companies could make cars safe by default. For example, they could make it not possible to accelerate faster than one needs to. They could put in speed limiters that are triggered by the speed limit on the road. They could stop marketing and selling over powered cars. Instead they market cars as exciting race track like vehicles, things that let you do what you wa…

> For example, they could make it not possible to accelerate faster than one needs to.

I was in a rental car that had this once. Was on the highway, needed to get around another driver who was being unsafe. Was unable to do so because of the limiter. It was easily the most unsafe vehicle I've ever driven as a result. These mechanisms lack situational awareness and nuance, and thus are a direct threat to my personal safety. They very much need to be banned as a matter of course until such a time as humans aren't allowed to drive at all.

Re: Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

#112

Post by matheusmoreira »

bloomingeek wrote: post #21
jprete wrote: post #5

The US doesn't just need laws about disclosure of these practices. It needs to mandate that this kind of corporate surveillance must be a clearly labeled opt-in and cannot be mandated by any contract.

Yes, but to me there's another important issue, with all the tracking tech in our vehicles, who actually owns them? We need to treat this similar to the "right to repair" issue! I paid my money, so I own the product. [IF] I own the vehicle it should be my right to say what software runs in the background. Of course the company can say, "If you don't like our product, don't buy it." If I want to keep up with the lates…

> Of course the company can say, "If you don't like our product, don't buy it."

Honestly I'm pretty tired of that "our way or the high way" nonsense. Society needs to make it so they actually can't say that. Make respecting us a precondition for their continued existence. As in they literally get liquidated if they say that even once.

That's how we deal with sociopaths leveraging these non-negotiable "terms" against us. They have zero empathy, they view us like cattle to be marked and monitored and turned into cash flow. So there is no reason to empathize with their nonsense viewpoints either. Just make whatever they're doing illegal. Doesn't matter how much money they lose.

Re: Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

#113

Post by matheusmoreira »

oliv__ wrote: post #8

It's pretty clear we've reached the point where technology has shifted to working against us, and not for us anymore. I work in tech but as far as I am concerned, you can keep all your smart homes, cars and other gadgets and soul sucking (anti) "social" apps. Somewhere along the way technology was hijacked to control us rather than empower us. And if you don't like it: shut up because "progress" is inevitable

Technology is amoral. The power shift happened because we are no longer in control. It's these corporations who are the masters of the computers now. They're just allowing us to use their computers. Of course those computers work against us, they are treacherous by definition.

Re: Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

#114

Post by schreiaj »

everforward wrote: post #109
schreiaj wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also difficult to determine if someone is speeding from data. For example the road I live off of according to the speed limit the car thinks goes from 40 to 65 to 25 to 65 to 40 in about a 4 mile span. Spoiler it does not. It is 40 the whole way. But according to the car I am either going 25 under, 15 over, or exactly the right speed. (And the 65 section in the middle? Blind corner. Idk where it’s getting its da…

Indeed, the usual garbage in garbage out issue. Iirc, though, I think I read something about this and they were more interested in average speed (regardless of posted speed), and the rate/frequency of acceleration/deceleration (especially deceleration). The idea being that speed increases accident severity, regardless of posted speeds. Rapid deceleration is indicative of reacting late to something you should have see…

Maybe if the only thing you're reacting to is other vehicles or the road. The number of times I have to slam on my brakes on that particular road because of animals running into the road is way too high. And no, not always deer. I've come around curves and just had someone's dog sitting in the middle of the road on multiple occasions because for some reason people think it's totally safe to just let their dogs roam.

Re: Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

#115

Post by QVVRP4nYz »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #69
moooo99 wrote: post #66

I‘m a huge fan of s telemetry insurance. I have I personally and it saves me around 300€/year on my cars insurance because I am a very defensive driver. However, this being integrated into the vehicle in an absolutely intransparent way is a huge step up and a really unsettling privacy violation. For this to be ethically viable imho, there need to be a few prerequisites - it’s transparent what has been transmitted - y…

In which country is that?

I don't know about OP but in Poland https://yanosik.pl/ offered such deals ( https://payhowyudrive.pl/ ). It is probably a bit self defeating - the app's main function is warning about speed traps, that means unsafe drivers as significant part of its users.

Re: Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

#116

Post by JumpCrisscross »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #81
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should own your car Ownership is a legal concept. What it means, what that package of rights tied to a piece of property entails, is entirely dependent on the law. Using ownership as a guideline for rule-making is bad form because it’s tautology; I can justify and condemn anything on the basis of my or adjoining persons’ purported ownership rights. The machine languages of ownership are control and possession. That…

ownership has a legal definition, the concept of ownership exists outside of the law.

> the concept of ownership exists outside of the law

Not really. The common definitions either fall back to control or invoke the term property, another legalistic word. What ownership means is incredibly fluid and context dependent; consider how ambiguous it is when it comes to its classic form, real estate.

Re: Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

#117

Post by drbawb »

ixwt wrote: post #54
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who actually owns them? We need to treat this similar to the "right to repair" issue Ownership is a bad framework for this issue—it’s too ambiguous. You can “own” a vehicle all you want, that doesn’t give you the right to fuck with its odometer or catalytic converter.

I disagree. You can mess with odometer as much as you like. Trying to sell it off with a different amount of miles than have actually been put on it is called fraud. You should own your car and be able to do as you wish. You should also be able to turn on or off any tracking. There are just consequences for some of the things you might want to do.

>I disagree. You can mess with odometer as much as you like. Trying to sell it off with a different amount of miles than have actually been put on it is called fraud.

For a long time this was just a fact of buying any car that lived long enough. I have bought several cars where the transaction went something like: "so the odometer has rolled over twice; so there's actually 376,000 miles on the frame... but only 118,000 of those are on this motor and I swapped the transmission with a reman 76,000 miles ago."

Of course we've added a few significant figures to odometers since then, and in the era of digital odometers I imagine "rolling over" behaves very differently. (Will the chassis survive 4 billion miles? Seems unlikely. Do the display and storage have different bit resolutions? Is it a saturating counter internally? Externally?)

Re: Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

#118

Post by prometheus76 »

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #108
prometheus76 wrote: post #102

I called to turn off the data in a Toyota, and the guy wanted my name, phone number, email address, physical address and even more I can't remember right now. I was like "why do you need this info?" He said, "We need a record of who made this request for our records." I told him "do you understand that I am calling your company specifically because I don't want you to have records?" This went round and round about th…

Were you able to obtain any records of your own where they agree to cease collection that you can hold against them if they continue? Do you have any means of verifying that the collection has ceased? I don't believe that their word means much without these.

I just wrapped my truck with several layers of copper mesh, so it should be fine.

In all seriousness though, no. I have no way of confirming the data transmission has stopped.

Re: Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

#119

Post by kkfx »

Ladies and gentleman if we want a fair society we MUST:

- mandate FLOSS by law, starting from the first SLoC, meaning no company can sudden publish software to sell something with it, the software must be published since the day zero of it's development or the hw/sw/service can't be on sale;

- mandate local first for anything, so connected cars are ok, but they just offer a simple DynDNS mechanism the owner can add to it's own domain name as a subdomain like car.mydomain.tld and reach a relevant set of APIs the car offer. All data collected by the OEM must pass though the car owners systems, in an open and readable and documented form.

If this is not mandate, by popular acclaim, surveillance capitalism will stay, since it's the new tool to know and conform the masses. Surveilled people are known, and knowing they are surveilled try to behave in a "social norm" way, fearing the judgment/social score, as a result people evolve toward slaves who obey those who establish and update current social norms. We all know cooperation is needed to do anything, those who compete then need many who cooperate, obeying their orders, to craft anything. In the past was religion, then money, now social scoring the way to stiffen the masses. Such powerful tool is not something anyone accept to loose without a desperate and limitless fight. Only a large public reaction can force a change.

Re: Automakers are sharing consumers' driving behavior with insurance companies

#120

Post by EraYaN »

max_ wrote: post #23
idiotsecant wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which specific regulation do you think has a history of not being impactful? I find that the devil is in the detail in this argument because most regulation us massively impactful and helpful and I find that the talking point that we need to get rid of it is generally loudest from those who would profit the most from not following those rules anymore.

GDPR for example has done nothing to protect people from this particular case of data misuse. The problem with English law, is that you have to explicitly declare what is wrong a head of time. So we just end up with endless needs for regulation ls. If we had legal systems like Hammurabi Codes, they work work way better.

I mean the one thing GDPR did was scare the ever living daylight out of quite a few engineering teams and executives. Which honestly was what they industry really needed, people just needed to consider the data collection a bit more.

And fines have been levied and are levied constantly. It's mostly a man power problem as to how many, but the fines pay for more man power in some places so it all works out. It's just slow, which is why people always complain that nothing ever happens.

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