"For a small convenience, or a few pennies saved ... we'll give up our entire world".
To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology
131–140 of 414 posts
Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology
#132We should start calling this stuff what it is, meatspace spyware.
Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
A diesel truck that has three times the pressure on the road and easily ten to fifteen times the total weight, while getting about 1/3rd the gas mileage of the average US passenger vehicle. Given the (unsupported) claim that a EV wears the road significantly more than a gasoline car for what amounts to shouldn't we expect that a vehicle exerting three times the pressure on the road should pay more per mile than 'just…
> Given the (unsupported) claim that a EV wears the road significantly more than a gasoline car This is an unambiguously, heavily supported claim. By states, car makers, the federal government, and third party analysis firms. It's incredibly uncontroversial. It's even got a name, and associated math: it's called the Fourth Power Law https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-... > shouldn't we expect…
The fourth power law is uncontroversial, the fact that on average (or just take per model) EVs wear more than your "average ICE car" (especially as SUVs are the average now) is not
Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds to me like the system is working exactly as it should.
It's kind of funny, because from my perspective I'm an old man who learned himself a trade decades ago and worked things right to the point that I don't have to drive around a shit-box anymore, but to you I'm a privileged asshole. Which one is the truth?
You aren't taxed more on larger, more expensive vehicles because the powers that be (or the poster you were responding to) think you're a privileged asshole. You're taxed more because heavier vehicles cause more road wear, and because Washington has no income tax (which are typically progressive in nature), so the rest of their tax system needs to lean more progressive to make up for that. Thus, more expensive vehicles get taxed more.
Did you benefit from paying no state income taxes for decades? Well, now you're paying a little back into the system. I'd think you'd be happy to do that, after having paid no state income taxes for so long. I'd also think you were well aware of the registration taxes when you purchased the vehicle? If so, given these two facts, why are you complaining about it?
You can still be an asshole if you want of course, but being an asshole has nothing to do with your registration taxes.
Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology
#135It 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.
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.
It makes sense that one's privacy is a valuable asset one can sell.
Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology
#136It'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...
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.
Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology
#137I'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.
Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology
#138It 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.
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…
> 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/resea...
Re: To save money on insurance, drivers agree to intrusive monitoring technology
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Utah views EV drivers as tax evaders because they don't buy gas That's because they kind of are. Road taxes are often use-based, where gasoline is the way they extract "use" taxes. EVs also wear roads more than gas cars do, on average, because of their higher weight. And it's not linear wear per pound, either. This is going to require a significant shift about how states and cities think about their road maintenanc…
I figure it’s semi trucks that do almost all the road damage. We could just tax the trucks, but that would just get passed along in higher prices for everything. So might as well pay for road repair out of the general fund than have special taxes.
You're right about semis. The most cost effective thing for keeping the roads better is weigh stations open all the time.
However, EVs cause around 2x more damage to roads than non EVs.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/26/pothole-electric...
Wait til the semi EVs hit the road!
EVs also have significantly higher particulate emissions due to increased tire wear.