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

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

#251
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m reasonably rich and would pay good money not to be tracked. It’s not really an option.

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/

... which on its home page tracks to google analytics, tag manager, and the payment services provider paddle.

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

#252
post #50

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.

> incentivizes people to minimize dangerous behavior behind the wheel. Think very carefully about whether you want to be behind a person who is scrupulously obeying every single traffic law. Especially if you get 3 of them abreast.

That seems like... a good outcome? The privacy implications troubling enough to give me pause but the idea of more people actually driving at safe and legal speeds seems like a net positive, but perhaps there's some disaster scenario I'm not considering?

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

#253

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…

Why'd you build it then?

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

#255
post #2

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.

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.

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

#257
post #237

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.…

"likelihood" is only if you are more likely to be a perpetrator than a victim. Your insurance company pays more if you are at fault, so they'd prefer to prove you innocent.

Or they throw you under the bus. To be liable for all damages. Because they find reason to do so with exclusions they have on policy.

I believe any box or anything that monitors car will be used by insurance company to simply not pay up.

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

#258
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course the data collected is going to say that as the insurance companies aren't in business to charge people LESS money. Isn't that what they did in paragraph 1?

My reading is the lower initial price is a incentive to allow the company to collect data. The data can then be used as evidence of poor driving, which then allows the company to raise prices. Although I've never used such a tracker, my understanding is they use proxy metrics for safety (accelerometer thresholds vs. accident record) that can facilitate this.

Having worked in the insurance industry, and spent a fair amount of time chatting to the underwriting team about what goes into their models, they do on the whole use this data in a straight forward way - if you drive well, you'll get a lower rate. If you drive badly they're going to charge you for the privilege.

Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a bit of "but we can charge more" baked into the pricing models, but that tends to go in as a completely separate "we can charge more" line item within the internal model. This if nothing else is because in the UK the Financial Conduct Authority have an extensive list of things you can not price on, regardless of whether your models show they're indicative of a greater risk. The FCA don't care if you're charging more than you have to, but they will tear you a new one if you're shown to be breaking the rules.

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

#259

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…

> can you trivially determine somebody's home address

Well, your phone has already done that - Waze "helpfully" auto-populated my home and work address for me.

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

#260
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reading is the lower initial price is a incentive to allow the company to collect data. The data can then be used as evidence of poor driving, which then allows the company to raise prices. Although I've never used such a tracker, my understanding is they use proxy metrics for safety (accelerometer thresholds vs. accident record) that can facilitate this.

I know someone who's an actuary, and the reality is much simpler: people who consent to tracking tend to be safer drivers because they aren't afraid of the insurance company seeing their driving habits. It gives the insurance company a way to identify a lower risk group of drivers so they can charge that group lower prices.

> people who consent to tracking tend to be safer drivers because they aren't afraid of the insurance company seeing their driving habits

Is that true? The handful people I know who have/had these devices are definitely wouldn’t fit that category. And most removed it after a while because their premiums went back up (because of their driving). They just chose it because it offered cheaper rates and they all said the companies promised it would not raise rates above what they were already paying. So it was a “what do I have to lose” decision.

Obviously anecdotes aren’t data. I think it makes sense that the drivers that are egregiously unsafe (and know it) will avoid them. But it would take seeing actual data to make it clear to me that the majority of people who consent are safer drivers.

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