Car is spying on you, leading to higher insurance rates • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by kelnos » Tue, Mar 19, 2024, 2:10 AM UTC

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,…

> 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?

The question is, though, does "hard braking" actually correlate to being more likely to cause an accident? I don't think anyone has supported these assertions with evidence.

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

#72

Post by kelnos » Tue, Mar 19, 2024, 2:14 AM UTC

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.

> rapid acceleration and braking are symptoms of bad driving

Big fat "citation needed". I haven't seen convincing evidence that supports this at all.

And even if such evidence exists, I think there are a lot of edge cases: like what if your daily commute involves entering or leaving a highway where the ramp is unusually short? You're going to have to accelerate hard to come up to speed, or brake hard to get down to a safe speed. Should people be penalized for that? I would hope not, that the software would consider that to be infrequent, but I don't trust other people's closed-source software to make decisions that can greatly affect people's finances.

(For the record, I don't think I accelerate or brake particularly hard all that often, so I'm not trying to protect myself here; I have no dog in this race aside from a desire to protect people's privacy and minimize surveillance capitalism.)

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

#73

Post by kelnos » Tue, Mar 19, 2024, 2:15 AM UTC

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 firmly disagree with notion that "driving a long time" is the same as "driving well" or "being experienced"

As they say, some people have 30 years of experience, and others have 1 year of experience, 30 times.

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

#74

Post by kelnos » Tue, Mar 19, 2024, 2:17 AM UTC

krastanov wrote: post #31

prepend wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s rapid acceleration? What’s hard braking? Are the cars measuring it accurately? Why do I want my property reporting this data without my consent?

It is a balance though. I do not like my property doing this type of reporting and I equally dislike someone else's property reporting data about me (e.g. a speed camera). But I do want everyone that uses a public good for which we pay together (roads) to follow certain rules and I want those rules enforced. These two preferences of mine are in conflict, as it is usual when considering the "commons".

This has nothing to do with rules enforcement, though. This just affects insurance premiums.