Comment by mycologos
1 year ago
I think there are a few reasons to be mad about this, but some are better than others:
1) People don't understand they're being monitored. I think this is a good reason to be mad. People should have some understanding of the agreements they make. It's part of being a functional adult in the world. It's also annoying that the companies keep spinning this as a tool to improve your driving, when it's clearly an attempt to price insurance against a person's actual driving habits.
2) The system's assessments are opaque. I don't have a good sense of how accurate any of these measurements are, nor what system is in place to ensure that. If the information collected is consequential enough to double a person's insurance costs, there should be some effort expended to be confident that the collected metrics actually reflect reality. I didn't see anything like that in the article, maybe I missed it, but it shouldn't just be some random team in a private company doing their best.
3) People's driving habits shouldn't be shared with insurance companies. This one ... this one I think is not great. It looks like the shared data at least tries to be anonymous -- they share driving behavior and times, but not actual location data. Heck, I'd be fine with scrubbing the times and just sharing the hard start and stop and speeding numbers (assuming point 2 above is addressed). I get that a knee-jerk defensiveness about privacy would make Thomas Jefferson proud or whatever, but we strike balances on public welfare and private freedom all the time. If you're itching to manufacture 1 gram of ricin to put in a sealed glass vial above your mantle, too bad, you can't. Cars aren't ricin, but they are the shortest path between most humans and homicide. If this kind of intervention induces people to be more careful to keep their current insurance rates, I think that's reasonable. Driving like a maniac is not a human right or a protected characteristic.
I've avoided accidents by hard breaking twice in the last two years, once from deer bounding into the road, and once from a deaf old cat walking into the street.
I haven't been cited for anything in decades, and have never been in an at-fault accident. I drive the speed limit and have a dashcam. With the deer, I was actually 10 MPH under the limit.
So should my rates go up for these incidents where I successfully avoided hitting something? Insurers are unscrupulous and would use any excuse.
No, thanks. I'll share nothing.
Amen. It's their job to calculate risk. Not my job to be "transparent". The ratchet only goes in one direction.
I won't be an Amazon driver in my own car.
But they have the tech to collect the data and make extra cash by selling it and making you an Amazon driver in your own car. So if they can, they will. Unless there’s something to stop them. Which in the absence of their goodwill would be legislation.
Unfortunately legislation representing anything other than big money interests is difficult and rare to pass.
The insurance company would argue that you drive in an area with wildlife crossings. That makes you a higher risk even if you managed to avoid this deer. You are more likely than average to encounter another one in the future and may not be as fortunate.
I did pest control for a while, and my truck was equipped with a monitoring device that would beep if it detected unsafe driving. The thing was inconsistent enough to be nearly indistinguishible from random. It sometimes nagged me while driving straight at normal speeds, or going over a pot hole, or just stopping like normal at a stop light. At other times, it wouldn't go off for what should have been obvious "offenses"—hard stops, last-second swerves to avoid road debris, etc.
All in all, I think it was useless for actually policing driving behavior, but I did get identified (read: randomly selected) as the safest driver in the branch one month and got a bonus, so I guess that was nice?
I drove a newer Subaru for a couple days and it had a "feature" like this with a camera pointed at the driver that would beep if it thought you weren't paying enough attention. Just like the pest control truck it was innacurate to the point of being totally useless and very annoying. The stupidest part was that it couldn't be disabled. I was a happy Subaru owner for many years but the driver camera and a few other modern owner-hostile features totally turned me off to the company.
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Did your rates go up? Or is this a straw man argument?
They didn't, since my insurer was unaware of these events.
Location can be relevant. There is both a quarter mile drag strip by me and a circuit lap by me that both allow you to drive your own car on them.
Both styles of driving would be... Alarming from a telemetry perspective.
Afaik neither is covered by regular auto insurance anyways so it really shouldn't factor into rates. There's specific racing insurance, but it's quite pricey.
Not that I want them sharing location data, but pure acceleration/velocity data won't show areas like that.
I'm also not sure how well regionalized the data is. Though neither is good, there's a very big difference between going 15 over on the highway and going 15 over on back country roads with blind turns. Or between going 15 over on the highway vs in a shopping center parking lot.
Speeding is contextual.
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 data but it is very very wrong)
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 seen and responded to earlier (eg following too closely and having to slam the brakes, not seeing someone merging, not slowing down for a yellow light, etc).
Basically that a safe driver would have a fairly smooth acceleration/deceleration profile because they're aware of what's happening around them and pre-plan accordingly. If someone wants to merge in, give them room and then back up enough that you can brake slowly if something happens.
I still don't want to be tracked, but their metrics seemed sane at first pass.
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Just like any other data collection and “tailored” to it service the only purpose is to justify a charge not to actually work. Targeted ads work better than traditional ones? Who knows but how can you say that your service is better if it has nothing innovative. Just like “feature-rich” devices is just a sales pitch.
>People should have some understanding of the agreements they make.
People do not engage in meetings of the minds on these types of things. Manufacturers/insurance companies enter into agreements (and leave stickers that are unlikely to be read) which is a clear violation (imo) of contract law.
It's one thing to be aware of agreements you make, it is another to navigate a corporate surveillance hellscape of on by default consentless surveillance a bunch of psychopayhic corporate types greenlit.
> it's clearly an attempt to price insurance against a person's actual driving habits.
I think it's a combination of two strategies.
1) searching for a reason to not pay a claim.
2) searching for a reason to increase your pricing, while hiding average driver behavior from you to increase their bargaining power
> It looks like the shared data at least tries to be anonymous
One of the main points of the article is that insurance companies are using the data to raise drivers' rates. How can they do that if the data is anonymous?
The car company can share the details based on the chassis VIN number rather than driver details.
Then the insurance company grabs the vehicle registration number when you ask for a quote and looks up the VIN on their side based on a security database to prevent resale of stolen cars or similar.
Anonymous data becomes identifiable data...
> The car company can share the details based on the chassis VIN number rather than driver details.
That's hardly anonymized data! It's more obscured.
Ah, anonymous was the wrong word. I meant instead that the shared data tries to restrict itself to information that doesn't obviously fall under a right to privacy. For example, trip times are shared, but locations are not.
The flow of traffic on the highways where I live is consistently 15-20 mph above the posted limit. I wish everyone would slow down, but that doesn't change the fact that the safest way to merge is to accelerate hard and match their speed. The last thing I need is a financial incentive to be oblivious to my surroundings.
The only speeding ticket I’ve gotten in the past 20 years was for speeding on the on-ramp to get up to the speed of the highway traffic. Holiday weekend, so it was stop, ticket, and release. Repeat. No warnings given.