Car Insurers Find Tracking Devices Are a Tough Sell

Once interviewed with a company writing the web interface for users with these devices.<p>Them: So as you can see here, we have a user in Florida who had 3 hard brakes and an excess speed reading in the past month.<p>Me: Interesting.<p>Them: Ooops. Clicked wrong button. She&#x27;s going to have reset her password next time she logs in.<p>Me: That was an actual user?<p>Them: Yes, that&#x27;s the live system.<p>They told me they were popular with drivers looking for a discount with online insurers.

There&#x27;s a lot of pessimism ITT, but I&#x27;d like to say: As a new driver, I love these things. I started off with a multi-thousand insurance bill yearly, even with the cheapest insurance I could find. This is simply because I am young, male, and had to buy my own car - I don&#x27;t think the insurance company was screwing me over, I&#x27;m just a high-risk demographic.<p>However, I&#x27;m a fairly cautious driver - why should I have to pay for the indiscretions of other people in my demographic? I signed up for a UBI program and received a device that tracks<p>* How long I drive over 120km&#x2F;h<p>* When I drive<p>* How often I brake hard<p>I don&#x27;t consider this a huge breach of my privacy, and it has saved me over $5000 so far. If it required GPS my tune might change, but across 3 different insurance companies I&#x27;ve never seen a program like that. Maybe if I had the luxury of belonging to a low-risk demographic I would be more sensitive, but for people like me these programs are a godsend.<p>(Full disclosure: I have not read the linked article due to paywall)

True story, last night I was driving on the motorway, just cruising at about 60mph. &quot;You are breaking the speed limit!&quot; my GPS announced. She thought I was on a 30mph limit road that runs parallel for a bit, about 50ft to the left. Do I want my car snitching on me to the insurance company or the po-po? Not a chance I will ever risk getting a tracking device fitted.

Where I live car insurance is very comprehensive and one of biggest reasons why people insure their cars is as protection for theft.<p>For the most popular cars, the ones at higher risk of being stolen, tracking is mandatory. All insurance companies require it, otherwise they won&#x27;t insure your car.<p>So, with the justification of a higher risk and by acting in a coordinated manner, peruvian insurance companies (4 which control the market) have effectively deployed a vast tracking network.<p>Don&#x27;t know if something similar could happen in the US, there are too many insurance companies as to easily establish common policies across the board and I suspect that it would be harder to come up with a credible justification for it.

I have one and don&#x27;t mind at all. My insurance company is also my health-insurance provider and would know immediately if I have an accident, so they&#x27;d call me and if no answer would send help automatically. If my car is stolen, they can track it. They have a clause that prevents them from using the data against me in e.g. an accident claim. I get up to 50% of my fuel cost back monthly if I drive well and e.g. check my tire condition yearly (although linked to household insurance as well). I have friends with fast cars that wouldn&#x27;t touch this and that&#x27;s fine - keeps my premiums down because I&#x27;m not subsidizing their behavior.<p>I&#x27;d rather have them tracking me than my Android device, say:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;timeline" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;maps&#x2F;timeline</a>

&quot;And here is the Apple Watch that tells us every time you smoke a cigarette, or think something shameful. Healthy mind healthy body.&quot;

I wonder if one way to make better use of this data is to restrict what detail the insurance company can see. For example, you could imagine an arrangement where a third party vendor subject to strict controls gets the raw data and produces summarized scores, for example the frequency of hard brakes. Insurance companies would then only see these summaries, which could be challenged by customers, and can only vary premiums based on the summaries.

At the risk of sounding cynical: how long before the insurance providers lobby the government to make these trackers mandatory because they enforce &quot;safety?&quot;

Someone should build an insurance company for Teslas. Build it as a Tesla app connected to the log data. No need for creepy trackers, they&#x27;re already built in ;)

Sell my privacy for a tiny discount of giving away money and getting nothing in return? Sign me up.

Good. I hope this idea dies quickly.

My brother recently got one of these on his car, but he found he really didn&#x27;t save anything by having it. Based simply on the amount of time driving during &quot;peak hours&quot;, namely rush hour&#x2F;when everyone is leaving work, he lost any discount he was pitched by the insurance company. This isn&#x27;t really anything he has any control over.<p>In that case he seems to be getting a snow job from an insurance company that is using the the idea of quantified self&#x2F;living to seize a larger part of its customers&#x27; lives, likely without really paying them back anything for the intrusion.

If car insurers want to make them an easy sell try solving a harder problem than just small discounts. Register a car in the city of Detroit and your insurance rate goes up 200-300%.<p>How about a device that you can activate from your cell phone that not only tracks your car but actually shuts it down? People would be creeped out by tracking but if you can save 70% on your insurance and at the same time more likely save your car from the chop shops it would be a win for everyone. Then have a private service that retrieves the cars so the police can work on more serious crimes.

These devices would be easier to swallow if you could view the data that&#x27;s being collected, knew how your score is being calculated, and had a chance to appeal errors&#x2F;anomalies.

From the article:<p><i>&quot;Smartphones have made Americans more comfortable with location tracking.&quot;</i><p>&quot;<i>Privacy already has shifted from being a right to a good that is purchased.&quot;</i><p>Right.

This article touched on the fact that additional information these sensors provide is interpreted in a traditional context.<p>&quot;Early company surveys of people’s interest in usage-based insurance revealed that about 40% of people had a viewpoint that was some variation on “No way in hell.”<p>followed by<p>&quot;Progressive concluded Snapshot was overestimating the potential for accidents from midnight to 4 a.m. driving on week nights, and now considers late-night driving to be high-risk only on weekends.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s why people don&#x27;t want to tell their insurance company anything more than the minimum. The insurance companies thought driving at night was risky and it wasn&#x27;t until they had snapshot telling them that just because someone works 3rd shift isn&#x27;t an inherently higher risk did they not pull their head out of their butt. So now, via snapshot they can offer competitive rates to people on 3rd shift whereas before they&#x27;d just have jacked the rates on the few that were unlucky enough to file a claim for something happening in the evening. Um, hooray?

Hard-braking: A+ Speed: A+ Peak risk hours: A+ Distance: C-<p>Because I drove over 7500 miles per year, I got the minimum discount (1%) - apparently experience decreases skill level ;)<p>As soon as the initial 6 month 10% discount was reduced to 1%, I dropped the device.

In the UK these are being pushed as a smartphone app