Insurers Know How Often American Drivers Touch Their Phones

I wish the journalist had asked more about this seemingly alarming statistic:<p>&quot;Zendrive now has its monitoring technology on 60 million phones, roughly one of every four U.S. drivers&quot;<p>For example: How did this &quot;monitoring technology&quot; get on 60M phones? Do the owners know it&#x27;s there? Is it hidden in other apps? Is there clear disclosure of its existence in those apps? What is done with this data? Who has access? Is it anonymized? Is it sold to third parties? Is it used for advertising or other non-safety-related purposes? How do they distinguish between drivers and passengers? What do they do about COPPA if it&#x27;s on the phone of an under-13-year-old? Etc.

Just bin case anyone needs a datapoint on whether or not Zendrive is a creepy data mining and privacy-invasive kind of company...<p>When I went to their website, I was soon greeted with a chatbot that asked&quot;:<p>&quot;Welcome $myCompanyName! What brought you here to check us out?&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve never visited them before. I&#x27;m at an office that shares an internet facing IP address with another company (I might go ask one of them to visit the site, to see if they&#x27;ve just linked that IP address to the company I work for, or if they&#x27;re even creepier than that...)<p>Sneaking a look in dev tools is <i>interesting</i>...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;js.driftt.com&#x2F;embeds&#x2F;1556584410000&#x2F;w8e7my5ng92y.json" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;js.driftt.com&#x2F;embeds&#x2F;1556584410000&#x2F;w8e7my5ng92y.json</a><p>Looks like they&#x27;re specifically targeting 18 companies with tailored messages and CTAs.

Are they accounting for carpooling&#x2F;passengers? I drive into work with my wife every morning, and often check my phone en-route while she&#x27;s driving.<p>This is an important problem, but ham fisted solutions which invade privacy are not the answer. We need better regulation of this stuff.

Surveillance of 60 million devices? Do the users all know?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;technology&#x2F;la-fi-tn-ride-hailing-safety-20160526-snap-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.latimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;technology&#x2F;la-fi-tn-ride-ha...</a><p>&quot;The company doesn&#x27;t work directly with services such as Uber and Lyft, but a number of apps, such as Sherpashare (which is primarily used by ride-hailing drivers for services like Uber and Lyft), HopSkipDrive, eDriving and a variety of navigation apps use Zendrive&#x27;s technology to monitor ride safety.&quot;<p>Hurray for malware. What other apps is this hiding in?

The article doesn’t seem to make the distinction between direct cell phone use and that done through an car-specific UI like Android Auto or CarPlay.<p>Will I be charged more for my insurance for selecting a podcast?<p>Why am I not charged more for changing the climate controls through a touchscreen UI that might require the same level of attention?

&gt; Zendrive now has its monitoring technology on 60 million phones,<p>How do they have their surveillance tech on so many phones? Do people know that&#x27;s what&#x27;s going on?

It should be treated in the same class as driving while drinking. If you are in an accident that involved your phone usage you have to put your phone in a box before you can start your car or some similar mechanism to the in car breathalyzer.<p>I am the only person in my family I know that doesn&#x27;t use my phone while driving. Something I don&#x27;t think has been addressed here is that there is much less social pressure on people to not use phones while driving. Nobody would let someone drive a car if they knew they are drunk but many people allow others to use their phone while being the driver.

When will American cities prioritize good public transportation? It would be interesting to see what the differences are compared to cities that do, such as Singapore, Vienna and London.

While the data itself is valuable and shows worrying trends, its collection makes me even more worried.<p>If this trend of us collecting datapoints for every muscle twitch continues, we will not be needing a &quot;right to not incriminate oneself&quot; any more, our devices will be the ultimate provers of our guilt. We sign off our freedom for... what? 10 bucks a month savings in car insurance and &quot;you&#x27;re a Captain Picard!&quot; in a facebook &quot;which Trek character are you&quot; dumbass quiz?

&gt; The call ended abruptly when Balakrishnan—talking on a hands-free system—was rear-ended at a red light.<p>So the expert was doing something that has been demonstrated to be nearly as distracting.<p>I am very skeptical of this recent study. Yes, it’s good that drivers are looking forward instead of at their laps, but a good driver is looking all around and making risk calculations about people and cars not directly in front of them.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vtnews.vt.edu&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;020519-vtti-handsfreestudy.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vtnews.vt.edu&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;020519-vtti-handsfree...</a>

As a society, we&#x27;ve already dealt with an experience that is &quot;addictive&quot; where people &quot;can&#x27;t help themselves&quot;: drunk driving.<p>Societal pressure plus draconian penalties has put an end to omnipresent drunk driving. The same will work for distracted driving... but only if society decides to take action.

Smartphones are the cigarettes of this generation — expensive, addictive, unhealthy, and heavily pushed by big business.<p>Thirty years from now, people will look back on this time and wonder what the hell we were thinking. (The answer, of course, is that we weren&#x27;t, because we were too distracted by our phones to do so.)

One more reason to run your own VPN with something like PiHole to monitor, connect your phone to this VPN, and then block all shitty traffic like this.<p>Since this might be in Uber and Lyft apps, I wonder if disabling those apps till I need them will solve this issue.<p>However, in <i>n</i>-years time, when all insurance companies will start using this data openly and stupid politicians will pass laws to allow this, what will happen to all the privacy conscious people, will they even be able to buy insurance as reasonable rates?

I hope they do and I hope they do something about it. Distracted driving is a really bad idea, and you should not be touching your phone while you are driving.

My commute in SV is entirely surface streets (by design). Since moving here I have observed what I call the &quot;California stop&quot;: at a red light, drivers will stop 2-3 car lengths behind the next driver. Enough that a clever smart car driver could comfortably pull into the space.<p>Every time I see it, the driver is looking down at what I assume is a phone. They are so eager to get back to their phone they stop the car early.

Just bought car insurance, I asked the woman on the phone when I bought it &quot;what do you do with this data? Are you selling it?&quot; and she sounded somewhat incredulous that I would even ask such a thing. I declined even though they offered up to a 25% discount. I&#x27;ll admit it was difficult to decline, even for as much as I care about privacy.

What&#x27;s good about this is that it might allow a targeted solution (don&#x27;t compose long texts or watch movies will driving) instead of taking away responsible people&#x27;s ability to add a gas station stop to their trip, glance at some song lyrics in broad daylight with no traffic, or dictate voice notes while driving. The sense of responsibility that makes me slow down in bad conditions and leave a good following gap is plenty well tuned to make me a safe driver. The rules are needed by an entirely different class of people with less ability to imagine consequences and estimate risk.<p>Maybe I do need the rules to protect myself from those people, but I wish people wouldn&#x27;t get into this moral panic as though touching a cell phone is the equivalent of blacking out your windshield.

I would have to solve Google&#x27;s ReCaptcha to be able to read this article...<p>&gt; We&#x27;ve detected unusual activity from your computer network, To continue, please click the box below to let us know you&#x27;re not a robot.

What if the shortest path to widespread societal acceptance self-driving cars is by quickly making humans _really bad_ drivers?<p>Making phone-use irresistibly addictive is one such path, I think.

There was an earlier article (last year?) showing this is a simple feedback loop that could be fixed with a firmware upgrade to traffic lights:<p>If a red light sensor sees more than a 2? 5? second gap between cars, it will immediately switch from green to red.<p>People using cell phones at the stop light regularly create such gaps.<p>The gaps mean everyone waita multiple light cycles.<p>Knowing you will wait multiple light cycles encourages you to use your cell phone while you wait.

This is a completely misleading headline. The headline should be: &quot;Insurers know how often Americans who voluntarily choose to carry spy-phones (&quot;smart phones&quot;) are to look at their spy-phones while driving&quot;.<p>What&#x27;s worse is that many people in the comment section of this article seem to be surprised that they are being tracked by the tracking devices they choose to carry.

Using your radio has been shown to be just as distracting or more distracting yet we allow that. Their is no data presented in the article that shows any even attempted casualty. For example, they note that usage of devices is up and yet fatalities are down: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nhtsa.gov&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;us-dot-announces-2017-roadway-fatalities-down" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nhtsa.gov&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;us-dot-announces-2017-r...</a><p>And lest anyone claim this is due to safety items like advanced airbags, that same article shows _pedestrian_ fatalities are also down.<p>Now this could be for a host of factors. But the article isn&#x27;t anything other than a scare fest and a reminder that anyone from FB talking about potential privacy issues should be shamed into silence.

I&#x27;d love to add this to an on phone blocker like Blockada [0] (tl;dr local VPN based HOSTS blocking app). Does anyone know if there&#x27;s a) a way to verify that this SDK is installed on my phone and b) if it&#x27;s using a shared &#x2F; single set of hostnames for reporting so that they can be blocked?<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blokada.org&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blokada.org&#x2F;index.html</a>

Is there a chance that my insurance company&#x27;s app is tracking this? Presumably an iOS app can&#x27;t access accelerometer data when it isn&#x27;t open (and it rarely is).

Gee, an insurance company asks people whether they drive safely, gets wildly optimistic responses, and concludes people have poor self-assessment. It&#x27;s certainly possible (Dunning-Kruger syndrome) but a more likely explanation is they simply lie to avoid a possible rise in their premiums.

What about passengers? My phone is always asking me if I’m driving for example when I’m trying to use Waze as a passenger

I got a nice phone holder and use Android Auto and &quot;Ok Google&quot; and barely touch my phone now

How to prevent shady mobile apps and SDKs to communicate with unauthorized data collection portals?

If anybody wants to check their logs it seems the hostname are:<p>- api-gateway.zendrive.com<p>- api.zendrive.com<p>- sdk-api.zendrive.com

How do they know this?