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Car insurers accused of discriminating against people with Hotmail accounts
- zdfjkhiuj 9y agoSomeone with a HotMail account has managed to keep a consistent address for about twenty years. That is a good thing. The idea that they should ditch HotMail for the functionally equivalent GMail just because GMail is popular is, of course, idiotic. But this is an insurance company, so it is plausible that they crunched the numbers and found a real effect.
- acct1771 9y agoOr...too lacking in ambition to find a proper service and forward the previous address?
- icebraining 9y agoLacking in ambition sounds good from an actuarial point of view.
- Alex3917 9y agoI still log into my old Hotmail account every few months just to keep it from getting deleted. It’s a complete piece of shit, it’s not even usable let alone comparable in any way to gmail.
- executesorder66 9y agoIf it's a complete piece of shit, why do you want to prevent it from being deleted?
- tobltobs 9y agomaybe he has a forward to a usable email account.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y agoIn my case, I've maintained old email addresses when: 1) A website ties accounts to email addresses and doesn't allow changing them, and 2) the email provider recycles expired addresses, i.e. a new user could sign up for my old address.
- Alex3917 9y agoFor historical reasons, in case there were ever some account on some rarely used service where I forgot to change the email, and in case I ever need to build something on the MS Graph API.
- Markoff 9y agoI find outlook.com aka hotmail vastly superior to cluttered gmail, are your sure you even tried it?
- skinnymuch 9y agoAre you using outlook.com? How is it a complete piece of shit? Microsoft improved it quite a bit. It’s different than Gmail, but far from awful.
- JauntyHatAngle 9y ago>The idea that they should ditch HotMail for the functionally equivalent GMail just because GMail is popular is, of course, idiotic. I think the "functionally equivalent" part is quite arguable, at least it was in the past when many techies made the switch from hotmail to gmail. People switched because the features and interface were far superior.
- zdfjkhiuj 9y ago>People switched because the features and interface were far superior. No one should use the web interface, let alone "techies." Use a real email client and everything behaves identically.
- JauntyHatAngle 9y agoNot really, portability was not easy to accomplish back then when you were constantly shifting between work stations and different setups. Even to this day, I don't know of an easy way to switch between fresh devices all the time and use a "real" email client. I don't see the problem with someone preferring gmail - personally the +suffix tagging was what I still use to this day.
- sniglom 9y agoWell, you could also see it like, somebody not interested in switching to better alternatives, even after 20 years. Say, driving a 20 year old car even though there are safer alternatives available.
- megaman22 9y agoI would not be surprised if there is a correlation between maintaining a hotmail or yahoo account and poor decision-making impacting one's driving record.
- lunulata 9y agorightfully so, i use my hotmail for junk too. its a crummy service compared to like gmail. hotmail pretty much lets most spam through to the inbox
- ModernMech 9y agoIf Hotmail uses the same backend as Outlook, I cannot agree; I've never felt like I've gotten spam of any kind. Today, e-mail spam seems to bee a solved problem from my own user perspective. The next big thing to tackle is telemarketer phone spam.
- akira2501 9y ago> Today, e-mail spam seems to bee a solved problem from my own user perspective. Honest question.. how long have you had the email addresses you're using for comparison? I've had the same email for the past 12 years, corporate, and now moved into O365. It's _average_ for spam filtering as far as my subjective experience goes.
- ReverseCold 9y agoSame email for past 8 years, all (100%) of the spam goes directly into the spam folder where it belongs. Marketing emails go into "promotions" - but I could probably unsubscribe from those if I wanted. The only messages in my inbox are either from real people or are otherwise notifications I want to get.
- oneweekwonder 9y ago> The next big thing to tackle is telemarketer phone spam. Even tried to use a new number, worked for a year or two and it got leaked to some telemarketer. With the effort involved to change my number again. I decided to try a new tactic; waste their time. They call me, I identify it is spam(eg first name instead of real name) and ask them to hold and then go silent/ghost until they hang-up. I feel guilty to hear "sir, sir, voice of despair sir... beep beep beep" because I worked in a call center and understand these guys just want to make a living. I tried to be nice and asked my number to be removed, no luck. I engage and then waste their time and now suddenly I stop to get telemarketer calls?! On a side-note I feel like I started to receive more SMS spam. So I'm now at the point of wanting to opt-in so that they can call me to waste their time. _sigh_
- searealist 9y agoI wonder if a computer noticed that a hotmail account was correlated with more payouts. https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/29/a-i-bias-doesnt-mean-what-journalists-want-you-to-think-it-means/ https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/29/a-i-bias-doesnt-mean-what...
- to3m 9y agoI don't know about Mahapatra, but Stuccio is a denizen of this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yummyfajitas https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yummyfajitas
- searealist 9y agoHe was either banned or left after being threatened with a ban. Check his last post time.
- sah2ed 9y agoThanks for the link. I found some fairly interesting articles there.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoWhat would you rather have? Insurers using broad classes and heuristics about you to put you in a bucket that may not always be fair, or a company like Google who knows about your life to an extreme amount of detail calculating exactly how much risk you pose and providing that to the insurers as a service? If you don't want to be put by insurers into buckets, well, all I can say is, be careful what you wish for.
- discoursism 9y agoPersonally, I'd rather car insurance were tailored as individually as possible. If I could get that option without my data ever leaving Google's silo, I would do it in a heartbeat. Then again, I know I'm very low risk compared to most people. In general, I do think it's good that people pay insurance based on the real risk of loss they pose. I'm fine with this in the case of umbrella insurance, car insurance, home insurance, life insurance, etc. The only exception I have is health insurance, because I don't think people should die of curable illnesses, just because they can't afford treatment. But if someone poses a high risk of causing a car accident, I prefer that they not be able to drive. If someone is likely to burn their house down (maybe they're into basement welding), they probably should have to pay more to insure it. Insurance companies know that many people would prefer to subject themselves to the panopticon to save money, which is why some of them are starting to offer the option of installing a speed tracker in your car, among other things. I recognize that this is not everyone's preference of course, but you asked, so I thought I might give you some perspective from someone who thinks differently from you.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoI don't necessarily disagree with you. I posed that question because if Google actually did provide that kind of service, people here would be up in arms against it. And god forbid if Facebook or Uber did [mind you that Uber is in a reasonably good position to], they would be sharpening the guillotines and calling for Zuck's and Travis' heads.
- scarmig 9y ago
- mxuribe 9y agoSo, I wonder what fees they charge for @aol email accounts?
- jimjimjim 9y agorant: another weird symptom of the world rapidly turning into shit. It seems like more knowledge only makes the world worse. For a consumer there is very very very little benefit of corporations knowing anything about you. The entire concept of insurance is to lessen the financial impact of an unfortunate event by everyone contributing a smaller amount. Fighting against this principle is insurance companies that want to keep accepting money but really don't want to hand it out again. To do this they will disadvantage anyone who is more likely to need their money. Some things make sense, maybe smokers should pay more for health insurance but with more and more data mining they will be able to find trends where people that do X might be 0.001% more likely to claim and will therefore charge them more. If you happen to also do X you will pay more even if you yourself arn't more likely to claim. and when they chuck ML/AI into the mix to look for trends it will just get worse.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoSo you think it would be better if insurance companies knew exactly all the details of your life so they could custom design your premium for you? Because that is the real outcome of making premiums specifically catered to your life experiences as opposed to general buckets. If everyone were charged the same premium, your premiums would actually be much more, because now you would be deemed as posing the same amount of risk on the road as a person who has caused 5 accidents over 10 years. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
- jimjimjim 9y agono, definitely not! god no! that does away with the idea of insurance. what if your genes said that you were 15% more likely to get cancer and all the insurance companies won't accept you? what if to keep your premiums you had to not eat bacon? hellish!
- vbrendel 9y agoSo what email address should I get that will most reduce my risk of crashing my car?
- hkmurakami 9y agoProbably Hotmail, since without insurance you won't be allowed to buy a car at a dealership, thereby reducing your overall likelihood of acquiring a vehicle, which in turn reduces the likelihood you drive, which in turn reduces the likelihood you crash your car.
- mustardo 9y agoNot sure if trolling... Correlation does not mean causation
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tim333 9y agoHow about @nasa.gov ? If you can help build rocket you can probably drive.
- jagger27 9y agoI think the real correlation here is with age. People who still use a Hotmail address are likely from carryovers of the MSN era, i.e. millenials.
- knz 9y agoMillennials?! My experience has always been that customers with email addresses at older services (Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink, AOL etc) are usually boomers that are using an account set up for them by their millennial aged grandchildren back in the 90's or early 2000's...
- zebraflask 9y agoExactly the demographic that will be more likely to exhibit impaired driving. This makes perfect sense.
- FabHK 9y agoExcept that age is almost certainly already a variable in the rating system, and its effect should be taken in account already.
- zebraflask 9y agoMy comment was a little tongue-in-cheek, but you make a good a point. As other posts have mentioned, the email would be a proxy for other factors associated with age that age by itself can't capture. If it's age at all. I'd bet it might be more closely associated with something harder to articulate or measure, along the lines of "a proclivity for clinging to subpar solutions." Someone who uses a subpar email service might also have ingrained poor driving habits.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoAaah, but it's not just age. It's also technical incompetence. People with Hotmail accounts are probably less likely to do their own maintenance, after all they haven't maintained their e-mail by moving to a provider with functional spam filtering. Their cars are more likely to break down. Not all insurance claims are due to accidents.
- interfixus 9y agoI have no clue about what it takes to run a profitable insurance business, so no opinion on the soundness of that practice. But I certainly do use metadata about people's communication in my general assessment of their relevance, trustfulness, clue level, etc. Do you use a Hotmail address? Well then, you really are out of it. Gmail? A lot sleaker, yes, but our conversation will be under third party scrutiny, and chances are that you haven't thought that part of it through. Your work mail for a private correspondance? I wouldn't do that in a million years, so yeah, your total score just went down a notch. Is that an Outlook client I see you're using? Fine, but sort of humdrum, and you are probably the kind of person who will send me .docx documents to read, and make a fuss when you get them back, formatting screwed up. And so on and so forth, most of it subconscious, but the evaluations stick, and mostly turn out to be accurate. And yes, I have made first sortings of job applicants on the the same kind of criteria.
- nickmooney 9y agoWait, you're saying that you intentionally favor job applicants based on your admittedly subconscious biases?
- interfixus 9y agoRead again. I said most of it subconscius. Whenever I have evaluated applications, I certainly have made the effort to be explicit about every criteria I've used. It's not a farfetched idea that the person sending a job application from the web client of a Gmail account is probably a different type than the one with a personal domain and running Thunderbird/Linux.
- stryk 9y agoThat's not really fair. There are a lot of folks who are bound to the MS Office suite not by choice, but because that's what the corporate system of their employer uses.
- interfixus 9y agoIn which case we are talking work mail. My evaluation won't really concern someone personally, then, but the organisation they work for.
- 013a 9y agoIts obvious why this is happening; some form of statistical modeling or AI correlated having a hotmail account with being higher risk. This is a serious problem with all AI that makes decisions like this. Having a Hotmail account is a symptom of a problem which could lead to higher risk, but it is judging that symptom as if it is a cause which leads to risk. Its exactly similar to the supposition that black people statistically commit more crime, and thus should pre-emptively receive harsher bail or be profiled. Unless you can scientifically prove that ethnicity causes crime to happen, its disgusting. This is obvious to us. In year's past, correlation fallacies might have meant that black people were profiled by police more. Today, it means that we build AIs which make life-ending decisions like determining repeat offender risk, visa status, employment decisions, all of which predetermines an unknown outcome by correlating your known qualities with the known outcome of people with similar qualities to you. We need regulation in place to stop any punitive decision making, public and private, which can be found in court to be based on correlation instead of causation.
- ra 9y agothat's sort of how insurance pricing works though. An actuarial process groups you with others based on similar attributes, and works out an overall risk value for you based on the combined risk profiles of the "groups" to which you belong. Historically, insurance companies only had things like postcode, gender, age, accident history to go off... but they're always interested in other data sets that could be used to modify pricing (or select less risky customers). Clearly someone or something has identified email domain as a factor (presumably based on data).
- tialaramex 9y agoThey don't want "less risky customers" in car insurance and similar markets they want: More customers (full stop, if you have customers then your competitors don't have them, so you grow and they fail) Customers who pay more money Correctly assessing risk is not irrelevant but it's a small factor. You will not go out of business if you get the risk factors slightly wrong, you will if you can't attract customers or if they don't pay. In markets where you insurer fewer, bigger customers you care even less about accurately computing their individual risk, and more about a problem called aggregate risk - if you ensure all the residential blocks in San Francisco against earthquake damage, the Big One wipes you out. Insure one such block in every US city and you're fine, the Big One means you take a loss in SF but not in New York or Seattle. But if they're all built from Newsteel and then it turns out Newsteel turns into mush after 25 years you're back to big problems. So you are suddenly very interested in understanding what is the Same about things you insure.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Wehrdo 9y agoI think the troubling aspect here is that these are actually statistically sound decisions. The company does not need to have a strong implication that Hotmail -> bad driver. They only need to know that P(bad driver | Hotmail) > P(bad driver | Gmail). And through some correlation (many of the theories proposed by others seem plausible), this apparently holds. As developers of these systems, we need to be careful of how we might apply superficial correlations like these, so that we don't cause harm and burden to those who happen to be caught up in them through no fault of their own. As a side note, I happen to have a 10+ year old Hotmail account that I use for signing up to services. My Gmail address is only given out to real people. Personally, I view it as a testament to my diligence that I have managed to give my email out to hundreds of websites, several of which have had database breaches, and still only see one or two unwanted emails per week.
- tuna-piano 9y agoLike those who are of a certain gender and are charged more?[1] Or those from a certain zip code who are charged more? [2] Or those who drive a certain car model who are charged more? [3] How is email address any different? [1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/insurance/teen-boys-high-car-insurance-quotes/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/insurance/teen-boys-high-car... [2] http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ten-worst-zip-codes-car-insurance-20150126-story.html http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ten-worst-zip... [3] https://electrek.co/2017/06/05/tesla-owners-insurance-rates/ https://electrek.co/2017/06/05/tesla-owners-insurance-rates/
- GhostVII 9y agoIts much easier to change your email than your gender or zip code. Charging different amounts based on a car model makes sense though, some cars are much safer than others.
- radix07 9y agoYes, the people that STILL haven't bothered to change from Hotmail even though it's quite easy are more likely to not be good drivers. I don't think the difficulty of changing the factor should matter, in fact I'd say the easier they are to change the more impact they likely have as it may show laziness (higher risk). Having these factors be openly noted however would be important.
- beagle3 9y agoRelated: Capital One was giving different loans based on browser used[0]. [0] https://consumerist.com/2010/11/01/capital-one-made-me-different-loan-offers-depending-on-which-browser-i-used/ https://consumerist.com/2010/11/01/capital-one-made-me-diffe...
- CornishPasty 9y agoWhy am I not surprised that it's Admiral, one of the worst car insurers I've ever had the misfortune to deal with.
- DoubleGlazing 9y agoThe same company that wanted to force people to give them access to their social media to help determine their premiums. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/02/admiral-to-price-car-insurance-based-on-facebook-posts https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/02/admiral-t... Thankfully, facebook put a stop to it. But if they hadn't I'm certain it would have become a common practice.
- arethuza 9y agoCompared to some of the antics we had with Direct Line, Admiral have been really good - not had any serious problems and when my wife crashed my car last year they looked after everything pretty well.
- sniglom 9y agoIf you're an awful company, you surely need to make sure that your data is more accurate than the competition. It's like running an awful store, it's doable with prices low enough.
- andrewaylett 9y agoI received an email from Admiral yesterday, which seems related but not completely: """ You may have seen a story in the news which claims we use customers' names to price our insurance based on race. This is 100% not the case and we do not, and have never, used this information to provide a price to our customers. I'm sorry if this story has caused you any concerns. To offer our prices we use a complex rating structure and rate on many different variables and data sources. The journalists have misunderstood our pricing structure and the insurance quotes in the story are not like for like. This email is to offer you an explanation of the press story and to offer my apologies for any concern caused. There is no need for you to take any action. """ Not sure which story that's referring to; seems somewhat different to (and much worse than) this one. On a slightly different note: that old "trick" of adding an experienced driver to one's insurance has always seemed a bit odd to me. And as a 36-year-old, I have to say I'd assumed I was already past the point of its applicability. But I had cause to add my mother to an Admiral policy this week, and was very surprised to discover that adding her would give me a refund.
- KozmoNau7 9y agoThere was a story going around where apparently the premium was significantly higher if you put your name as "Mohammed", rather than "John".
- tialaramex 9y agoThere's loads of crazy stuff like that. The quote system asks if your car has anything added to it, like roof racks, spoilers, tow bar, body kit. You go "Oh yeah, a tow bar" thinking crap this will cost extra and their backend correlation engine figures "tow bar, probably caravan trailer, old boring safe driver, low risk" and you get a discount. The UK government gave insurers direct electronic access to driving license records. If you tell them your details they can instantly check if you've got points, or have been disqualified from driving. Insurers ask for your license details. To use the government database right? Nope, that's a bunch of expensive R&D, if you make it optional, people with bad records just say they don't know their license number, charge them more. Simple, no extra R&D needed.
- isp 9y agoMore worryingly, they also appear to be using first name to influence insurance prices. Which is problematic, since first name correlates with race. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16212991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16212991
- peoplewindow 9y agoFrankly maybe they should just be allowed to charge differential prices based on race. If race correlates with different insurance outcomes for some reason then covering up the symptoms doesn't change anything, the same link might just end up being discovered by an ML system via other signals. I've seen ML repeatedly discover inconvenient truths in other (non individual related) contexts and suppressing the feature it was using to make the connection just caused it to find worse equivalents based on combinations of other features. My sympathy is somewhat limited because in recent times it feels like there's plenty of explicit racism in the world against whites, like the BBC constantly posting internships and job ads that specifically forbid white people from applying. If western societies have somehow concluded that it's OK to engage in that sort of thing, then why shouldn't race be a factor in insurance contributions? At least that has some sort of coherent argument for why it's a good thing (more accurate premiums for everyone).
- mattmanser 9y agoFirstly, it's correlation not causation though, at the moment certain names are associated with lower economic status and poor education, purely because immigrants take time to accrue assets and move up the ladder, and certain races have been historically heavily discriminated against and so were forced into lower economic statuses and worse schools. Secondly, you seem to be against positive discrimination (which I was for a time). All you have to do to change your mind is look at the actual statistics. We've been trying to not discriminate for over a generation, for over 30/40 years. For example, how many female executives are there? How many female politicians are there? In the UK, for example, both those numbers were terrible. No, for politicians, we've got all-women short lists, and it's working, the numbers are starting to approach an even balance. We've even just got our second female Prime Minister, before the US even managed one. It's basically a tiny percentage. People like employing people in their "club". People just like them. For well paid people, that's the white, male club. Maybe it's subconscious racism, maybe it's concious racism, maybe it's simply network effects, it doesn't matter. What matters is that we've tried the "we don't discriminate" path for over a generation, it didn't work and therefore positive discrimination is necessary to correct imbalances in many fields. At some point we'll be able to stop, but simply saying that as a society we wouldn't discriminate any more didn't work.
- danieltillett 9y agoMy wife runs a online consumer facing business and her experience is hotmail account users are significantly more of a pain than any other email account type. They seem to be less able to understand instructions - it is a bit of a running joke in our house whenever she complains to me about some painful customer I ask her if they are a hotmail customer.
- tobltobs 9y agoI can second this. If I get a support email from a hotmail user the first thing I do is to refund them their upgrade payment, because most of the time it is completely hopeless. Another pita with hotmail users is when they click the "Report spam" button on email address confirmation emails ...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- CogitoCogito 9y agoConsidering drivers are legally required to have insurance, the insurers should at minimum be legally required to provide a readable itemized explanation for their cost decision. I.e. this accident was factored in this much, your email domain was factored in this much, your race was factored in this much, etc. In other words, they should be required to explain the full details of whatever model they are using. Also potentially the actual variables allowed in this computation should be white-listed by regulators. I.e. you can't use email domains because they were never allowed in the first place. All of this could be considered "anti-innovation" or whatever, but I see it as the minimal consumer protection that should be provided for a service that drivers may *not skip.
- magoon 9y agoI do use Gmail. But I give my hotmail address to companies (like insurers), which ultimately forwards to my gmail.
- philipodonnell 9y agoHere's a bonus messed up way of discriminating that auto insurance companies do. The minimum liability coverage in many states is $10K. However, every major insurance company insists they always recommend $100K. The average liability claim in an auto accident is around $15K. However, if you look at that and think, hey, I have liquid funds, $10K - $100K isn't that big a gap for me, and if $15K is the average then $10K seems like a pretty good economic level. Guess what? The insurance companies have decided that having the minimum $10K worth of coverage means that you are exhibiting high risk behavior and you get to pay more if you ever want to increase that compared to those who already have it, say to $25K when you get married and your wife is more nervous about it. Oh, you want to shop around do you? Well they also target other insurance companies who primarily market themselves as selling those $10K policies that the larger companies refuse to write. Your high-risk tag will hit if you are coming from one of those (like the General) regardless of your coverage. I'll repeat that in case its unclear. I have to pay more for my legally required insurance because I didn't want to buy more than what I am legally required to buy. I am being punished because I didn't buy what they preferred to sell me from the companies they preferred me to buy it from. But once I behave "correctly", by paying more for a policy from one of the correct insurance companies with the arbitrary minimum the insurance companies prefer, they will bless me by removing my high-risk tag after 6 months. Thanks.
- mrow84 9y agoPlease correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I can tell there is no advantage to the insurers, with respect only to the returns on policies, in producing accurate assessments of individual risk levels, as compared with only accurately assessing the aggregate risk level - the expected return is the same either way (and I would imagine that the individualised assessment is much more challenging). Assuming I am correct about that, then the advantage to them of providing individualised premiums is to appear competitive in the market place, by being able to confidently match their premiums to individual risk levels, and thus being able to advertise (the possibility of) lower premiums. Again assuming all of that is true, then there really isn't any net benefit - in fact presumably we have to pay for this whole individualised risk assessment exercise, which will actually raise the total costs. More speculatively, I imagine that their job is made somewhat easier by cognitive biases that cause people to think, on average, that they are better than average at (for example) driving.
- tjpaudio 9y agoI've actually modeled email domain as a feature in a regression model of customer spending habits. We were all surprised to find it is a very predictive signal! Of course insurance companies want to use every signal available to them to price discriminate on rates. If you are a good driver, the insurance company wants you because you are unlikely to file claims. Likewise, you are happy to receive a discount for being a good driver. A simple signal of being a good driver is your driving record, but we all know this isn't very reliable by itself. So you end up with other signals being used. Literally any signal that is not protected (like race/gender) will get used in any insurance model. None of this is new. The color of your car is used surely, so why is it so shocking that your email domain is used as well?
- lazerpants 9y agoAnd now we have to know, what did the regression show for popular email services?
- tjpaudio 9y agoI didn't get paid to say.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]