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This is like offering a discount on car insurance if you consent to having a GPS tracker installed.[1] It's voluntary for now, but the industry is hoping peopl

This is like offering a discount on car insurance if you consent to having a GPS tracker installed.[1] It's voluntary for now, but the industry is hoping people get used to it so it can be made effectively[2] mandatory. And because people seem caught in race to the bottom competition to give up the most privacy they can, stuff like this may regrettably catch on. [1]http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/01/14/scenario-auto-insurance-discounts-and-monitoring/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/01/14/scenario-auto-insuranc... [2] Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price.

cgriswald 8y ago
> [2] Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price. Or, once a critical mass is reached the insurance industry will lobby for it to be mandatory in all cars, selling it as a safety feature.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  I do think that ubiquitous, highly intrusive spying will become mandatory for all cars at some point. I don't think it will be because of insurance. I think it's more likely to come from the push for "self-driving" cars and automated roadways. I look at Tesla's spy system as the sort of dystopian future we can expect.
ip26 8y ago
So, in your eyes, where should the privacy line be drawn? Is it OK the insurance company knows the VIN number of your car, the make, the model, the miles, the color, your name, age, address, credit score, credit card information, marital status, how many miles you drive a year, where the car is stored, your claim history, criminal history, etc? If that's all OK, what crosses the line about monitoring driving behavior?
- gerbilly 8y ago
  > what crosses the line about monitoring driving behavior? I think the privacy line is already drawn too far, but aside from that, I think if monitoring 'driving behaviour' involves GPS tracking, it crosses the line because you can use it to infer the people and groups you associate with.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  1. It's not all ok 2. It's a wealth of data that can be used to generate other things about you. It's also data that's traditionally very hard for other parties to get a hold of - your car's make, model and your address is typically not secret information, but for the most part nobody but you knows everything about how you spend your time. And once your insurance company has this information, you lose control over it. They can share it with other companies, with law enforcement, with parties that may not be relied on to keep the information secure. Wrong inferences can be made about you, can be shared out.
- gubbrora 8y ago
  A good litmus test is "how fucked would we be if they got infiltrated by organized crime". A GPS will collect a lot of data that can be used for blackmail by rogue employees.
- grawprog 8y ago
  We have GPS trackers installed on the install vans at my work. I've seen the real time tracking maps. They track everything about the vehicle. The speed it's driving, every time it stops, every time the engine is turned off or on, you can predict arrival time at destinations based on average speed and traffic conditions taken from online. These are just some cheap consumer model ones the boss picked up for about $100 each. The more advanced and expensive ones he showed me, could give you even more detailed real time.information.
- cgriswald 8y ago
  > ...what crosses the line about monitoring driving behavior? First and foremost, it's only ever going to be used against me if it is used. I would basically have to bet I was never in an accident, which, given I've been hit three times while legally stopped in the last 5 years, I'm not willing to do. I suspect for the vast majority of drivers, the monitor is a net cost, not a net savings. But also, there is not a one-to-one relationship between liability and safety. Insurance companies care about liability first, and if they care about safety, they care about it second. I'd like to see some studies on how these monitors influence driver behavior before even considering getting one installed. For another, the monitors lack context. It is safer to travel at 75mph in a 65mph zone if traffic is going 75mph and the road (and your vehicle) otherwise supports that speed. (Put lazily without citation: At that speed there is almost no difference to increased speed in terms of serious injury or fatality, but at that speed variance, the likelihood of a crash occuring is higher. Net result: more serious injuries and fatalities driving at the slower speed.) But the monitor will only see you going 10mph over the speed limit. And then, as a sibling poster mentions, there are the privacy issues. If it monitors your location, it is monitoring far, far more than your driving habits.
  - neutronicus 8y ago
    I've seen it asserted that it's actually safer to drive 55 when everyone else is going 75, despite the conventional wisdom you're quoting here. So do you have a citation?
    - Nadya 8y ago
      I remember reading the study but I can only find broken references to it. This is from an .edu domain and although the citation to the study itself is broken - I hope it referencing the study counts for at least something. From memory, the TL;DR of the study was "speed differentials cause accidents, not speeding" along with "speed differentials cause more likely to be fatal accidents". A car going 75 MPH rear ending a car going 70 MPH is going to do less damage and potentially be less fatal than a car going 75 MPH rear ending a car going 55 MPH. I'll see if I can find the actual study. [0] https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/2015/09/18/is-driving-faster-safer/ https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/2015/09/18/is-driving-faster-...
danans 8y ago
> Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price. An alternative would be to only require tracking for drivers who have proven themselves to be unsafe (found to be repeatedly at fault in accidents). Car insurance is not just protection against accidents due to traffic and weather, it's also protection against negligent behavior of drivers themselves. In the longer term, though, we need to switch to other forms of transportation that don't require individuals to self insure. Perhaps that will be self driving car and bus services, that don't have the huge risks associated with people driving, or maybe they will involve expanded rail service.
- gerbilly 8y ago
  > require tracking for drivers who have proven themselves to be unsafe Bad drivers are already a part of the risk calculation. I think the desire to track them individually is a manifestation of our North American propensity to look for punitive solutions.
  - reallydude 8y ago
    > Bad drivers are already a part of the risk calculation. That's a weasel statement. "bad" "part" "calculation" are all soft terms. You can always tighten the metrics, which a GPS would allow for, given time and rigor.
    - gerbilly 8y ago
      Fine, you can chose to see it that way. But I do believe that we have a bias towards solutions that punish a particular person.[1] It's an insurance company, if many people drive badly then you can be sure they've factored it in because they don't lose money over a solved problem like that. I still don't think we should target bad drivers for extra surveillance, because I value the privacy of the bad drivers too much. Also valuing the privacy of the bad drivers, is just valuing my own privacy down the road. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis [2] At first they came for the bad drivers, but I wasn't a bad driver ...
rcar 8y ago
This has a lot more to do with the risk pooling of insurance and competition among carriers than it does to do with some desire to mindlessly violate privacy. To give a simplified example, say a good driver costs an average of $100 per year and a bad driver costs $10,000. If without trackers, you can get 100 customers where 10% end up ultimately being bad, the cost over the year ends up being $100 * 90 + $10,000 * 10 = $109,000 or $1,090 per customer. If trackers let you get down to just 8% bad drivers, your expected costs are $100 * 92 + $10,000 * 8 = $89,200 or $892 each. That lowered cost means more competitive rates, which in turn drives positive selection (i.e., good drivers will be more likely to sign up for your service in the first place). Those bad drivers you passed on also aren't just going away - they're going to competitors and driving up their costs.
- existencebox 8y ago
  Isn't this the purpose of insurance adjustments? When an event occurs that would cost the insurance company money, they change their prior of what you should be paying, no need to try and "pre-crime" with tracking chips. I would rather we not normalize technology that really has no reason to exist but to allow insurance companies to optimize the last meaningless % of their margins at the cost of a slow erosion of an expectation of privacy. (companies who already have a history of doing questionable things to deny claims and avoid liability, enoughso that I have personal stories on this matter)
  - epanchin 8y ago
    This is more like advertising your insurance company in women’s magazines to pre filter your customers without offering different prices based on gender. As the insurance company couldn’t determine your driving ability themselves, and therefore offers the same price regardless of ability, the black box allows customers to pre filter themselves before applying, hopefully reducing the average accident rate.
- andrewla 8y ago
  I think it's clear that they want to use this to minimize expenditures. The problem arises with how they use the data. The trackers don't intrinsically let them get the bad driver rate down, but lets them tune the premiums that those drivers have to pay. Let's use your data; they currently pay ~$1,090 per customer. So for the sake of argument, let's say that they charge $1,100 and keep that $10 in expectation. Now they install GPS trackers, and they can identify two classes of behavior; class A drivers (50% of drivers), who have a 4% accident rate, and class B drivers (50% of drivers), who have a 16% accident rate. The combined rate is still 10%. Class A drivers cost 48 * 1e2 + 2 * 1e4 = $24,800 = $496/driver Class B drivers cost 42 * 1e2 + 8 * 1e4 = $84,200 = $1,684/driver. So this is great -- good drivers pay less, risk profiles are narrowed, etc. Maybe the bad drivers can be given feedback that will tell them what things they can do to minimize their accident rate based on the GPS data, and get some feedback on that -- "drive slower", "stop at red lights", "stop running into parked cars" -- things that both improve the metrics for the GPS and result in safer drivers. But maybe the metric that the adjusters found are "frequently drives in historically Irish neighborhoods", or "drives to fast food restaurants more often". Now things get diciers. And what if the things that the GPS is measuring are not proxies for how bad a driver they are, but how willing they are to settle with cash without involving insurance. Or the correlation is a false one -- it could be that most of the Class B drivers are excellent drivers, as good as Class A, but they have to pay Class B rates because they got lumped in with a secondary association not related to quality of driving. This is a problem with any attempt to bring more metrics to bear in computing insurance rates, but is especially exacerbated by the invasive nature of GPS-based metrics, which can be used as proxies for all sorts of socioeconomic signals that allow open discrimination.
ttoinou 8y ago
Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price What IF thanks to trackers insurance prices drop by 10x ? So that without a tracker the price stays the same as of now. Would it be "effectively" mandatory for you ?
- eropple 8y ago
  I'm not sure what that question gets you, because this won't be the case. An insurance company would have to drastically shrink, and so would its net profits, to do as you describe. So it quite obviously won't happen. Premiums will remain where they are. The price floor is effectively established. (I do look forward to the next permutation, "well what if somebody lowers prices," so we can have a good round of explaining what a cartel is.)
  - CountSessine 8y ago
    I'm not sure what that question gets you, because this won't be the case. But where is their price floor right now compared to their operating margins? If the business is mostly actuarial risk, then dramatically lowering that risk by more accurately characterizing good and bad drivers would see premiums plummet. If the business is mostly SG&A, then better assessing individual risk would be misapplied optimization and wouldn't affect premiums much at all. (I do look forward to the next permutation, "well what if somebody lowers prices," so we can have a good round of explaining what a cartel is.) Do you have good reason to think that car insurers have formed a cartel?
  - ip26 8y ago
    If car insurance really is a cartel, then sure, market forces won't work. But in the absence of a cartel, the generally expected outcome would be that safe drivers see lower rates than today and dangerous drivers see higher rates than today. Average premiums would probably remain about the same, because total payouts would remain about the same. I get concerns about privacy & whether the market forces will actually work. But, pricing risk is also the fundamental business of insurance, so it seems very intuitive & logical for them to add additional parameters to quantify risk in their models. The better they can quantify the risk, the more competitive their rates can be, and the more successful they are as a business.
Scoundreller 8y ago
I’m looking forward to the fun insurance high-risk scenarios that lead to immediate suspension of your insurance, like: “You’re 3 seconds away from a collision with 99.9% likelihood. Your insurance is now terminated”.
- hopler 8y ago
  Liability insurance, but doesn't pay if you are liable.
JohnFen 8y ago
It's pretty much effectively mandatory right now. Just try buying a new car that doesn't have a GPS tracker installed, and that doesn't regularly phone home to the manufacturer.
- IronWolve 8y ago
  My state allows you to alternatively get a 50k bond in exchange for mandatory insurance. Not sure how many states allow that, but the poor could not afford a spare 50k to save 2-3k a year in insurance. Also, I would think the bond could collect interest.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    Mine as well, although I think the amount is a bit higher. It has to match the amount of liability insurance that you'd otherwise be required to carry, because you're essentially self-insuring.
will_brown 8y ago
Maybe the insurers should have to report their data. # of claims filed % of claims initially denied % of claims denied eventually settled Breakdown of claims by jurisdiction/claims adjuster Total $ collected in premiums and total $ paid out in claims Most importantly the insurer should have to make the insured data profile available to the insured What’s good for the goose is good for the gander
apercu 8y ago
What's funny (sad?) is that I don't drive much. I work from home and I rarely leave by car. And I drive a slow, lumbering vehicle so I tend to drive pretty slow. I've had 2 tickets in over 20 years of driving, and those were both really minor infractions, and no tickets in the last 10 or so years. I would save money getting one of these devices installed. But there is no way I would opt in for even MORE surveillance. I won't even let my wife install the google or amazon home automation devices. I hate what the internet has become.
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  The real scam is that they’ll give you a 15-25% reduction in premium, even if you’re driving 80% less than average. I get that some risks are fairly constant (e.g. theft), but premiums could be better correlated to actual risk.
  - rebuilder 8y ago
    Why aren't premiums better correlated to risk? It seems like that would be an obvious competitive advantage for an insurance company, if other insurera are mispricing risk.
    - chewz 8y ago
      Because of Pareto principle. 80% of the insurance risk could be estimated with 20% of variables. Which is more then enough because most of the insurance pricing is determined by sales and administration costs and not by price of risk itself.
    - Scoundreller 8y ago
      It’s a mystery to me too. Similarly, the cost savings from increasing my deductible just isn’t there. Going from $1000 to $2000 should be more savings than a handful of dollars per year, since that will save insureco on just about every single claim. There’s no way they’re charging me $100+/month if my risk of a claim is 2-3% per year.
cwkoss 8y ago
The publishing/advertising industry seems to be the best example of this.
m463 8y ago
This has already happened with supermarkets. Use your tracking token (safeway club card = phone number) or your groceries will cost significantly more.

cgriswald 8y ago

> [2] Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price. Or, once a critical mass is reached the insurance industry will lobby for it to be mandatory in all cars, selling it as a safety feature.

JohnFen 8y ago
I do think that ubiquitous, highly intrusive spying will become mandatory for all cars at some point. I don't think it will be because of insurance. I think it's more likely to come from the push for "self-driving" cars and automated roadways. I look at Tesla's spy system as the sort of dystopian future we can expect.

ip26 8y ago

So, in your eyes, where should the privacy line be drawn? Is it OK the insurance company knows the VIN number of your car, the make, the model, the miles, the color, your name, age, address, credit score, credit card information, marital status, how many miles you drive a year, where the car is stored, your claim history, criminal history, etc? If that's all OK, what crosses the line about monitoring driving behavior?

gerbilly 8y ago
> what crosses the line about monitoring driving behavior? I think the privacy line is already drawn too far, but aside from that, I think if monitoring 'driving behaviour' involves GPS tracking, it crosses the line because you can use it to infer the people and groups you associate with.
pavel_lishin 8y ago
1. It's not all ok 2. It's a wealth of data that can be used to generate other things about you. It's also data that's traditionally very hard for other parties to get a hold of - your car's make, model and your address is typically not secret information, but for the most part nobody but you knows everything about how you spend your time. And once your insurance company has this information, you lose control over it. They can share it with other companies, with law enforcement, with parties that may not be relied on to keep the information secure. Wrong inferences can be made about you, can be shared out.
gubbrora 8y ago
A good litmus test is "how fucked would we be if they got infiltrated by organized crime". A GPS will collect a lot of data that can be used for blackmail by rogue employees.
grawprog 8y ago
We have GPS trackers installed on the install vans at my work. I've seen the real time tracking maps. They track everything about the vehicle. The speed it's driving, every time it stops, every time the engine is turned off or on, you can predict arrival time at destinations based on average speed and traffic conditions taken from online. These are just some cheap consumer model ones the boss picked up for about $100 each. The more advanced and expensive ones he showed me, could give you even more detailed real time.information.
cgriswald 8y ago
> ...what crosses the line about monitoring driving behavior? First and foremost, it's only ever going to be used against me if it is used. I would basically have to bet I was never in an accident, which, given I've been hit three times while legally stopped in the last 5 years, I'm not willing to do. I suspect for the vast majority of drivers, the monitor is a net cost, not a net savings. But also, there is not a one-to-one relationship between liability and safety. Insurance companies care about liability first, and if they care about safety, they care about it second. I'd like to see some studies on how these monitors influence driver behavior before even considering getting one installed. For another, the monitors lack context. It is safer to travel at 75mph in a 65mph zone if traffic is going 75mph and the road (and your vehicle) otherwise supports that speed. (Put lazily without citation: At that speed there is almost no difference to increased speed in terms of serious injury or fatality, but at that speed variance, the likelihood of a crash occuring is higher. Net result: more serious injuries and fatalities driving at the slower speed.) But the monitor will only see you going 10mph over the speed limit. And then, as a sibling poster mentions, there are the privacy issues. If it monitors your location, it is monitoring far, far more than your driving habits.
- neutronicus 8y ago
  I've seen it asserted that it's actually safer to drive 55 when everyone else is going 75, despite the conventional wisdom you're quoting here. So do you have a citation?
  - Nadya 8y ago
    I remember reading the study but I can only find broken references to it. This is from an .edu domain and although the citation to the study itself is broken - I hope it referencing the study counts for at least something. From memory, the TL;DR of the study was "speed differentials cause accidents, not speeding" along with "speed differentials cause more likely to be fatal accidents". A car going 75 MPH rear ending a car going 70 MPH is going to do less damage and potentially be less fatal than a car going 75 MPH rear ending a car going 55 MPH. I'll see if I can find the actual study. [0] https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/2015/09/18/is-driving-faster-safer/ https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/2015/09/18/is-driving-faster-...

danans 8y ago

> Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price. An alternative would be to only require tracking for drivers who have proven themselves to be unsafe (found to be repeatedly at fault in accidents). Car insurance is not just protection against accidents due to traffic and weather, it's also protection against negligent behavior of drivers themselves. In the longer term, though, we need to switch to other forms of transportation that don't require individuals to self insure. Perhaps that will be self driving car and bus services, that don't have the huge risks associated with people driving, or maybe they will involve expanded rail service.

gerbilly 8y ago
> require tracking for drivers who have proven themselves to be unsafe Bad drivers are already a part of the risk calculation. I think the desire to track them individually is a manifestation of our North American propensity to look for punitive solutions.
- reallydude 8y ago
  > Bad drivers are already a part of the risk calculation. That's a weasel statement. "bad" "part" "calculation" are all soft terms. You can always tighten the metrics, which a GPS would allow for, given time and rigor.
  - gerbilly 8y ago
    Fine, you can chose to see it that way. But I do believe that we have a bias towards solutions that punish a particular person.[1] It's an insurance company, if many people drive badly then you can be sure they've factored it in because they don't lose money over a solved problem like that. I still don't think we should target bad drivers for extra surveillance, because I value the privacy of the bad drivers too much. Also valuing the privacy of the bad drivers, is just valuing my own privacy down the road. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis [2] At first they came for the bad drivers, but I wasn't a bad driver ...

rcar 8y ago

This has a lot more to do with the risk pooling of insurance and competition among carriers than it does to do with some desire to mindlessly violate privacy. To give a simplified example, say a good driver costs an average of $100 per year and a bad driver costs $10,000. If without trackers, you can get 100 customers where 10% end up ultimately being bad, the cost over the year ends up being $100 * 90 + $10,000 * 10 = $109,000 or $1,090 per customer. If trackers let you get down to just 8% bad drivers, your expected costs are $100 * 92 + $10,000 * 8 = $89,200 or $892 each. That lowered cost means more competitive rates, which in turn drives positive selection (i.e., good drivers will be more likely to sign up for your service in the first place). Those bad drivers you passed on also aren't just going away - they're going to competitors and driving up their costs.

existencebox 8y ago
Isn't this the purpose of insurance adjustments? When an event occurs that would cost the insurance company money, they change their prior of what you should be paying, no need to try and "pre-crime" with tracking chips. I would rather we not normalize technology that really has no reason to exist but to allow insurance companies to optimize the last meaningless % of their margins at the cost of a slow erosion of an expectation of privacy. (companies who already have a history of doing questionable things to deny claims and avoid liability, enoughso that I have personal stories on this matter)
- epanchin 8y ago
  This is more like advertising your insurance company in women’s magazines to pre filter your customers without offering different prices based on gender. As the insurance company couldn’t determine your driving ability themselves, and therefore offers the same price regardless of ability, the black box allows customers to pre filter themselves before applying, hopefully reducing the average accident rate.
andrewla 8y ago
I think it's clear that they want to use this to minimize expenditures. The problem arises with how they use the data. The trackers don't intrinsically let them get the bad driver rate down, but lets them tune the premiums that those drivers have to pay. Let's use your data; they currently pay ~$1,090 per customer. So for the sake of argument, let's say that they charge $1,100 and keep that $10 in expectation. Now they install GPS trackers, and they can identify two classes of behavior; class A drivers (50% of drivers), who have a 4% accident rate, and class B drivers (50% of drivers), who have a 16% accident rate. The combined rate is still 10%. Class A drivers cost 48 * 1e2 + 2 * 1e4 = $24,800 = $496/driver Class B drivers cost 42 * 1e2 + 8 * 1e4 = $84,200 = $1,684/driver. So this is great -- good drivers pay less, risk profiles are narrowed, etc. Maybe the bad drivers can be given feedback that will tell them what things they can do to minimize their accident rate based on the GPS data, and get some feedback on that -- "drive slower", "stop at red lights", "stop running into parked cars" -- things that both improve the metrics for the GPS and result in safer drivers. But maybe the metric that the adjusters found are "frequently drives in historically Irish neighborhoods", or "drives to fast food restaurants more often". Now things get diciers. And what if the things that the GPS is measuring are not proxies for how bad a driver they are, but how willing they are to settle with cash without involving insurance. Or the correlation is a false one -- it could be that most of the Class B drivers are excellent drivers, as good as Class A, but they have to pay Class B rates because they got lumped in with a secondary association not related to quality of driving. This is a problem with any attempt to bring more metrics to bear in computing insurance rates, but is especially exacerbated by the invasive nature of GPS-based metrics, which can be used as proxies for all sorts of socioeconomic signals that allow open discrimination.

ttoinou 8y ago

Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price What IF thanks to trackers insurance prices drop by 10x ? So that without a tracker the price stays the same as of now. Would it be "effectively" mandatory for you ?

eropple 8y ago
I'm not sure what that question gets you, because this won't be the case. An insurance company would have to drastically shrink, and so would its net profits, to do as you describe. So it quite obviously won't happen. Premiums will remain where they are. The price floor is effectively established. (I do look forward to the next permutation, "well what if somebody lowers prices," so we can have a good round of explaining what a cartel is.)
- CountSessine 8y ago
  I'm not sure what that question gets you, because this won't be the case. But where is their price floor right now compared to their operating margins? If the business is mostly actuarial risk, then dramatically lowering that risk by more accurately characterizing good and bad drivers would see premiums plummet. If the business is mostly SG&A, then better assessing individual risk would be misapplied optimization and wouldn't affect premiums much at all. (I do look forward to the next permutation, "well what if somebody lowers prices," so we can have a good round of explaining what a cartel is.) Do you have good reason to think that car insurers have formed a cartel?
- ip26 8y ago
  If car insurance really is a cartel, then sure, market forces won't work. But in the absence of a cartel, the generally expected outcome would be that safe drivers see lower rates than today and dangerous drivers see higher rates than today. Average premiums would probably remain about the same, because total payouts would remain about the same. I get concerns about privacy & whether the market forces will actually work. But, pricing risk is also the fundamental business of insurance, so it seems very intuitive & logical for them to add additional parameters to quantify risk in their models. The better they can quantify the risk, the more competitive their rates can be, and the more successful they are as a business.

Scoundreller 8y ago

I’m looking forward to the fun insurance high-risk scenarios that lead to immediate suspension of your insurance, like: “You’re 3 seconds away from a collision with 99.9% likelihood. Your insurance is now terminated”.

hopler 8y ago
Liability insurance, but doesn't pay if you are liable.

JohnFen 8y ago

It's pretty much effectively mandatory right now. Just try buying a new car that doesn't have a GPS tracker installed, and that doesn't regularly phone home to the manufacturer.

IronWolve 8y ago
My state allows you to alternatively get a 50k bond in exchange for mandatory insurance. Not sure how many states allow that, but the poor could not afford a spare 50k to save 2-3k a year in insurance. Also, I would think the bond could collect interest.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  Mine as well, although I think the amount is a bit higher. It has to match the amount of liability insurance that you'd otherwise be required to carry, because you're essentially self-insuring.

will_brown 8y ago

Maybe the insurers should have to report their data. # of claims filed % of claims initially denied % of claims denied eventually settled Breakdown of claims by jurisdiction/claims adjuster Total $ collected in premiums and total $ paid out in claims Most importantly the insurer should have to make the insured data profile available to the insured What’s good for the goose is good for the gander

apercu 8y ago

What's funny (sad?) is that I don't drive much. I work from home and I rarely leave by car. And I drive a slow, lumbering vehicle so I tend to drive pretty slow. I've had 2 tickets in over 20 years of driving, and those were both really minor infractions, and no tickets in the last 10 or so years. I would save money getting one of these devices installed. But there is no way I would opt in for even MORE surveillance. I won't even let my wife install the google or amazon home automation devices. I hate what the internet has become.

Scoundreller 8y ago
The real scam is that they’ll give you a 15-25% reduction in premium, even if you’re driving 80% less than average. I get that some risks are fairly constant (e.g. theft), but premiums could be better correlated to actual risk.
- rebuilder 8y ago
  Why aren't premiums better correlated to risk? It seems like that would be an obvious competitive advantage for an insurance company, if other insurera are mispricing risk.
  - chewz 8y ago
    Because of Pareto principle. 80% of the insurance risk could be estimated with 20% of variables. Which is more then enough because most of the insurance pricing is determined by sales and administration costs and not by price of risk itself.
  - Scoundreller 8y ago
    It’s a mystery to me too. Similarly, the cost savings from increasing my deductible just isn’t there. Going from $1000 to $2000 should be more savings than a handful of dollars per year, since that will save insureco on just about every single claim. There’s no way they’re charging me $100+/month if my risk of a claim is 2-3% per year.

cwkoss 8y ago

The publishing/advertising industry seems to be the best example of this.

m463 8y ago

This has already happened with supermarkets. Use your tracking token (safeway club card = phone number) or your groceries will cost significantly more.