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Insurers Know How Often American Drivers Touch Their Phones
- davidw 8y agoI 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.
- starpilot 8y agoHow do I stop? I'm full-on addicted.
- davidw 8y agoPut it in the trunk or something while you're driving.
- astura 8y agoTurn your phone off (or at least on silent/do not disturb) and put it either in the back seat or the seatback pocket before getting behind wheel. Get a Garmin offline GPS for navigation. If you want entertainment like music, audiobooks, or podcasts you can get a cheap, basic MP3 player and load it up before car trips and plug it into the aux input. Though, honestly, this might not be necessary as long as the phone is out of reach and alerts are off/on silent; so a phone with notifications disabled bluetooth streaming podcasts from the back seat should be fine. The important thing is its entirely out of your reach and you don't hear the notifications.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoTurn off notifications, get it out of your reach.
- Raphmedia 8y agoPut the phone out of your view. You are not physically addicted to it. There's no withdrawal. Just put the thing away and break the habit.
- jldugger 8y agoSell your car, use the proceeds for Lyft rides and cellular service.
- katbyte 8y agoMaybe try putting on a podcast or audio book to keep your mind occupied so it doesn’t wander to “check Phone” Something funny but captivating like the dollop or a good book and I won’t even check it on transit
- shujito 8y agoleave it at home
- superkuh 8y agoThis recent trend of calling everything addictive and normalizing this misuse is not only stupid but also dangerous to society at large. Addiction is a serious thing with a well defined meaning. By applying it to things that are just actually rewarding, as opposed to things that hijack the reward system via direct manipulation to skew responses to predicted reward, it creates a perception of danger. This perception of danger then allows for the conversation about real issues that need solutions (usually education) to bottom out and begin calls for the use of government violence to prevent people from doing what they want. Encouraging the use of force against people who haven't done any violence or fraud themselves is a very bad thing. The circumstances have to justify it. Misuse of the word addiction helps that false justification.
- munificent 8y ago> Addiction is a serious thing with a well defined meaning. Yes, and that meaning applies fully to smartphone apps for many people. > By applying it to things that are just actually rewarding, as opposed to things that hijack the reward system via direct manipulation to skew responses to predicted reward Again, this applies to apps as much as it does to cigarettes. In both cases, you do get a short-term sensation of reward followed by regret and negative long-term consequences.
- superkuh 8y ago> this applies to apps as much as it does to cigarettes. How you you say this seriously? You are completely ignoring the direct biochemical effect of nicotine on the reward prediction system. A computer application does NOT have this effect.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoIsn’t everything “you” experience due to a chemical reaction in the brain?
- RussianCow 8y agoThis is not true; there have been studies showing that the effects of smartphone addiction are similar to those of alcohol/drug addiction.[1][2] [1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/smartphone-addiction-drug-642320/ https://www.androidauthority.com/smartphone-addiction-drug-6... [2]: https://www.promisesbehavioralhealth.com/addiction/new-studies-compare-smartphones-cocaine-addiction/ https://www.promisesbehavioralhealth.com/addiction/new-studi...
- McDev 8y agoIn the UK we give you 6 points on your license (reach 12 to get disqualified) and a £200/$250 fine Disclaimer: it doesn't stop people
- rootusrootus 8y agoIn Oregon the fine is $1000, or $2000 if you're involved in a collision. We have the lowest distracted rates in the country. But really, people still do it a lot.
- stordoff 8y agoAlso worth noting: > You’ll also lose your licence if you passed your driving test in the last 2 years. [Your licence will be cancelled (revoked) if you get 6 or more points within 2 years of passing your test.] > The law still applies to you if you’re: stopped at traffic lights[,] queuing in traffic[, or] supervising a learner driver https://www.gov.uk/using-mobile-phones-when-driving-the-law https://www.gov.uk/using-mobile-phones-when-driving-the-law
- munificent 8y agoTry the suggestions here: https://humanetech.com/resources/take-control/ https://humanetech.com/resources/take-control/
- mattbeckman 8y agoPro tip: just get in an accident while distracted, and you'll never want to do it again.
- megy 8y agoPut your phone in your glove compartment, or on the back seat.
- CalRobert 8y agoStop driving.
- johnchristopher 8y agoI was thinking about that today when a android update prompt took my screen view in hostage. I am using the phone as a GPS. Hopefully I knew the road very well but I would have been forced to stop the car in any other situation.
- Dirlewanger 8y agoAside from highly localized municipal efforts, the only way anything is going to be done about this is a top-down approach from the federal government. PR campaigns need to be conducted, funds for LEO training/equipment to conduct stings need to be allocated, all that. This needs to make going after drunk driving look like a drop in the barrel. As much as I hate wanting to expand the influence of our law enforcement bodies, I don't see any other way out of this epidemic.
- kevin_b_er 8y agoWhile that might be nice, the insurance companies spying on me is very distasteful. Alas we've traded the governement's unreasonable search and seizure for private search and seizure as time as gone on.
- megy 8y agoI disagree. I think every single car should be tracked at all times. They are killing machines, responsible for 40,000 deaths a year in the US directly, more than gun deaths.
- davidw 8y agoYeah, as someone who sees people drive past, staring at their phones, as I ride my bike around... I don't have a ton of sympathy. It's a privilege, not a right.
- novok 8y agoYou need protected bike lanes, not a surveillance state. Even if cell phones did not exist, you would still be at risk as a cyclist.
- davidw 8y agoI drive too, and those idiots might crash into me because they're staring at their phones. I don't really care how they're stopped, but they're a public menace. And yeah, we need protected bike lanes.
- anonymou2 8y agoNo, the roads belong to everyone not just motorists, building a cyclist ghetto and kicking cyclists off the roads so that motorists can have them all for themselves is just wrong. Motorists should be responsible for their actions.
- novok 8y ago
- sokoloff 8y agoI don't use it for text-based comms while driving, but I'm realistically not giving up podcasts and internet-connected GPS.
- 3JPLW 8y agoYou don't need to be touching your phone _while driving_ to do those things. Set them up before you leave your parking spot and use a robust mount so you can safely glance at the GPS without fiddling.
- gbrown 8y agoAre they accounting for carpooling/passengers? I drive into work with my wife every morning, and often check my phone en-route while she's driving. This is an important problem, but ham fisted solutions which invade privacy are not the answer. We need better regulation of this stuff.
- katbyte 8y agoOr even between driving vs slowly rolling in traffic vs stopped? I never really touch the phone at speed unless but stopped or slowly moving forward at 5kph? I’ll change music or check google maps for a better route ️
- mikepurvis 8y agoThis is in some ways the worst because it's the speed at which everyone outside your vehicle assumes you're the most attentive and aware of your surroundings. It's the speed at which that kid playing in the street is most likely to "come out of nowhere" and end up under your wheel.
- katbyte 8y agoOn a highway? Context is everything.
- genocidicbunny 8y agoI've found that on the highway that someone in an adjacent lane is most likely to make a sudden lane change at very high or very low speeds. So at 5mph, from my experience, you're far more likely to encounter situations where you need to be paying attention than not when you're driving at low speeds on a highway. So yeah, using your phone on the highway, in really any situation unless its park-and-sleep traffic, is kind of a dick move.
- mikepurvis 8y agoWe already have regulations. It's not working. I'm perfectly content for a phone to detect via GPS/IMU that it's in a moving vehicle and send up a big angry prompt like "Please confirm that you are a passenger and not driving this vehicle. Phone interactions are being logged and will be available to law enforcement if a collision occurs." I say this as a bike commuter who sees phones being used at stoplights every day, and as a parent of kids who walk to school. But also has a driver who occasionally fiddles with Google Maps on the road and could use the reminder myself.
- xattt 8y agoThe 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. Will I be charged more for my insurance for selecting a podcast? Why am I not charged more for changing the climate controls through a touchscreen UI that might require the same level of attention?
- whenchamenia 8y agoI honestly think any control you cannot manipulate by touch alone, while keeping your eyes on the should be banned within the drivers reach.
- jldugger 8y agoMy commute in SV is entirely surface streets (by design). Since moving here I have observed what I call the "California stop": 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. 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.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoThat’s everywhere I go, coast to coast.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoAre you sure it's not that they leave a large margin because they're already paying attention to the phone whilst driving?
- jblow 8y ago“California stop” is already a reserved term that means something else (slowing down mostly, but not all the way, at a stop sign).
- sokoloff 8y agoWe always called that a "California roll", though if someone said "California stop" to me, I'd assume it was the same thing.
- SilasX 8y agoSorry if too OT, but I'm reminded of AWS's infuriating convention of using "on-demand" and "spot" instances to mean very different things.
- brogrammer5 8y agoI've also heard that called a "Hollywood stop".
- opportune 8y ago
- argd678 8y agoWhen 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.
- Notorious_BLT 8y agoDepends on the city, most American cities aren't structured in a way that makes sense for public transportation. They are designed around the assumption of car ownership. And that still leaves the question of how to bridge the huge gaps between cities without cars. The biggest US cities, like Chicago and NYC, have pretty great public transportation.
- el_don_almighty 8y agoNever
- logfromblammo 8y agoI disagree. It will be when Ford and GM go bankrupt, and when foreign-owned auto manufacturers forget how US lobbying works. Then wait for about 40 years as the people in power continue to do things exactly as they had been done before, just because no one ever got fired for keeping the applecart upright. Then the US will go all in on public transportation and walkable urban centers.
- loeg 8y agoConversely, how does Zendrive know you're not riding the bus?
- mrobot 8y agoHow do they know this?
- weka 8y ago> The reason for all this data is that at least one in five U.S. auto insurance policies now offers a potential discount if the customer consents to a vehicle monitor.
- loco5niner 8y agoI assume the insurance company has you download an app on the phone with an offer to lower your rates if you are a good driver.
- rootusrootus 8y agoThey have an SDK that gets installed into all sorts of mobile apps.
- monksy 8y ago> Zendrive now has its monitoring technology on 60 million phones, How do they have their surveillance tech on so many phones? Do people know that's what's going on?
- munificent 8y agoSmartphones are the cigarettes of this generation — expensive, addictive, unhealthy, and heavily pushed by big business. 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't, because we were too distracted by our phones to do so.)
- jrockway 8y agoYou can look at comics from the past and see what people of the time thought the big problem was. In the 80s, walkmans were going to be the death of humanity. In the 1900s, people reading the newspaper instead of talking to random strangers around them was going to be the death of humanity. The common thread is that people do not like being bored, but some boring things are required each day. We filled the idle time with newspapers, music, and now reading newspapers and listening to music on our phones. It's nothing new. I am not worried. The underlying problem is that commute times are too long for people to remain attentive to the mind-numbingly boring task of driving. That is what we should focus on fixing.
- sib 8y agoI wish the journalist had asked more about this seemingly alarming statistic: "Zendrive now has its monitoring technology on 60 million phones, roughly one of every four U.S. drivers" For example: How did this "monitoring technology" get on 60M phones? Do the owners know it'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's on the phone of an under-13-year-old? Etc.
- jolmg 8y agoIt seems like Zendrive is something you can integrate on your apps. Their target market seems to be companies that have fleets to manage, like Uber or DHL. From Zendrive's FAQ page[1]: > How does it work? > Zendrive measures driver safety using only phone sensors. Integrate the Zendrive SDK into your driver app, and we’ll measure your drivers’ Caution, Control, and Focus while on the road, as well as detect collisions. This is done by measuring a wide variety of safety factors, like speeding, hard brakes, sharp accelerations, phone use, swerving, length of time driving, time of day, and many many more. > Who’s it for? How are people using this? > We built Zendrive for any On Demand company with a growing fleet, to help them manage their growth. With in-depth analysis showing any particular driver’s safety, or fleet-wide safety, it gives fleet managers the tools they need to improve their fleet’s driving to ensure safety, reduce risk and liability, and increase savings. > Since launch we’ve found additional types of companies getting value from Zendrive, from fleet management platform companies, to activity tracking companies and expense tracking companies who use the driving detection in the technology, to hardware companies looking for new safety features. [1] https://www.zendrive.com/faq/ https://www.zendrive.com/faq/
- blocke 8y agoLet's not pretend this is a full list. It's just a list of example apps. "Hardware companies" Does that mean bundled by carriers and crappy Android phones? Lovely.
- zarriak 8y agoIt 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. I am the only person in my family I know that doesn't use my phone while driving. Something I don'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.
- brainlessdev 8y agoIn Spain the fine for drunk driving between 0.25 and 0.50 is the same as the fine for driving while on the phone: 600€ + 6 points off your driver's license. I find that appropriate.
- hedora 8y agoThere was an earlier article (last year?) showing this is a simple feedback loop that could be fixed with a firmware upgrade to traffic lights: If a red light sensor sees more than a 2? 5? second gap between cars, it will immediately switch from green to red. People using cell phones at the stop light regularly create such gaps. The gaps mean everyone waita multiple light cycles. Knowing you will wait multiple light cycles encourages you to use your cell phone while you wait.
- Noumenon72 8y agoIn the long term, the incentive of "I must pay close attention to the light or I will have to wait another cycle" is much more powerful than "I might get another 15 seconds of phone use if I don't bother looking up from time to time". People need time to adjust to that weird red light scheme (or it needs to adjust to allow a longer gap just after turning green).
- blocke 8y agoSurveillance of 60 million devices? Do the users all know? https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-ride-hailing-safety-20160526-snap-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-ride-ha... "The company doesn'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's technology to monitor ride safety." Hurray for malware. What other apps is this hiding in?
- fmajid 8y agoGee, an insurance company asks people whether they drive safely, gets wildly optimistic responses, and concludes people have poor self-assessment. It's certainly possible (Dunning-Kruger syndrome) but a more likely explanation is they simply lie to avoid a possible rise in their premiums.
- peterhadlaw 8y agoI'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's a) a way to verify that this SDK is installed on my phone and b) if it's using a shared / single set of hostnames for reporting so that they can be blocked? 0: https://blokada.org/index.html https://blokada.org/index.html
- mschuster91 8y agoWhile the data itself is valuable and shows worrying trends, its collection makes me even more worried. If this trend of us collecting datapoints for every muscle twitch continues, we will not be needing a "right to not incriminate oneself" 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 "you're a Captain Picard!" in a facebook "which Trek character are you" dumbass quiz?
- cjensen 8y agoAs a society, we've already dealt with an experience that is "addictive" where people "can't help themselves": drunk driving. 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.
- leetcrew 8y agoor we could try a less authoritarian approach and work to improve technologies like android auto and apple carplay that allow drivers to take advantage of the useful features of their phones without taking their eyes off the road.
- x2f10 8y agoHow many cars have those technologies built in? I have a 2018 that does not (Subaru Forester).
- leetcrew 8y agonot sure without doing some research but android auto is a standard feature in my base 2017 gti. android auto is honestly kind of frustrating from a UX perspective but I'd argue the voice controlled music app is safer than fiddling with a radio/cd player and integrated google maps lets me know ahead of time when I'm about to hit a slowdown on the highway so I can be ready to hit the brakes earlier.
- int_19h 8y agoIt's an option on many cars now, but Subaru has been somewhat late to the party - I know that Impreza got it in 2017, and Outback and some other cars in 2018. Looks like Forester only got it this year.
- acdha 8y agoHave you used any of those on a car which didn’t require using a touchscreen while driving? I have boggled at recent rentals after seeing how far car UIs have regressed over the last decade – so many things require you to move your hands to controls which cannot be used without looking, are extremely fiddly, or pull your attention away from the road. Toss in the studies showing that handsfree usage doesn’t lower the distraction factor and I’m wondering whether the answer is banning anything short of a full HUD and that only for navigation.
- macintux 8y ago> The call ended abruptly when Balakrishnan—talking on a hands-free system—was rear-ended at a red light. So the expert was doing something that has been demonstrated to be nearly as distracting. 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. https://vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2019/02/020519-vtti-handsfreestudy.html https://vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2019/02/020519-vtti-handsfree...
- Zarath 8y agoJust bought car insurance, I asked the woman on the phone when I bought it "what do you do with this data? Are you selling it?" 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'll admit it was difficult to decline, even for as much as I care about privacy.
- Maria_Halsey 8y agoI'm not surprised. It's definitely an issue. Hopefully someone will think of a way to mitigate besides just police intervention. It's an interesting issue
- nateburke 8y agoWhat if the shortest path to widespread societal acceptance self-driving cars is by quickly making humans _really bad_ drivers? Making phone-use irresistibly addictive is one such path, I think.
- drb91 8y agoWe have public transit today!
- bigiain 8y agoJust bin case anyone needs a datapoint on whether or not Zendrive is a creepy data mining and privacy-invasive kind of company... When I went to their website, I was soon greeted with a chatbot that asked": "Welcome $myCompanyName! What brought you here to check us out?" I've never visited them before. I'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've just linked that IP address to the company I work for, or if they're even creepier than that...) Sneaking a look in dev tools is interesting... https://js.driftt.com/embeds/1556584410000/w8e7my5ng92y.json https://js.driftt.com/embeds/1556584410000/w8e7my5ng92y.json Looks like they're specifically targeting 18 companies with tailored messages and CTAs.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 8note 8y agogood to know they're still marketing to both T-Mobile and sprint; I'm guessing my phone is not yet included
- areoform 8y agoI got a generic message for a different company than these 18. I think those are tailored messages and they're doing some other kind of profiling to predict which company the person is visiting from.
- x0x0 8y ago
- elchief 8y agoI got a nice phone holder and use Android Auto and "Ok Google" and barely touch my phone now
- gesman 8y agoHow to prevent shady mobile apps and SDKs to communicate with unauthorized data collection portals?
- yumraj 8y agoOne 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. Since this might be in Uber and Lyft apps, I wonder if disabling those apps till I need them will solve this issue. However, in n-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?
- OrgNet 8y agoI would have to solve Google's ReCaptcha to be able to read this article... > We've detected unusual activity from your computer network, To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.
- gnicholas 8y agoIs there a chance that my insurance company's app is tracking this? Presumably an iOS app can't access accelerometer data when it isn't open (and it rarely is).
- lobster45 8y agoWhat about passengers? My phone is always asking me if I’m driving for example when I’m trying to use Waze as a passenger
- nerdbaggy 8y agoIf anybody wants to check their logs it seems the hostname are: - api-gateway.zendrive.com - api.zendrive.com - sdk-api.zendrive.com
- Noumenon72 8y agoWhat's good about this is that it might allow a targeted solution (don't compose long texts or watch movies will driving) instead of taking away responsible people'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. Maybe I do need the rules to protect myself from those people, but I wish people wouldn't get into this moral panic as though touching a cell phone is the equivalent of blacking out your windshield.
- call-the-cops 8y agoIf the insurers know then the cops know. If how many times “drivers touch their phones” is something cops know, then what else is going on?
- StanislavPetrov 8y agoThis is a completely misleading headline. The headline should be: "Insurers know how often Americans who voluntarily choose to carry spy-phones ("smart phones") are to look at their spy-phones while driving". What'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.
- muckrakerz 8y agoUsing 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: https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/us-dot-announces-2017-roadway-fatalities-down https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/us-dot-announces-2017-r... And lest anyone claim this is due to safety items like advanced airbags, that same article shows _pedestrian_ fatalities are also down. Now this could be for a host of factors. But the article isn't anything other than a scare fest and a reminder that anyone from FB talking about potential privacy issues should be shamed into silence.