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Got it. EDIT: my tone wasn't good here. Assuming good intentions. I am leaving the original below just so people can see what the replies where to. Original:

Got it. EDIT: my tone wasn't good here. Assuming good intentions. I am leaving the original below just so people can see what the replies where to. Original: Got It. So the above is a flat out lie.

crhulls 6y ago
No, it is not a lie. I'm happy to answer questions openly but please give me a chance before calling me a liar. Arity (an Allstate subsidiary) provides us tech that powers our crash detection service (think Onstar for your phone - we dispatched 10k ambulances last year) and other driving features. Arity also scores our drivers, like a credit score for your driving. But, this is extremely different than selling your data. Arity does not know who these people are - they get a set of limited information which is not tied to an indvidual. They then take that information and match it with insurance offers based on a number of factors, but who that person is, or there forward looking behavior is never connected back. They don't have the legal right (or even the reasonable technical ability based on the data we give them) and the offers are not tied to an individual. The insurance offers are similar to what Credit Karma does with your credit score. You go to Credit Karma, you give them your social and some seriously sensitive info, and then they match you with offers. They are NOT selling your info to credit card companies in the same way we are not selling your info to insurance companies. There is very little difference. To the technical piece, I guess they could theoretically reverse engineer people from our data, but that is like say anyone who uses say Amplitude or some metrics provider could be selling your data to insurance companies. All of us developers use a number of 3rd party services that we are trusting to be shepherds of private information. In this case one of our third party providers is an insurer. So you could argue they have more incentive to breach to contract, but they would really get no benefit from that because a) we would sue the to oblivion and b) do you really think they could get insurance commissioners to allow them to price on stolen data? As mentioned above we are extremely transparent about all this. It is explained at sign up. We push the information to our users. We give them a privacy center which goes through all of this in non-legalese. User can opt out of anything they want and we don't degrade the service intentionally (e.g. if you opt out of the connection to Arity we literally can't power the features). We even let free users opt out of the targeted promotions. Some people may still not like this but we do not do corporate speak and we do not try to hide anything.
- chickenpotpie 6y ago
  I appreciate the time you have take to talk about this, especially with how critical we've been of your work. If I may add one more piece of criticism: I really want to believe you about your policy and I would be much more comfortable with your app if the privacy policy explicitly said some of the things you claim.
  - crhulls 6y ago
    Thanks and noted.. Have you seen the Privacy Center in our app? This was meant as the area to get plain English explanations on how things work along with various opt-outs. It is still a bit more legalese-ish than I would like but the intent was very much to be open and let users make informed decisions.
- bhhaskin 6y ago
  I apologize if it seemed like a personal attack. That wasn't my intention. And I really do appreciate the fact that you guys have a privacy preference center. It's clear that you do care about privacy, and since you do care about privacy then I am sure you can understand the concerns.
  - crhulls 6y ago
    Thanks - much appreciated. What I primarily believe in is being open and honest with our users, and avoiding corporate speak whenever possible. Privacy means different things to different people and I probably am more open than he average person on hacker news. A full comment on what it personally means to me would be quite a long essay!

Got it. EDIT: my tone wasn't good here. Assuming good intentions. I am leaving the original below just so people can see what the replies where to. Original: Got It. So the above is a flat out lie.

crhulls 6y ago

No, it is not a lie. I'm happy to answer questions openly but please give me a chance before calling me a liar. Arity (an Allstate subsidiary) provides us tech that powers our crash detection service (think Onstar for your phone - we dispatched 10k ambulances last year) and other driving features. Arity also scores our drivers, like a credit score for your driving. But, this is extremely different than selling your data. Arity does not know who these people are - they get a set of limited information which is not tied to an indvidual. They then take that information and match it with insurance offers based on a number of factors, but who that person is, or there forward looking behavior is never connected back. They don't have the legal right (or even the reasonable technical ability based on the data we give them) and the offers are not tied to an individual. The insurance offers are similar to what Credit Karma does with your credit score. You go to Credit Karma, you give them your social and some seriously sensitive info, and then they match you with offers. They are NOT selling your info to credit card companies in the same way we are not selling your info to insurance companies. There is very little difference. To the technical piece, I guess they could theoretically reverse engineer people from our data, but that is like say anyone who uses say Amplitude or some metrics provider could be selling your data to insurance companies. All of us developers use a number of 3rd party services that we are trusting to be shepherds of private information. In this case one of our third party providers is an insurer. So you could argue they have more incentive to breach to contract, but they would really get no benefit from that because a) we would sue the to oblivion and b) do you really think they could get insurance commissioners to allow them to price on stolen data? As mentioned above we are extremely transparent about all this. It is explained at sign up. We push the information to our users. We give them a privacy center which goes through all of this in non-legalese. User can opt out of anything they want and we don't degrade the service intentionally (e.g. if you opt out of the connection to Arity we literally can't power the features). We even let free users opt out of the targeted promotions. Some people may still not like this but we do not do corporate speak and we do not try to hide anything.

chickenpotpie 6y ago
I appreciate the time you have take to talk about this, especially with how critical we've been of your work. If I may add one more piece of criticism: I really want to believe you about your policy and I would be much more comfortable with your app if the privacy policy explicitly said some of the things you claim.
- crhulls 6y ago
  Thanks and noted.. Have you seen the Privacy Center in our app? This was meant as the area to get plain English explanations on how things work along with various opt-outs. It is still a bit more legalese-ish than I would like but the intent was very much to be open and let users make informed decisions.
bhhaskin 6y ago
I apologize if it seemed like a personal attack. That wasn't my intention. And I really do appreciate the fact that you guys have a privacy preference center. It's clear that you do care about privacy, and since you do care about privacy then I am sure you can understand the concerns.
- crhulls 6y ago
  Thanks - much appreciated. What I primarily believe in is being open and honest with our users, and avoiding corporate speak whenever possible. Privacy means different things to different people and I probably am more open than he average person on hacker news. A full comment on what it personally means to me would be quite a long essay!