6 ms·

Insurance company drops customer saying a 'drone' took photos of clutter in yard

37 points by taubek 3y ago

houseatrielah 3y ago
They could already do this with high-rez satellite photos if they wanted. The drone just makes it unusually irritating.
- gerikson 3y ago
  Yep, this is a thing: https://www.verisk.com/insurance/products/personal-aerial-imagery/ https://www.verisk.com/insurance/products/personal-aerial-im... I seem to remember reading on Twitter that 80% of the population of the US is photographed every 3 months or so by services like this. Also https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/aerial-imaging-in-insurance-service-market-A47569 https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/aerial-imaging-in-insur...
  - bagels 3y ago
    Verisk looks to be using "aerial" photography, not satellite.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  Or fly a Cessna - far noisier than any drone - over the area with a fancy camera, or ... Would it make all that much difference if they'd sent out an artist on horseback, to depict his property with quill and ink on parchment?
  - function_seven 3y ago
    How loud is this quill when it scratches against the parchment? Does the horse whinny?
    - RobRivera 3y ago
      the horse is a coconut afixed to a bicycle
  - wolpoli 3y ago
    I get that the horse allows the artist to see over the top of the fence into the yard without a ladder, but could we rely on the horse staying still during the drawing process?
    - bell-cot 3y ago
      Figure that they'd use horses with cooler temperaments. And a decent rider can control a horse pretty well with his legs. So - still enough.
- happytiger 3y ago
  Just wait until it’s a fully automated system. This is still someone doing investigations at the moment. In the not too distant future, surveillance will determine rates and not just policy eligibility.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago
  What I want to know is how a man with a drone is more cost-effective. In 2023, high resolution satellite imagery is basically a SaaS product.
- ahahahahah 3y ago
  They didn't use a drone.
chomp 3y ago
*Allegedly https://www.avantaventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Avanta-Ventures-Case-Study-Cape-Analytics.pdf https://www.avantaventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Av... Cape Analytics' documentation says that UAV carries higher resolution than is necessary and most of their stuff is done with aerial fixed-wing aircraft. Not that it matters for how crazy this story is, I just wanted to inject some facts into the conversation.
- FPGAhacker 3y ago
  Fixed-wing aircraft and drones are not mutually exclusive categories.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  There are fixed wing uavs
  - RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
    Manned aircraft still way cheaper at scale. You can do whole counties in a day. Fly it 2-3 times a year and sell it to hundreds/ thousands of customers. Unless the property is ridiculously expensive, don't expect any one to commission a flight for it.
- olliej 3y ago
  Ok, so the issue isn't "aircraft controlled from ground vs aircraft controlled from the air", it's private property being spied on/inspected without consent or notice. That's illegal for a landlord, and should be illegal for insurance companies. Moreover, their identification is (from the article) erroneous, and their risk claim is false (per the article the person is not in a fire zone). Failing to acknowledge those are erroneous and continuing to terminate the policy is BS, and I assume fraudulent: if the law allows an insurance company to do zero-notice termination of policy without a justification I'm sure that they would have done that instead, rather than providing any justification that could prove wrong.
- RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
  Usually you use something like Nearmaps, Hexagon, or Vexcel. These companies use multi camera oblique imagery that can get views down the side of houses were you can do a 'good-enough' job assessing at least some of the major factors for wildfire risk. Debris or outside storage would fall into this category.
V__ 3y ago
I know the US isn't big on privacy, but a closed off backyard? Isn't this the definition of reasonable expectation of privacy? I mean, let's say his children were running around naked while the insurance company would have filmed them.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  IANAL...but between all the legal language in the average American property insurance policy, plus all the laws which the insurance industry (& friends) have "encouraged" our politicians to pass, I'd bet "no" on the privacy.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  A major city near me regularly flies small aircraft (and now, drones) over private property in order to find construction being done without a permit. They've been doing this since at least the 80s. Just saying that this sort of thing is far from new.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    My country allows cities to fly aircraft looking for pools of untreated water, and the police has automatic powers to enter a property if they find any. And neither your nor my example are nearly as problematic as the article. The article is an entirely new class of bad.
- squokko 3y ago
  In the US, anyone is permitted to fly anywhere in unrestricted airspace, and anything in view of public property is considered to have no expectation of privacy.
  - V__ 3y ago
    If it's a fenced off backyard, it's not in view of public property.
    - CrimsonRain 3y ago
unsupp0rted 3y ago
> Sveen felt his privacy had been intruded on by the supposed drone. Would they be within their rights to drive up a truck with a long ladder, climb to the top and look in on his property?
- astura 3y ago
  Depending on the wording of his policy they might even have had the right to just walk into their yard, that's what my parents insurance company did. They also had their policy cancelled.
- jollyllama 3y ago
  Would they be within their rights to lie about having done so? The all-seeing, eye in the sky drone can be to lie about evidence or its sources. To me, that is the bigger issue here.
powera 3y ago
The facts aren't entirely clear here. But, hypothetically, if the insurance company did this ... it's not a privacy violation. Your "right to privacy" doesn't extend so far as to forbid your insurer from viewing your property.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  By that logic they can prowl around at 3am with a flashlight. Be reasonable.
  - bena 3y ago
    To call back a previous post: Is it a car in the park though? We can all likely agree that trespassing physically on the property is not allowed. But that's not what happened here. They were in airspace they were allowed to be in. They managed to view the property with equipment good enough to see what was in the area. If you get high enough, you don't even need to go over the area itself. Hell, one of my neighbors has a house near enough my backyard that they can see clear over the fence from their upper floor.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      The issue is the adversarial nature of it, vs your insurance company calling you and making an inspection, or telling you they noticed a problem and asking you to address within a reasonable timeframe. I think you understand this just fine.
- function_seven 3y ago
  > Your "right to privacy" doesn't extend so far as to forbid your insurer from viewing your property. I'd say it does, when they view parts of my property that I've walled off from ordinary view. It's reasonable to expect that photos of me won't be taken when I'm in my private backyard. My neighbors can't see into the yard. Pedestrians and motorists can't. Yeah, random pilots flying overhead can look out their window and see me. But a targeted flight done for the purpose of photographing my private backyard (among other features) is a different scenario, IMO. I should be given a chance to deny this. (Of course, maybe I already granted permission in Sec. II, Paragraph 34(c)(iii) of my insurance contract. I should read that.)
thinkingkong 3y ago
Insurance companies dropping people without clear instructions or notice on how to become compliant is sort of wild. I can see how having a big pile of tires wouldnt be great. But what is “debris”? That could be anything.
- oytis 3y ago
  Instructions could be somewhere in the fine print
- RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
  > But what is “debris”? That could be anything. Yep. This is something we've been working to address at my startup (https://wuuii.com/ https://wuuii.com/). We build software for doing these kinds of inspections. Getting property owners to take action is one of the critical steps in the process, but communicating clearly what needs to be done is something we focus on. We use a combination of aerial imagery and on the ground inspection to identify all of the issues and make specific mitigation recommendations.
- sys_64738 3y ago
  Insurance is all about risk and when you are not uniform with the baseline then you become a risk. Whatever debris is doesn't really matter. It's that there is debris and that's what increases the insurance risk.
  - apple4ever 3y ago
    Yes but it's clear they are going too far
anigbrowl 3y ago
Insurance companies are trying to bail on the California market and using any excuse to do so. The state insurance commissioner (an elected official) is said to be asleep at the switch, to the point that there is a grassroots movement to recall him, which to my knowledge has never happened. The drone/aerial surveillance is the headline here, but the real issue is that insurers are unilaterally canceling policies without any sort of grace period or remediation possibility. Bear in mind that if you lose your home insurance and don't sign a new policy, a lender can and usually will foreclose upon it.
- sgerenser 3y ago
  I’ve never heard of a lender foreclosing for no insurance. Usually they’ll force sign you up for some captive insurance company or insurance of last resort, and add the cost onto your monthly payment.
  - pwg 3y ago
    > Usually they’ll force sign you up for some captive insurance company or insurance of last resort, This has been my experience when the lender screws up and fails to accurately record the insurance information. Then, near the expiration date, when they check, and find nothing, one gets a nasty-gram in the mail berating one for failing to maintain insurance, and indicating that if they don't get proof of insurance within 15 days of the date on the letter (of which at least five days has usually already lapsed), they will apply their own insurance, to the tune of 4x the cost of the actual insurance that is still valid and active.
- Simulacra 3y ago
  Bear in mind that if you lose your home insurance and don't sign a new policy, a lender can and usually will foreclose upon it. That should be illegal for the foreclosure. There should be a grace period. What if your insurance company goes bankrupt, or some other calamity?
  - mgraczyk 3y ago
    I would prefer not to subsidize other people the way you're describing.
Simulacra 3y ago
This feels so unfair, like the insurance company is just looking for an excuse to break with this person.
- happytiger 3y ago
  That’s exactly what they are doing. They are profiling for risk and thinning their portfolio with anything aberrant or risk-inducing. Insurance companies also use location data for this. All of the data people aren’t concerned about losing on social networks and cell providers is being used for these purposes too. And it’s really just started since 2018 or so to get implemented in insurance companies. The insurance companies are always looking for mitigation technologies that help reduce portfolio risk. Their biggest problems have been dealing with the tidal wave of data and determining what data is worth using for evaluation purposes, but from what I’ve seen they’re starting to figure it out. Might seem arbitrary to drop some guy for his cluttered yard, but it’s so very not. Just wait, without guaranteed rights to privacy it’s going to be a pretty massive tidal wave of “personalized insurance rates” based on a plethora of data people can’t quite conceive of at the moment.
caesil 3y ago
"He felt it intruded on his privacy" Nah, if someone is offering to pay you if your house burns down they're allowed to swing by your house and take a look at it.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  Extending this to health insurance, is an insurance adjuster allowed to stick his fingers up my butt on a whim?
  - tatersolid 3y ago
    My life insurance required me to submit to a standard physical exam by the company’s chosen medical professionals. If I were a bit older at the time, as a male I assume this exam would have included a prostate exam. So yes?
  - intrasight 3y ago
    That costs extra ;)
  - kspacewalk2 3y ago
    If they write up a policy to that effect, and you agree to it, why not?
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      There are classes of activity for which contracts are not legally binding. For good reason.
- ryanklee 3y ago
  Sorta burying the concern under a thin blanket of euphemism there...
- olliej 3y ago
  Sure. They can contact me, arrange a time, and then go through. Just as required if they were a landlord renting out property to me. We could put it another way: police also ostensibly protect your property, should they also have unfettered access to it to ensure you're not doing anything that might increase the risk of intervention on your property?
bastardoperator 3y ago
I was in LA during the northridge earthquake, insurance companies were putting in double time looking for ways to prevent having to pay for damages to homes. I remember driving down streets and seeing garages spray painted with "State farm refuses to pay on my claim". I'd be happy to pay into a system that isn't driven by pure profit.
- Kon-Peki 3y ago
  State Farm is a mutual insurance company [1] - all the "profits" are sent back to the policyholders as rebate checks. Of course, that also means that they don't have unlimited pools of money to pay out claims during big disasters. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance
Ancapistani 3y ago
Some personal context: I've been doing aerial photography as a side hustle for a couple of years now. There are several sites out there that offer one-off jobs for bid. While you usually don't know who your ultimate client is, I've done probably ~25 of those that were obviously for insurance purposes. All but two were commercial properties; those two were homes where the owner was also operating a business out of an outbuilding, so it's reasonable for me to believe that they were also for commercial insurers. From the drone operator's side, the pay for this kind of work ranges from ~$50-150. Based on the research I've done into the companies posting jobs on these sites, they seem to be charging ~$200. I'm sure large customers with lots of jobs get a significant discount, too. TL;DR: The ubiquity of drones these days has driven the cost of this sort of data collection way, way down.
RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
Disclosure: I am a cofounder of a startup in Northern California focused on wildfire risk inspections and making recommendations to homeowners about what they can do to reduce their risk. I'm on the science side with a focus on the impacts of risk mitigation. Dealing with outside storage and debris are part of both the Safer From Wildfire standard and the Wildfire Prepared Home standard. Addressing ember accumulation areas (read: any where leaves/ dust/ crap piles up) adjacent to a structure or any where else on a property is one of the easiest things a home owner can do to reduce their overall risk. Its cleaning up your yard and moving things that might catch on fire away from your house. If you have a problem with that and live in even a mild wildfire risk area, good luck maintaining coverage. This is the absolute lowest hanging fruit with regards to reducing wildfire risk. Sources: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0100-press-releases/2022/release076-2022.cfm https://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0100-press-releases/2... https://ibhs.org/wildfire-prepared-home/ https://ibhs.org/wildfire-prepared-home/ https://wuuii.com/ https://wuuii.com/
nathanfig 3y ago
Two big issues worth discussing here IMO: 1) Privacy rights in the age of aerial photography 2) Consumer rights in the age of subscription-dependence Property insurance historically has some of the best consumer protections, its one of the oldest "private subscriptions" that fills a critical need. But new technology can easily disrupt a balance of power set decades ago.
- RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
  This is nothing new for insurance. Aerial imagery has been in use for decades to address different perils. At least this homeowner had someone take a look before they were denied coverage. Most insurance companies will just write off whole zipcodes as 'lost' due to wildfire risk rather than get into this granular a level of detail. The issue California faces isn't a technical one. Its a social/ behavior issue. Californians will need to change their behavior with regards to how they manage their personal property or the risk will continue to be too high for insurance companies to bear. These properties aren't struggling to get insurance because suddenly we have aerial imagery; they are struggling because the data regarding wildfire risk has become impeccably clear. Individual actions can make an impact to their individual and community wildfire risk, but fundamentally wildfire risk is a network phenomena. It has to happen at scale. If a homeowner isn't willing to deal with debris piles on their property they are putting themselves and their community at risk. Should they get insurance?
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    You're putting the blame on the homeowner for a problem they weren't aware was a problem. In this specific case I don't see that the guy's yard, which is actually quite tidy, credibly increases fire risk. His insurance was canceled without him receiving any option for appeal or remediation. That's BS. You'd be made if something similar happened to your business, and it's not a good basis on which to shill for your clients.
    - RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
      My clients are home owners who are looking to do what it takes to avoid a non-renewal and mitigate/ reduce their personal wildfire risk. We give them the reports and data necessary to challenge a non-renewal. He can hop on our website right now and schedule an inspection. We service the entire bay area. But I can tell you this right now, with what I saw in the video he won't pass. He's storing combustibles too close to the structure. It puts him at significant risk. At my company we see customer service as the top priority and try to partner with homeowners to both understand their risk and take action. This is why we focus our reporting so much on education around the issue and communication about what matters for risk. Ultimately however, the onus is on the homeowner to take action. It's no one's responsibility but theirs to understand and mitigate their risk. I think many home owners are naive as to how high their risk really is. Look at the reaction to Oregon's recent risk maps. The maps were accurate, and the public panicked. Now they are wordsmithing the science to down play the risk. Rearranging the deck chairs does nothing about the underlying hazard. Link to the Oregon story: https://katu.com/news/local/oregon-lawmakers-insurance-commissioner-respond-to-wildfire-map-concerns# https://katu.com/news/local/oregon-lawmakers-insurance-commi...
tennisflyi 3y ago
Pretty sure the app iVue it is pretty similar. Used currently for landscaping and floor conditions.

37 points by taubek 3y ago

houseatrielah 3y ago

They could already do this with high-rez satellite photos if they wanted. The drone just makes it unusually irritating.

gerikson 3y ago
Yep, this is a thing: https://www.verisk.com/insurance/products/personal-aerial-imagery/ https://www.verisk.com/insurance/products/personal-aerial-im... I seem to remember reading on Twitter that 80% of the population of the US is photographed every 3 months or so by services like this. Also https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/aerial-imaging-in-insurance-service-market-A47569 https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/aerial-imaging-in-insur...
- bagels 3y ago
  Verisk looks to be using "aerial" photography, not satellite.
bell-cot 3y ago
Or fly a Cessna - far noisier than any drone - over the area with a fancy camera, or ... Would it make all that much difference if they'd sent out an artist on horseback, to depict his property with quill and ink on parchment?
- function_seven 3y ago
  How loud is this quill when it scratches against the parchment? Does the horse whinny?
  - RobRivera 3y ago
    the horse is a coconut afixed to a bicycle
- wolpoli 3y ago
  I get that the horse allows the artist to see over the top of the fence into the yard without a ladder, but could we rely on the horse staying still during the drawing process?
  - bell-cot 3y ago
    Figure that they'd use horses with cooler temperaments. And a decent rider can control a horse pretty well with his legs. So - still enough.
happytiger 3y ago
Just wait until it’s a fully automated system. This is still someone doing investigations at the moment. In the not too distant future, surveillance will determine rates and not just policy eligibility.
1970-01-01 3y ago
What I want to know is how a man with a drone is more cost-effective. In 2023, high resolution satellite imagery is basically a SaaS product.
ahahahahah 3y ago
They didn't use a drone.

chomp 3y ago

*Allegedly https://www.avantaventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Avanta-Ventures-Case-Study-Cape-Analytics.pdf https://www.avantaventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Av... Cape Analytics' documentation says that UAV carries higher resolution than is necessary and most of their stuff is done with aerial fixed-wing aircraft. Not that it matters for how crazy this story is, I just wanted to inject some facts into the conversation.

FPGAhacker 3y ago
Fixed-wing aircraft and drones are not mutually exclusive categories.
LegitShady 3y ago
There are fixed wing uavs
- RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
  Manned aircraft still way cheaper at scale. You can do whole counties in a day. Fly it 2-3 times a year and sell it to hundreds/ thousands of customers. Unless the property is ridiculously expensive, don't expect any one to commission a flight for it.
olliej 3y ago
Ok, so the issue isn't "aircraft controlled from ground vs aircraft controlled from the air", it's private property being spied on/inspected without consent or notice. That's illegal for a landlord, and should be illegal for insurance companies. Moreover, their identification is (from the article) erroneous, and their risk claim is false (per the article the person is not in a fire zone). Failing to acknowledge those are erroneous and continuing to terminate the policy is BS, and I assume fraudulent: if the law allows an insurance company to do zero-notice termination of policy without a justification I'm sure that they would have done that instead, rather than providing any justification that could prove wrong.
RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
Usually you use something like Nearmaps, Hexagon, or Vexcel. These companies use multi camera oblique imagery that can get views down the side of houses were you can do a 'good-enough' job assessing at least some of the major factors for wildfire risk. Debris or outside storage would fall into this category.

V__ 3y ago

I know the US isn't big on privacy, but a closed off backyard? Isn't this the definition of reasonable expectation of privacy? I mean, let's say his children were running around naked while the insurance company would have filmed them.

bell-cot 3y ago
IANAL...but between all the legal language in the average American property insurance policy, plus all the laws which the insurance industry (& friends) have "encouraged" our politicians to pass, I'd bet "no" on the privacy.
JohnFen 3y ago
A major city near me regularly flies small aircraft (and now, drones) over private property in order to find construction being done without a permit. They've been doing this since at least the 80s. Just saying that this sort of thing is far from new.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  My country allows cities to fly aircraft looking for pools of untreated water, and the police has automatic powers to enter a property if they find any. And neither your nor my example are nearly as problematic as the article. The article is an entirely new class of bad.
squokko 3y ago
In the US, anyone is permitted to fly anywhere in unrestricted airspace, and anything in view of public property is considered to have no expectation of privacy.
- V__ 3y ago
  If it's a fenced off backyard, it's not in view of public property.
  - CrimsonRain 3y ago

unsupp0rted 3y ago

> Sveen felt his privacy had been intruded on by the supposed drone. Would they be within their rights to drive up a truck with a long ladder, climb to the top and look in on his property?

astura 3y ago
Depending on the wording of his policy they might even have had the right to just walk into their yard, that's what my parents insurance company did. They also had their policy cancelled.
jollyllama 3y ago
Would they be within their rights to lie about having done so? The all-seeing, eye in the sky drone can be to lie about evidence or its sources. To me, that is the bigger issue here.

powera 3y ago

The facts aren't entirely clear here. But, hypothetically, if the insurance company did this ... it's not a privacy violation. Your "right to privacy" doesn't extend so far as to forbid your insurer from viewing your property.

anigbrowl 3y ago
By that logic they can prowl around at 3am with a flashlight. Be reasonable.
- bena 3y ago
  To call back a previous post: Is it a car in the park though? We can all likely agree that trespassing physically on the property is not allowed. But that's not what happened here. They were in airspace they were allowed to be in. They managed to view the property with equipment good enough to see what was in the area. If you get high enough, you don't even need to go over the area itself. Hell, one of my neighbors has a house near enough my backyard that they can see clear over the fence from their upper floor.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    The issue is the adversarial nature of it, vs your insurance company calling you and making an inspection, or telling you they noticed a problem and asking you to address within a reasonable timeframe. I think you understand this just fine.
function_seven 3y ago
> Your "right to privacy" doesn't extend so far as to forbid your insurer from viewing your property. I'd say it does, when they view parts of my property that I've walled off from ordinary view. It's reasonable to expect that photos of me won't be taken when I'm in my private backyard. My neighbors can't see into the yard. Pedestrians and motorists can't. Yeah, random pilots flying overhead can look out their window and see me. But a targeted flight done for the purpose of photographing my private backyard (among other features) is a different scenario, IMO. I should be given a chance to deny this. (Of course, maybe I already granted permission in Sec. II, Paragraph 34(c)(iii) of my insurance contract. I should read that.)

thinkingkong 3y ago

Insurance companies dropping people without clear instructions or notice on how to become compliant is sort of wild. I can see how having a big pile of tires wouldnt be great. But what is “debris”? That could be anything.

oytis 3y ago
Instructions could be somewhere in the fine print
RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
> But what is “debris”? That could be anything. Yep. This is something we've been working to address at my startup (https://wuuii.com/ https://wuuii.com/). We build software for doing these kinds of inspections. Getting property owners to take action is one of the critical steps in the process, but communicating clearly what needs to be done is something we focus on. We use a combination of aerial imagery and on the ground inspection to identify all of the issues and make specific mitigation recommendations.
sys_64738 3y ago
Insurance is all about risk and when you are not uniform with the baseline then you become a risk. Whatever debris is doesn't really matter. It's that there is debris and that's what increases the insurance risk.
- apple4ever 3y ago
  Yes but it's clear they are going too far

anigbrowl 3y ago

Insurance companies are trying to bail on the California market and using any excuse to do so. The state insurance commissioner (an elected official) is said to be asleep at the switch, to the point that there is a grassroots movement to recall him, which to my knowledge has never happened. The drone/aerial surveillance is the headline here, but the real issue is that insurers are unilaterally canceling policies without any sort of grace period or remediation possibility. Bear in mind that if you lose your home insurance and don't sign a new policy, a lender can and usually will foreclose upon it.

sgerenser 3y ago
I’ve never heard of a lender foreclosing for no insurance. Usually they’ll force sign you up for some captive insurance company or insurance of last resort, and add the cost onto your monthly payment.
- pwg 3y ago
  > Usually they’ll force sign you up for some captive insurance company or insurance of last resort, This has been my experience when the lender screws up and fails to accurately record the insurance information. Then, near the expiration date, when they check, and find nothing, one gets a nasty-gram in the mail berating one for failing to maintain insurance, and indicating that if they don't get proof of insurance within 15 days of the date on the letter (of which at least five days has usually already lapsed), they will apply their own insurance, to the tune of 4x the cost of the actual insurance that is still valid and active.
Simulacra 3y ago
Bear in mind that if you lose your home insurance and don't sign a new policy, a lender can and usually will foreclose upon it. That should be illegal for the foreclosure. There should be a grace period. What if your insurance company goes bankrupt, or some other calamity?
- mgraczyk 3y ago
  I would prefer not to subsidize other people the way you're describing.

Simulacra 3y ago

This feels so unfair, like the insurance company is just looking for an excuse to break with this person.

happytiger 3y ago
That’s exactly what they are doing. They are profiling for risk and thinning their portfolio with anything aberrant or risk-inducing. Insurance companies also use location data for this. All of the data people aren’t concerned about losing on social networks and cell providers is being used for these purposes too. And it’s really just started since 2018 or so to get implemented in insurance companies. The insurance companies are always looking for mitigation technologies that help reduce portfolio risk. Their biggest problems have been dealing with the tidal wave of data and determining what data is worth using for evaluation purposes, but from what I’ve seen they’re starting to figure it out. Might seem arbitrary to drop some guy for his cluttered yard, but it’s so very not. Just wait, without guaranteed rights to privacy it’s going to be a pretty massive tidal wave of “personalized insurance rates” based on a plethora of data people can’t quite conceive of at the moment.

caesil 3y ago

"He felt it intruded on his privacy" Nah, if someone is offering to pay you if your house burns down they're allowed to swing by your house and take a look at it.

AlexandrB 3y ago
Extending this to health insurance, is an insurance adjuster allowed to stick his fingers up my butt on a whim?
- tatersolid 3y ago
  My life insurance required me to submit to a standard physical exam by the company’s chosen medical professionals. If I were a bit older at the time, as a male I assume this exam would have included a prostate exam. So yes?
- intrasight 3y ago
  That costs extra ;)
- kspacewalk2 3y ago
  If they write up a policy to that effect, and you agree to it, why not?
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    There are classes of activity for which contracts are not legally binding. For good reason.
ryanklee 3y ago
Sorta burying the concern under a thin blanket of euphemism there...
olliej 3y ago
Sure. They can contact me, arrange a time, and then go through. Just as required if they were a landlord renting out property to me. We could put it another way: police also ostensibly protect your property, should they also have unfettered access to it to ensure you're not doing anything that might increase the risk of intervention on your property?

bastardoperator 3y ago

I was in LA during the northridge earthquake, insurance companies were putting in double time looking for ways to prevent having to pay for damages to homes. I remember driving down streets and seeing garages spray painted with "State farm refuses to pay on my claim". I'd be happy to pay into a system that isn't driven by pure profit.

Kon-Peki 3y ago
State Farm is a mutual insurance company [1] - all the "profits" are sent back to the policyholders as rebate checks. Of course, that also means that they don't have unlimited pools of money to pay out claims during big disasters. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_insurance

Ancapistani 3y ago

Some personal context: I've been doing aerial photography as a side hustle for a couple of years now. There are several sites out there that offer one-off jobs for bid. While you usually don't know who your ultimate client is, I've done probably ~25 of those that were obviously for insurance purposes. All but two were commercial properties; those two were homes where the owner was also operating a business out of an outbuilding, so it's reasonable for me to believe that they were also for commercial insurers. From the drone operator's side, the pay for this kind of work ranges from ~$50-150. Based on the research I've done into the companies posting jobs on these sites, they seem to be charging ~$200. I'm sure large customers with lots of jobs get a significant discount, too. TL;DR: The ubiquity of drones these days has driven the cost of this sort of data collection way, way down.

RosanaAnaDana 3y ago

Disclosure: I am a cofounder of a startup in Northern California focused on wildfire risk inspections and making recommendations to homeowners about what they can do to reduce their risk. I'm on the science side with a focus on the impacts of risk mitigation. Dealing with outside storage and debris are part of both the Safer From Wildfire standard and the Wildfire Prepared Home standard. Addressing ember accumulation areas (read: any where leaves/ dust/ crap piles up) adjacent to a structure or any where else on a property is one of the easiest things a home owner can do to reduce their overall risk. Its cleaning up your yard and moving things that might catch on fire away from your house. If you have a problem with that and live in even a mild wildfire risk area, good luck maintaining coverage. This is the absolute lowest hanging fruit with regards to reducing wildfire risk. Sources: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0100-press-releases/2022/release076-2022.cfm https://www.insurance.ca.gov/0400-news/0100-press-releases/2... https://ibhs.org/wildfire-prepared-home/ https://ibhs.org/wildfire-prepared-home/ https://wuuii.com/ https://wuuii.com/

nathanfig 3y ago

Two big issues worth discussing here IMO: 1) Privacy rights in the age of aerial photography 2) Consumer rights in the age of subscription-dependence Property insurance historically has some of the best consumer protections, its one of the oldest "private subscriptions" that fills a critical need. But new technology can easily disrupt a balance of power set decades ago.

RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
This is nothing new for insurance. Aerial imagery has been in use for decades to address different perils. At least this homeowner had someone take a look before they were denied coverage. Most insurance companies will just write off whole zipcodes as 'lost' due to wildfire risk rather than get into this granular a level of detail. The issue California faces isn't a technical one. Its a social/ behavior issue. Californians will need to change their behavior with regards to how they manage their personal property or the risk will continue to be too high for insurance companies to bear. These properties aren't struggling to get insurance because suddenly we have aerial imagery; they are struggling because the data regarding wildfire risk has become impeccably clear. Individual actions can make an impact to their individual and community wildfire risk, but fundamentally wildfire risk is a network phenomena. It has to happen at scale. If a homeowner isn't willing to deal with debris piles on their property they are putting themselves and their community at risk. Should they get insurance?
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  You're putting the blame on the homeowner for a problem they weren't aware was a problem. In this specific case I don't see that the guy's yard, which is actually quite tidy, credibly increases fire risk. His insurance was canceled without him receiving any option for appeal or remediation. That's BS. You'd be made if something similar happened to your business, and it's not a good basis on which to shill for your clients.
  - RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
    My clients are home owners who are looking to do what it takes to avoid a non-renewal and mitigate/ reduce their personal wildfire risk. We give them the reports and data necessary to challenge a non-renewal. He can hop on our website right now and schedule an inspection. We service the entire bay area. But I can tell you this right now, with what I saw in the video he won't pass. He's storing combustibles too close to the structure. It puts him at significant risk. At my company we see customer service as the top priority and try to partner with homeowners to both understand their risk and take action. This is why we focus our reporting so much on education around the issue and communication about what matters for risk. Ultimately however, the onus is on the homeowner to take action. It's no one's responsibility but theirs to understand and mitigate their risk. I think many home owners are naive as to how high their risk really is. Look at the reaction to Oregon's recent risk maps. The maps were accurate, and the public panicked. Now they are wordsmithing the science to down play the risk. Rearranging the deck chairs does nothing about the underlying hazard. Link to the Oregon story: https://katu.com/news/local/oregon-lawmakers-insurance-commissioner-respond-to-wildfire-map-concerns# https://katu.com/news/local/oregon-lawmakers-insurance-commi...

tennisflyi 3y ago

Pretty sure the app iVue it is pretty similar. Used currently for landscaping and floor conditions.