Insurer Measures Driver Safety With Smartphone App To Calculate Premiums

Qedward writes "Motorists are being invited to help develop a new driving app that could earn them a discount of 'up to 20%' on their motor insurance. British insurer Aviva is using smartphone technology to create individual driver profiles that will be used to calculate tailored pay-how-you-drive premiums. The driver behavioral app, Aviva RateMyDrive, will monitor motorists taking part in the test for 200 miles, including acceleration, braking and cornering. This data is then turned into an individual score which helps determine the motorist's premium, with 'safer' drivers earning up to 20% off their deal."

Begging to be gamed

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides the fact that this is begging to be gamed, how to they tell the difference between someone driving carefully and some half-blind octogenarian that's causing traffic accidents around them by driving too slow and failing to react to near-misses that may affect the next driver?

Not too sure on this

[Riddler Sensei]

I'm not too sure this is a universally good idea. Sometimes traffic gives you a tricky situation and you need to accelerate or do a quick lane change to avoid a potential accident. In those moments I'm not too sure it's good to introduce the thought, "Oh, but wait, that may increase my premium".

Drive too much?

[abelb]

How long before the insurance company succumbs to the temptation of penalizing those who use their cars too much? The more time you spend on the road the higher the chance that you'll be involved in an incident, regardless of how well you drive. You can see how such information could be used to discriminate against people living in rural areas and those living further from their place of work.

Plead the 5th

[LSDelirious]

Letting them track you is like talking to a cop who's placed you under arrest... they might convince you that you're being given a chance to prove what an upstanding law abiding citizen you are, but in reality they're only looking for the incriminating parts to hold against you. Its the marketing folks jobs to come up with hypothetical situations where you can save money so you'll switch to their brand... its the bean counters and their lawyers jobs to see that you don't ever actually qualify for said hypothetical discounts, and you are giving them the ammo...

Only 200 miles

[AmiMoJo]

So I have to drive carefully for 200 miles to get my rating up and then I can turn it off and go back to my old habits? Or just swap phones with my mum for 200 miles? Or just not take my (primary) phone when I want to have some fun?

Re:Drive too much?

[Alex]

That's not discrimination, its common sense.

If you do more miles - all things being equal, you are more likely to have an accident - so it makes sense for the insurer to charge you more. The only reason they aren't doing it yet is they've not found a good way to measure it yet, I'm sure they are working on it though.

Presumably now you are going to complain about insurers "discriminating" against people who live on flood plains, in high risk crime areas and arsonists ?

Alex

Why is this not a good thing?

[c0mpliant]

For years insurance companies have been doing the exact same thing of estimating how good or bad a driver you are based on your age, gender, occupation etc. Now they're proposing to allow you to determine how good a driver you are based on using an app for not too long of a time really.

Is there a potential for it to be misused, yeah, but I'd welcome any move to judge my driving over lumping me in with a particular age group or gender.

Re:Begging to be gamed

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Wouldn't that just be a matter of statistics? The more data that's captured, the more patterns will emerge.

Re:Not too sure on this

[captainpanic]

But really, what privacy concern is there in acceleration data?

None. But...

You can bet that their programmers wrote in the conclusion of their presentation to management: "With more data, the test becomes more accurate."
So, when they will do the test again next year (they will, don't worry), it will include more data. Did you know that statistics say that secondary roads are more dangerous than highways?

I'll stay out from the start.

Re:Not too sure on this

[JosKarith]

This is another thin end of the wedge situation. For now it's an optional 200 mile sample. Then it'll be permanantly on. Then having this will be a condition of your insurance...
Remember that as this is a smartphone app location data will also be captured. Do you really want your insurer knowing everywhere you go? How long before the Police demand that data to track where someone's been?
OBdisclaimer - I work for an insurance company and I'm extremely uneasy about this.

Re:Begging to be gamed

[wierd_w]

I'd say it is more a slippery slope:

The insurance company incentivises people to provide very detailed information about themselves, that they would normally never provide, and may even try to prevent being obtained.

In the process, they build a precedent that will penalize people that are unwilling to provide this data willingly.

EG, it starts out as "If I voluntarily join this program, I could say 20% on my insurance." It then later becomes the "New standard rate metric, based on your personal driving patterns," and eventually becomes "Penalized rate for not providing data on your traffic patterns."

While it looks good now, it wont look so good to people who value their privacy in the future. They will be lumped in with people who are clearly bad drivers but dont want to admit it, and want to hide that fact from the insurance companies.

Re:Begging to be gamed

[Sqr(twg)]

how to they tell the difference between someone driving carefully and some half-blind octogenarian that's causing traffic accidents around them by driving too slow ... ?

Correlating speed to position and a database of speed limits will tell you if people are driving too fast or too slow. (In certain cases, driving slower than the speed limit is the correct action, so you'd have to look at a large dataset to differentiate between those who adapt to circumstances and those who always drive to slow.)

In general, slow drivers aren't a problem for insurance companies. If you drive slowly and another car gets into an accident while trying to overtake, it's typically his insurace that will have to pay, because he should have waited until it was safe to pass.

I suspect they are trying to weed out the young drivers who have never been in a near-accident and believe that they can drive 20 mph over the speed limit, because they have such a good car, and their reactions are so much better than other people's. If they can eliminate that subset of drivers, they wouldn't have to have such high premiums for young people in general.

Re:break the law.

[chrb]

Mass civil disobedience happens when people really care about something enough to put their own liberty and property in danger. People don't care that much about their insurance company lowering their premiums in exchange for monitoring their driving behaviour, in fact, most good drivers are going to welcome this (and everyone thinks they're a good driver).

Re:break the law.

[Buchenskjoll]

I don't know where you live, but I live in a democracy. If I wanted to stop buying car insurance, and I knew I had all car owners behind me, I would start a political party, get elected and change the compulsory car insurance policy. Your whole idea of "how about if all of society rebelled against society" is weird and stupid.

Re:break the law.

[roman_mir]

If millions of people break the law, it's not a law. Basically laws are relying on voluntary compliance. For profit prisons are the only correct way to have prisons, but that's because there should be no government laws that put people to jail. The court system, the prison system, the policing, all of this should be private. The prison time should be paid by liability insurance and thieves shouldn't even be in prison, they should be forced to return the value of what they stole maybe multiplied by 3.

Only violent criminals should go to prison, and liability insurance should be used to pay for their prison time and the amount of coverage basically then is relative to the holding conditions (and I suppose charitable groups can give them some more money if they care).

AFAIC if you steal from me, I don't want you in prison, I want you to be working for me until you pay it back more than once.

Oh, and obviously gov't creates entire classes of prisoners that should never be in prison ever, under any circumstances. Drug laws? Drug war? That is what gives the woody to the private prisons that are private in name only, because they get government money and gov't laws to subsidise them and to create the prison population for them.

Re:break the law.

[h4rr4r]

Nothing wrong with debtors prisons?

Are you fucking stupid or just ignorant of history?

Are you dumb enough to think violent criminals have any money for insurance companies to collect? You want the victim to pay for incarceration? I bet you want women to pay for their own rape kits too.

Hopefully, one day you will grow up.

Re:break the law.

[shutdown -p now]

AFAIC if you steal from me, I don't want you in prison, I want you to be working for me until you pay it back more than once.

So in your hypothetical perfect world, the thief basically becomes a slave of the person he stole from until they can compensate the damage?

Okay, then. I wonder about the specifics. Like, when he's working for me, I'm the one setting the price of labor, right? And I know you're against minimum wage laws - so can I set it to, say, 1 cent per hour? Also, what about work time and conditions? I mean, the guy could be some slacker who refuses to work for me more than an hour every day, surely that's wrong? So can I force them to work every single moment they are awake until the debt is paid out?

I wonder, would you permit "selling" them, too? I mean, you can sell someone's debt to you today, logically this is quite similar. So if someone steals my car and they don't have insurance to pay for it, can I sell their debt (i.e. their obligation to work for me - effectively, my rights to them as a slave) to, say, some mining company? I just don't have anything that needs to be done requiring such copious amounts of manual labor, but clearly I should have some financial recourse, right?

Finally, I can't help but wonder what happens if my slave has a child. If all their wages are garnished to repay the debt, clearly they can't afford to so much as feed them. I would be quite eager to let them retain part of their earnings for themselves for those purposes, but only under certain conditions, like, say, requiring that the child in question also enters into a lifetime contract with me under similar terms to compensate for my lost repayments. This is obviously a valid arrangement, but do I only need the agreement of the kid, or must his parents also assent?