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Insurance Companies Try Out Auto Black Boxes
tekiegreg writes "It looks like the first black box test for auto insurance companies is underway. While this may be a privacy issue, it can also make better drivers out of everyone if insurance rates are adjustable based on the way everyone drives. This was covered on Slashdot before however this seems to be one of the first workups, that can even include tests on speed and braking, not just location."
I wouldn't mind if my driving safety was monitored for lower rates but I wouldn't want my speed watched ;)
Who are you kidding...this is going to turn into another way for them to raise rates and drop people. Sort of like health insurance won't cover some people unless they can pass a physical or charge inordinate amounts of money if you are a bit overweight.
The first time they clock you doing anything over 75 or 80 mph they'll probably be sending you notices. They start sensing sharp breaking and wild turns you may just find yourself without insurance. Chris Rock once said it should be called "in case shit" because you have in case shit happens. And you don't exactly get your money back if you don't. Now they'll see the shit coming and drop you before they have to make a payoff.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
What it can do, is force everyone into driving with a black box. Driving without one will become prohibitively expensive, even though the statistics will show that with/without doesn't really affect the actual numbers.
Insurance is about getting you to pay for something that won't ever likely happen... want me to prove it? Keep having stupid accidents, and see if they don't drop you.
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At least not the ones who will be able to afford the extra $1,000 or so every six months that will be eventually charged to drivers who don't get the "discount" for turning over the data.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Company spokesman William Perry says use of the auto data recorder will not be mandatory for Progressive customers.
"The key thing for us regarding the privacy aspect is the program is completely voluntary. It's not imposed on anybody," he said.
Ha... How much longer will it take before it becomes compulsory?
Regardless, this is still not as bad as Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA), where we could one day see full control of speed on our vehicles:
ISA info
As a 21 year old male who loves cars and driving, the future looks bleak.
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Yeah, people bitch about high insurance rates, but when an acceptable(?) solution comes around they seem to balk at it. After all, if you want a low rate, why not prove it? Is Big Brother/privacy concerns worth the $?
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it can also make better drivers out of everyone if insurance rates are adjustable based on the way everyone drives.
Is that a troll?
Also, if there was a microchip in my tongue that raised our medical insurance rates when ate a burrito, we'd also be healthier. Or perhaps some sort of camera system in the kitchen that the insurance companies could randomly monitor to verify our mandatory meal plans.
Now whoa, i'm not saying that you HAVE to put the microchip in your tongue, i'm just saying that you don't qualify for the $4000/year TongueChip(tm) discount unless you do it. Also, in completely unrelated news, trial lawyers have forced us to raise your insurance rates by exactly $4000\year.
perhaps that's how they got old?
cheers,
Erick
www.brainglass.com
feed your brain!
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It sound like the box just plugs in to the stardart OBD-II port found on all new (1996+) cars. If these things take off, I wonder how long until someone makes a box to spoof the signals? Though I am pretty sure that would count as insurance fraud.
If you're doing 65 in a 35 without some sort of GPS unit and a GIS system where it knows the roads and the speed limits? Yea sure, I went 65mph on this day and time, but if you dont know whether I was on a highway or a residential street, piss off! How does it know when you run a red light (if you dont speed up for the little bit)? It cant. Unless it has some GPS system incorporated. And at that rate, they'll know where I was going, where I parked my car, for how long - in other words, big brother will be a corporation and not the government.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
From TFA: " Progressive says it will use the data only for potential discounts and not to penalize customers whose devices reveal risky driving habits."
Of course, when they do their modelling for the next year, they'll take into account the predicted number of "safe" drivers and "risky" drivers. Given their desired profit levels and the discounts for safe drivers, they'll just adjust rates accordingly for everyone else. Guess which way rates will go to compensate for the discounts?
I'm not saying this is a bad thing (hey, it's capitalism), but to phrase it as "no penalty" for bad drivers (and good drivers who refuse to enter the program) is a bit of a misnomer.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
Problem is, the most annoying driving habits wouldn't be detected by this device. Backing up traffic by driving 25 in a 35 MPH zone, for example, will only look like someone driving an acceptable speed, despite the fact that such situations are just as likely to cause an accident as driving too fast. Not using a turn-signal probably won't be detected by the device either. Nor would people who pull into the right hand turn only lane even when they intend to go straight, preventing you from making a legal right-on-red turn. As well, the device wouldn't watch for knuckle-heads who never turn on their lights after dark, or when it's raining severely.
The car insurance industry needs some serious tweaking. There is absolutely no justification for an insurance company to sit on 8 billion dollars while at the same time raising the rates on their customers. What we really need is cooperative insurance where everyone adds to the pool and the unused pool money gets returned to the contributors.
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I had a psyc prof point out one time that if the various motor vehicle admins out there sent out a notice to everyone each year who did not get any points, the recognition alone was likely to cause some good. But, as a society, we are far more focused on pathology than what is good.
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.brainglass.com
http://www.busyweather.com/
" 2005 "I'm sorry, the black box says you were doing 60 in a 55 zone"
2006 I'm sorry, the black box says you violated the TandC that said you would not drive for more than 2.5 hours without a 30 minute rest break"
2007 "I'm sorry, the black-box says you were doing 55.0001 in a 55 zone. Haha!"
Viz, "acceptable" behaviour would be socially engineered.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
That means the little old lady driving 35 in the left lane on the highway will save a ton of money as she nearly (or really) kills dozens of people a day.
The black box will think she's the perfect driver.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
It may not have anything to do with driving. But you're making a common statistical mistake - confusing causation and correlation. Causation is just like it sounds, A causes B. Correlation means when you find B, you find A - even if A doesn't cause B.
A perfect example of this is credit rating. Doesn't effect your driving does it? Well, apparenlty people with poor credit ratings tend to have poorer driving records. So insurance companies would love to be able to price your auto insurance by looking at your credit rating. Might even be being done where you are. But does bad credit have anything to do with insurance claims? Actually it does. And I suspect the insurance companies have every reason to expect that the presence of black boxes will be correlated with claims.
Life Insurance in Canada
Will require GPS to be effective, and that means they know where you're driving. If your work happens to be near a "bad" intersection for accidents, your rate goes up, even if you have a perfect record.
Now, that's good for the insurance company, as they charge more for higher risk areas (or drivers). But it's bad for the pool, i.e. us.
It will be encouraged, it will be used, it will create profit and reduce "losses" (i.e. compensation), and it will spread like wildfire until it is effectively or actually mandatory.
In addition, how many minutes do you figure it will be before "recorded speed and GPS data" becomes "remotely reported speed and GPS data" becomes "transmitted directly to the nearest CHP car," without, of course, the context that a police officer observing the scene would see. Just numbers.
You know, swerving and accelerating to avoid an accident becomes a speeding ticket. Running a red light to avoid an accident could cost you your license. Running a broken red light at 4am with no traffic could do the same. No one will care about your story, the computer shows just what you did. Heck, it probably won't even require (allow) a court appearance.
I'm getting tired of even debating these points, which is why the bad guys always seem to win. They have an inexhaustible drive to control everyone else all the time that keeps them awake at night. They never seem to run out of energy and they never seem to run out of recruits.
And its always the same argument, over and over, every time. You can win the argument ("know your customer" banking laws) and while you're sleeping off the effort they pass the same damned thing again.
The utility argument is a loss, you can justify ANY incursion for that one. Mandatory diet and exercise, 24-hour monitoring, there can be no dividing line from the POV of utility.
The "license" argument isn't an argument for monitoring, it's an argument against public roads.
Just remember, those of you who think it can't hurt you, when it's your turn, the rest of us sure as heck aren't going to speak up for you.
A very good point. The blackbox assumes bad behavior from the very start. After all, they're not going to give you the good rates unless you can prove you've been good. So if you can't prove you've been good-- the lack of a speeding ticket or screwed up fender will should tell you that. Isn't that why your damn rates go up? --then your aren't entitled to the "special" rate. I tend to agree with the parent here... This is either a very flawed study in human psychology or nothing more than a sad profit tool, probably a bit of both.
I mean one person is monitored being good, the other one is not monitored being good, but penalized. Kinda ironic in a society of presumed innocense. Frankly, I'll drop any insurance company that pulls this crap.
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Don't cruise at 65 mph in the left lane when traffic is flowing at 75+ and I won't tailgate you.
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Here's my immediate reaction: if it can say how fast I was going, and how I was using the controls, and where I am, it can know if I'm speeding or working the controls in a piss-poor fashion.
However, how can it identify the person who is speeding through traffic, whipping in and out of different lanes and driving right up on other cars (very dangerous on a crowded freeway, and very common here in LA) versus the person who is speeding along in a single lane of a winding road with no other traffic within sight?
In other words, without proximity data (as is, your proximity to other cars) -- and let's be honest, even with that data -- it's always going to come down to a judgement call based on less than perfect knowledge of the circumstances.
Or maybe I'm full of crap. It's hard to tell some days.
Every time I go to work, once I settle into the flight deck, there's one black box recording every movement of the controls, and another recording every scrap of conversation. In the event of incidents, this data is available to investigators for analysis. That's the way it is in aviation, and now techology has made it economical to apply this principle to cars on the road. It's long overdue. btw, the 'black boxes' are actually flourescent orange, makes it a lot easier to find them in a wrecked vehicle.
If you want privacy, go take your vehicle and drive it on private roads. The history in aviation shows, data recorders are a GOOD THING. When there are incidents, the recorders have records of what happened. People learn from that data, it reduces accident rates, and helps designers make safer vehicles. Sometimes it can be used to identify liability and responsibility. Race cars are the same, much knowledge has been gained from post race data analysis, especially with regards to incidents.
If your data recorder shows you are not safe on the public roads, and that results in loss of insurance, hence ability to use the public road system, couldn't happen to a more appropriate person. This would take less than 1% of drivers off the road, but would increase road safety by orders of magnitude. Most people are responsible drivers on the road, but there's a very small number that seem to think the 'rules of the road' are there to be broken. They account for many thousands of fatalities yearly.
There is a time and a place to 'pick the fight' on privacy, this is not one of them. The public road system is a public resource, with zero expectation of privacy, and a very large expectation of responsibility. Data recorders are a good way to enforce that responsibility, because one look at accident statistics will confirm, there are way to many drivers on the road that just dont understand the concept of responsibility.
I'm in Alberta, I payed $3200 a year. He's in Sask, he payed $800 or so.
The simple explanation here is that the Saskatchewan taxpayers are picking up the difference. Sheeple are actually pretty dumb. Ontario has been grappling with this issue for a little over a year. We've got drivers crying for lower rates, and pointing to New Brunswick and Saskatchewan as examples. However, they ignore the benefit caps that have been instituted in those provinces. If you have a car accident that paralyzes you for life, the insurance providers in those provinces only have to pay out a certain, capped amount. The government can't require them to lower rates while keeping the same high payouts. However, in Ontario, if you were to require such a catastrophic claim, the payout would be much higher.
But people don't see that. They only see the short-term benefits. "Yes, your rates would drop $800/year, but if you were to be seriously injured, the insurance company would only have to pay for the first $100,000 of health care. After that, you'd be on your own." Most people tune out after, "drop $800/year."
Since then though, my insurance has gone as high as $4200, and is just now (that i'm 21!) dropping back down to around $2800,
Didn't it occur to you to perhaps consider trading in your pocket rocket for a less conspicuous, more practical car?
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