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TomTom Satnavs To Set Insurance Prices
nk497 writes "TomTom has signed a deal with an insurance firm that will see its satnavs used to monitor drivers. Fair Pay Insurance, part of Motaquote, will use monitoring systems built into the TomTom PRO 3100 to watch for sharp braking and badly managed turns, rewarding 'good' drivers with lower premiums and warning less skilled motorists when they aren't driving as they should. 'We've dispensed with generalization's and said to our customers, if you believe you're a good driver, we'll believe you and we'll even give you the benefit up front,' said Nigel Lombard of Fair Pay Insurance."
So if say, some idiot pulls out in front of you and you swerve or stop quickly, your insurance company will consider you a bad driver?
Observation: Insurance rates are currently set at a level that the market and competitive pressure will bear, without this additional information.
Prediction: Early adopters will see some benefit in lowered insurance costs, but once most people are enrolled, insurance rates will creep back up to previous levels (that being the established level that the market will bear). Insurance companies will create additional rules that will facilitate a greater rate of insurance claim denial based up the new information, and will see greater profits arise due to this. Consumers overall will see no benefit in the long run.
Well, when you "people" say every single piece is abused by "the man", you're bound to be right someday.
In other news, I'm quite sure that if I turn off my "tom tom pro 3100" and use my Phone or any other gizmo, there will be no tracking.
They can ccululate data of everyone they monitor and correlate patterns against claims. They'll soon know what constitutes risky driving far better than anyone's theories.
...as a "discount" for those exhibiting the behavior they want. In fact, they simply raise prices for everyone at such a rate that the discount is in fact the lack of a penalty. Yet, somehow, dressing it up in this way avoids backlash and consumer protection lawsuits, while convincing people to give up their privacy in ways they would have never considered has it not been for the phantom carrot of a "discount".
Before someone says "free market!", keep in mind that nearly every insurance company does this to some extent, usually with no proof of their claims, and insurance is legally required to some extent in most of the country. The free market does not exist, never did, and never will.
Great Intellect...
Most of the time sharp braking is for something which shouldn't be in front of the car
No, sharp braking is what happens when you are yacking on your cellphone or reading a newspaper, and glance up to see that you are about to rear end the car in front of you.
My guess is that frequent sharp braking is strongly correlated with bad driving.
Because the grainy data given by a GPS should not be consider legal reason to charge higher or lower prices for customers. Because if you are a truly unsafe driver, your costs will be raised because you have made claims. Because this is an insane violation of consumer privacy. Do you need more reasons or did you just see this as a good opportunity to flog a witch?
Great Intellect...
If the US wants to take away freedoms and monitor the internet, it is to protect the children. Then once is in place, they use it for other things down to political influence.
If they want to monitor your driving, you get rewarded to do it now. Then once everyone is doing it, you'll still get bonuses for being a polite sheep, but they'll jack the other rates up calling it inflation or something.
Wall mart seems like such a great place for low prices, but once they kill the competition they jack the prices up so you're really not saving anything from the competition they killed. Actually you're probably losing out since there is no one to compete with them anymore.
God spoke to me
If the insurance company I use announced they'd start doing this, I'd cancel and switch to someone else immediately, and I'd recommend the same to everyone I know.
JUST SAY "NO" TO BEING TRACKED EVERYWHERE YOU DRIVE
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
This is how privacy dies.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Regrettably, no. People sell their privacy astonishingly cheap. It amazes me when I go to the store and they expect me to carry a "loyalty card" for a minor discount. But apparently some of you do it, or they would not ask.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Maybe you've just been lucky. Accidents don't happen often enough to be a great risk predictor for the future. From the sound of it, maybe when you do have an accident it will be a big one, and you'll total the car. And that'll be more significant than the 2 mild fender benders that the little old lady next door has had in 20 years.
It's not that complicated. Your personal sharp brake count can be compared to the average count of all drivers in the area. Random events happen to everybody, but if it somehow happens to you a lot more, then either you are extraordinarily unlucky, or you're a bad driver. Either way the insurance company would want you to pay more, assuming they can correlate this behavior with actual accident rates.
this could be less about privacy and more about safe roads. if everyone drove as safely as they could...
"What Are They Gonna Do When Were All Using Freenet"
Who knew? I think that's amazing.
Insurance is a business and the more they can cut outlays to premiums the more profits they make. I'd rather they more closely aligned risks with claims than they just denied fair claims, which saves mone on the other side. In case I didn't make this clear: I'm OK with insurance companies making money off me, even if they turn a profit because I have low risk. I'm paying over a thousand dollars a month for medical insurance, and using about $500 worth a year for my family - with no pre-existing conditions or reoccurring need for medical care. And to me it's money well spent because in America today you can't get treated if you don't have insurance. Almost everybody gets sick now and then, kids break their arms or legs or whatnot, and to take them to the emergency room without insurance would cost me my house.
Ten of my coworkers and I could pool our contributions together and BUY a doctor and all his gear - and he'd work six days a year, but that's a whole other issue. We're talking about insurance now.
You can't deny that the closer to fact they gauge the risk, the more they diminish the "uncertainty" that motivates the buyer of their product. Defending against the slings and arrows of uncertain fortune is their value-add.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I would PREFER ads suited to the stuff I buy
If I'm not into romance novels, but prefer SciFi and they can use that data to advertise SciFi movies to me, isnt it better?
That's an interesting question. The answer is: It's none of your fracking business. You signed away these rights to get your loyalty card discount and who they sell your data to is their own concern, not yours. At this point it's just a metric boatload of data. Whether or not you religiously buy a half-rack of pounders every Friday night is a bit of a brick with a value sold to the highest bidder. If you cared about what they did with it, you should have halted at "do you want a loyalty card?"
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Driving in a busy city with bad traffic all around can cause frequent sharp braking
And also results in more accidents requiring payout. The "bad driving choice" in this case is where you drive, rather than your actual skill as a driver.
The insurance companies aren't rewarding you for being better than me. They're rewarding you for being less costly too them.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
They are there to protect *other* drivers as much as anyone else. Insurance is a legal requirement because it's reckoned to be better that there is some means of providing financial support to those who suffer at the hands of incompetent drivers, rather than to just resort to suing them and getting the run around for 10 years because they are a deadbeat who can''t pay for your medical bills and loss of income. The kind of idiot who drives badly probably also correlates strongly with the kind of idiot who thinks insurance is for idiots, so in that case I'm very glad to have my policy to fall back on. If driving insurance wasn't mandatory, driving insurance would be too expensive for anyone to afford, and the costs would fall back upon society in another form, which I get the sense you wouldn't agree with either.
While I agree that society is overly litigious, I think the chief manifestation of that is unnecessary paperwork like entire manuals devoted to what NOT to do with a product (do not eat your mobile phone...), and excessive medical tests and interventions. I don't like insurance companies either - because as for-profit entities, they offer a service which has value, and then do their level best to weasel out of providing it. But they do provide a valuable service, even if it's grudgingly.
Speeding should be a dangerous risk.
It certainly should be, and it would be if speed limits were remotely sane. Right now speeding is just travelling at the same speed as 90% of the other cars on the road. Speed limits should be set at a speed that most drivers would not be comfortable driving at.