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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."
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?
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".
Wonder how they would rate me if I took the bus to work for a week? Certainly wouldn't catch me speeding or accelerating/decelerating too hard, but I wonder how the frequent stops would factor in? Also if you didn't put your phone into airplane mode, would being a passenger in a 737 double your rates when they clock you doing 150+mph at takeoff before you ascend above cell reception range?
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
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.
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...
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
Progressive is already using a feature like this in the U.S. It's just not a smart phone app. It's actually a little box you put in your car. It's called Snapshot. Not my kind of thing. There is just no way for the insurance company to know what is or is not going on around you when you're driving.
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?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
There is no -1 disagree
How is this new?
In Spain, MAPFRE has been offering for at least 4 years the YCar line of insurance for young drivers which offers as much as a 40% discount if you install a GPS-like device which sends them information about when you drive, what speed you drive, how many kilometers, etc.
If you speed up, drive on "dangerous" hours (e. g. weekend 2 AM - 6 AM), etc, you lose the discount for next year.
http://www.mapfre.com/seguros/es/particulares/soluciones/seguros-coches-jovenes-ycar.shtml
There are several policies to choose and some of them even allow to adjust the policy clauses, for instance in case you are a young driver who works the night shift.
but imagine for a moment that everybody just stopped buying insurance, canceled their insurance completely and drove without it.
Within a short time the automated license plate scanners would be connected to an insurance monitoring system and an automated fine-sending system.
What, do you think the appropriate hooks aren't there yet?
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
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).
No, sure, people don't react and don't do anything because they are the proverbial frog that is being slowly cooked in a pan, not thrown into boiling hot water, they are boiled slowly.
However there will be a breaking point, I believe that breaking point is going to hit when the next economic crisis happens, so when the dollar crashes, the US bonds crash. But the unfortunate part is that if the people did try to get out of that pan right now, it would mean much less blood, less senseless violence. It's not like it's good to have a massive revolt, revolution, guillotines on the streets, etc., it's really bad, it's bad for the economy and society, not just for those, who are unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and have their heads chopped off.
It's bad for the society, because it will disrupt the economy to the point, where it may take not just years and decades to fix, it's better to kick the bad habits sooner rather than later.
You can't handle the truth.
Imagine if tax time came and nobody paid the taxes.
Imagine if everybody cancelled their insurance and drove anyway.
Imagine if everybody had drugs on them at all times.
You just gave the for-profit prison industry a huge erection.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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.
You can't handle the truth.
Please learn some fucking history. Private jails and courts have ALWAYS been used by the powerful to indenture everyone else. ALWAYS.
We are seeing the problem with this in America, right now.
Who created 3 strikes laws? Private companies who own prisons.
Who keeps pushing longer sentences? Private companies who own prisons.
Who pushes for more arrests in poor neighborhoods? Private prisons.
Yes, private security force may be hired and you may end up in prison and your property may end up being leaned and seized to pay for the decontamination and other costs."
and since it will be a private court, you will always be found guilty.
"government does today that would be anywhere near as efficient "
The US government is far more efficient then people think. Have you read the account reports? budgets? I have, for government and private sectors. The US government is many times more efficient in most cases.
Compared to almost every other government? more efficient, and far more honest.
Maybe you should learn about the system before talking about it? no, no just keep being stupid.
" What did government do with BP spill? What, the 75 Million USD per incident liability limit? How did that help anybody?"
And not having a government BP would have done more? Or do you think the people would have more power and money then BP?
BTW, BP paid 45 BILLION, not 75 million.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You are mistaken, just like this guy, and my reply to him is the same as it is to you. Your insurance is there to cover you, not anybody else.
I'm not mistaken about anything. The topic of who's liability is covered wasn't part of my post. My post was regarding the fact that mandatory third party liability insurance is there to ensure that you can afford to pay when your errors when driving a car cause harm to others.
And in my country at least, the injured party does not sue you. It is you legal duty to provide your insurance details to the other person whenever you are involved in a road traffic accident, and they do indeed claim directly from your insurance. You do not have the option to personally refuse to pay for example. The insurance company pays them directly, not you.
It is your personal responsibility to cover yourself with enough insurance so that if something happens to you, you do not have to worry about paying for your bills and such.
It's more than your personal responsibility. it's your legal duty. The law is there to protect people from idiots that think they don't need insurance, and who then are not able to pay when they cause harm to others.
Your attitude to perfectly reasonable rules of law is more than a little cranky. Fraud? You're nuts.
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?