Slashdot Mirror
Metadata On How You Drive Also Reveals Where You Drive
chicksdaddy writes "Pay-as-you-drive programs are all the rage in the auto insurance industry. The (voluntary) programs, like Progressive Insurance's Snapshot use onboard monitoring devices to track information like the speed of the automobile, sudden stops, distance traveled and so on. Safe and infrequent drivers might see their rates drop while customers who log thousands of miles behind the wheel and/or drive recklessly would see their insurance rates rise. GPS data isn't generally collected, and insurance companies promise customers that they're not tracking their movement. No matter. A study (PDF) by researchers at the University of Denver claims that the destination of a journey can be derived by combining knowledge of the trip's origin with the metrics collected by the 'pay-as-you-drive' device. The data points collected by these remote sensing devices are what the researchers call 'quasi-identifiers' – attributes that are 'non-identifying by themselves, but can be used to unique identify individuals when used in combination with other data.' In one example, researchers used a strategy they called 'stop-point matching,' to compare the pattern of vehicle stop points from a known origin with various route options. They found that in areas with irregular street layouts (i.e. 'not Manhattan'), the pattern will be more or less unique for any location. The study raises important data privacy questions for the (many) 'pay-as-you-drive' programs now being piloted, or offered to drivers – not to mention other programs that seek to match remote sensors and realtime monitoring with products and services."
This removes one way for them to "monetize" the data they collect from everyone with location services enabled on their Android cell phone....
Data on where you are, data on how fast you drove, data on where you have been, etc.
However, this doesn't mean that signing up for this intrusive insurance company black
box program is a good idea.
Also worth mentioning is that most newer cars are able to store crash data in their existing
onboard computers. Such data as speed, acceleration rates ( negative acceleration too )
and lateral G loading are often stored in the OEM onboard computer.
Welcome, my son, to the machine.
It's all right, we know where you've been.
Cue to the NSA wanting the information in 3.. 2..
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
The war for Internet privacy is over. We lost. There is no set of laws or regulations or RFCs that can get it back. Too much of the world's economy now depends on getting and analyzing and cross-referencing petabytes of information on consumers and their daily activities, phone calls, emails, television viewing, purchases and web surfing. And now, they all have the technology to do it in an economical fashion.
As Scott McNealy said way back in 1998, "You have zero privacy now. Get over it."
..than allow any vehicle I own to have a tracking device installed on it. JUST SAY NO.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Marketspeak for spooks...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
To foil the stop-point matching, just make random stops wherever you go. I'm sure my fellow motorists on the highways will understand.
These sort of systems are outright ideal for people who a) don't drive, b) own a car, and c) live in a dense urban area. Chicago's streets are more regular than Manhattan's - we're on a strict North/South/East/West grid, which makes me one of the people this isn't really all that easy to track with.
Besides, I just plain do not drive. BIke? Yeah, constantly. It's a 20 minute ride from my apartment on the lower west side to downtown, and it's actually *longer* if I drive (and a hell of a lot more expensive to park). I start my car, maybe, once a month. I'm still on the same tank of gas I put in there in May.
I don't know why I still have a car, but signing up for State Farm's Drive Safe and Save program has *halved* my insurance cost. HALVED. 50%, poof, gone. I don't care if my insurance company knows where my car is if the discount is that steep. Plus, seeing as the car is parked most of the time, I'd actually want my insurance company to know where it is in case it goes missing unexpectedly.
Also, I don't get all the whining. It's not like you don't already have a unique identifier plastered on the front and back of your car already.
By 2060 it will be illegal for humans to drive a car/truck in the USA. Your robot driver will be ratting on you anyway.
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
The character of Sherlock Holmes would be a villain today. Very little information exists in a vacuum. We once revered characters like Sherlock Holmes that could follow the threads that connected that information. Today we are horrified by that same feat. If there is anything to be afraid of it is that we have big data and not huge data. The false positives of big data are manifest in huge data, when supposedly unique results reutinely yield multiple, instead of only one false positive. 100 years ago we lived in several communities of millions. Today we are part of one community of Billions. Things will/must change. Ultimately it's better to accept and get it right then it is to fight and to move from one series of bad compromises to the next.
Throughout history and especially in today's world anyone able to pay extra can get more privacy and anyone sufficiently poor has none. This is simply a continuation of that trend. The poorer you are the more forms you have to fill out with personal information to get what you need and the less likely those forms are to be jealously guarded. On the extreme end you have people filling out dozens of forms daily dealing with hospitals, charity organizations, food banks, and government assistance organizations just to survive. In this case if you're rich enough you can choose an insurance company that won't log every mile you travel. At the other extreme you have people with private airplanes they board with the surrounding areas screened for photographers; houses surrounded by tall walls and guards; every form filled out by someone else and when possible with inaccurate personal information; cars with dark tint on the back windows; and personal physicians bound to secrecy with highly restrictive privacy agreements.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
not even Internet can compromise your OTP lines of communication
Even perfect encryption still allows traffic analysis. If the government can discover with whom you're communicating, when, where, and how much, it can discover much about your motives.
insurance companies promise customers that they're not tracking their movement.
Here's the easier way of finding out where someone's driven: get the government to go ask the insurance company for their records. Do you actually believe them when they say that they're not keeping track of your location?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
The reason for insurance is to spread the risk (and associated costs) over a large population.
When insurance companies pick-and-choose their customers and rates, it invalidates this purpose.
We've been seeing this with health insurance in past decades: ineligible if you have a pre-existing condition, or get dropped if you develop a condition, or get charged more for smoking or being older.
This makes sense from a business perspective, so don't bother saying "what did you expect a business to do?" I'm saying that it makes progressively less sense from the customer's point of view. As these metrics get better, the companies will know exactly how much you will cost them as a customer, and charge the appropriate rates. Why bother with insurance if they know beforehand how much you will need it?
Legally mandated insurance then becomes simple rent-seeking, with no benefit to the consumer.
This particular trend - monitoring the driver's behaviour - is framed as a good idea. Everybody thinks they are a better-than-average driver, so the tradeoff seems like a good deal. You don't care about the big picture because hey! I just saved a bundle on my car insurance!
Here's the big picture: there's no way to verify that the monitoring unit isn't broken, there's no way to verify that the monitoring report is accurate, or that what it's measuring is significant, or that the company isn't skewing the risk. There's no studies that link measured modes with accident risk, no way to tell whether the algorithm for detecting driving modes has flaws, no leeway for corner cases or exceptional conditions, and no way to appeal the decision.
You have a promise from the insurance company that, if you're a safe driver, your rates will go down.
The privacy implications are also important: your driving profile probably tells a great deal about your psychological makeup (how often you use the horn, how sharply you take corners). This would be of enormous benefit to advertisers, profilers, police, and national security agencies. The insurance company can make money by selling this information, but it's OK because it's not financial information.
Ten years from now this will be a problem: insurance companies siphoning money from customers for no benefit.
Perhaps we should be forward-looking this time and prevent useless suffering before it happens.
But here's the thing: what's a normal guy going to do?
When the insurance industry sneaks in their desires into law (Guess who wrote the Affordable Care Act? Hint: Not the Obama Administration - suck it Fox News!.) all we little people see in the media are distraction issues or distortions of the facts - up yours Fox News, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, all you over paid sacks of shit!! The media only reports on what brings in the eyeballs - obviously - and as a result, they mostly report on issues that get people's blood boiling: abortion, guns, evolution being taught in schools, gay marriage, Global Warming deniers, etc ...
Sometimes I wonder if some BIG CORP/Billionaire wants to sneak something really bad into law, THEY hire someone to create a controversy with one of those distraction issues.
Big shot: "We need to get a law that sends billions in bailouts for our fuckups! Let's get someone to sue to marry his gay lover on top of the Ten Commandments at a church and having his Mother abort his brother!"
Big Shot #2:" Yeah!, I'll get Rush's writers on it right away!"
Big shot:" And get teh Tea Partiers riled too!"
I as a normal person with a normal life do not have the time or legal knowledge to watch every single bill that comes up in Congress or in my State Legislature.
My fellow citizens are suckers for bullshit.
Turn off the TV.
I really need the people with the tracking device installed to inform them of my special offers:
Buy our $100 lottery ticket, you could win $110! (Odds of winning 1:200)
Join our lucky winners club, for only $5 a month, you can be entered in our annual drawing for $60 and a gold star sticker! (Odds of winning 1:100)
P.T. Barnum is salivating in his grave.
The Insurance Lobby has been spending millions of dollars annually lobbying the federal government to make this kind of tracking mandatory, and the Federal Government is quite interested in having the "metadata" too, since it is yet another way to spy on its citizens.
I'd say we probably have a couple more years of these programs being "voluntary" until most Insurance companies either require them outright, or there is a new federal law making them mandatory for everyone.
Parents have used devices to study teen drivers for quite some time as have suspicious wives and husbands. In a way that establishes precedent. Having already accepted the right of one person to track another without their knowledge or consent how could we say it is wrong for other parties to do exactly the same thing? Black boxes for crash studies have been in many cars for quite some time and have been very carefully kept out of court cases in which they could provide vital evidence as to who was speeding or if the brakes were applied before the crash. We also have Lojack type devices that track car locations. It seems to me that we have already let this tiger out of the cage.
See, driving is a privilege! So tracking all your movements on public roads and highways is for the good of the community.
What, got something to hide?
But anyways.
I've always thought classifying driving as a privilege and not a right when the main mode of travel is by road is insane and just makes it easier for government interference. And yes, you can still have rights that need a license, we do it for business, guns and marriage.
I saw a nice animation of a working system ~month ago. Cant find it now.
It was basically a huge HMM problem.
Video starts with IMU sensors reading of estimated car movement, somewhere else on the screen all the possible roads are listed and in time eliminated using HMM. Real position is snapped into road taken on the map after ~1 minute in a big city.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
For the most part, this involves people driving a car on a public street. That is not a private act (despite what, e.g., speed camera opponents apparently want you to think). I don't see the problem, especially if drive in actual cities with real blocks, where this doesn't work as well, anyway (not that you need to drive, but I digress).
R.Mo
You can figure out a person's entire life.
One true pairing -- "your favorite combination of characters in a fandom". yw
Implications of robot drivers:
- no need for each person to own a car. A pool of robot "taxis" will be available to everyone at all times. Dispatched from one company there will be no turf wars, no gouging of passengers, no navigational incompetence. - no need for taxi drivers, truck drivers, ambulance drivers, etc.
- no need for parking enforcement & traffic cops
- no need for human-use gas stations
- no need for Joe's Rip-Off garages
- no need for Costco to sell motor oil
- and best of all, a 95% reduction in TV advertisements!
Unfortunately:
- no more Geico ads)
I come here for the love
I signed up for one of these devices about a month and a half ago. Although I can pull up the daily map showing the general area the vehicles are parked or traveling, I don't get my first "report card" until a full calendar month of data collections, so look forward to seeing my first report in a few days. The general daily information I can pull up shows a color coded block of the grid the car operated in, and what the stats are for that grid (lower or higher than state average for collision or non-collision risk). So far I've always shown up in areas that are lower than the state average for risk.
An interesting aside. I received a letter from a rental car company wanting me to pay for collision damage that a renter said I caused by rear-ending the rental car they were driving. When I called them asking for details - they didn't submit a police report, collect a driver's license or tag, they said the only thing they had was the driver gave them a phone number (which matched my home number), and I assume they did a reverse lookup of my number to get name and address. It happened in a city that I have not visited in 30 some years, so it occurred to me that if I had the tracking device installed at the time of the alleged incident then I would have a solid alibi of not being anywhere near the scene. BTW, my insurance company essentially said to ignore because of how ridiculous the situation is.
I wonder if you can gain privacy by adding noise in the system: if I exit a motorway just to re-enter it immediatly, if I stop at unexpected places, is it still possible to infer the destination?
Fundamentally people are going to have to ask the question: if robots take away the jobs of the cab driver, what are they going to be doing in its stead?
Also do the laws of generality for things like actuarial science really embody the person in particular. We will have to face the fact that if you constantly treat people based on the profile taken from a database collected at some point in a mass fashion, are you not selectively inculcating the same properties to the person. You're essentially taking the viewpoint, a person, from birth to say, a certain time like 20, you're very much already defined by the environment, that people are already set in their ways.
You've basically, if you use socio econometric parameters, created a caste system that is very much based on stereotypes, or worse a stereotype based on large sets of data collated only at a certain point in history. Will we ever progress when the epitome is joe blogg with his burberry and you need the ads to support it?
Using the data collected from these devices, you still won't know where the person went to, since you don't know how many green lights they passed through.
>"The (voluntary) programs, like Progressive Insurance's Snapshot use onboard monitoring devices to track information like the speed of the automobile, sudden stops, distance traveled and so on. Safe and infrequent drivers might see their rates drop while customers who log thousands of miles behind the wheel and/or drive recklessly would see their insurance rates rise."
Fast acceleration, itself, is not unsafe nor reckless.
Hard braking, itself, is not unsafe nor reckless.
Hard lateral G-force, itself, is not unsafe nor reckless.
Speed, itself, is not unsafe nor reckless.
All of these things could be in AVOIDANCE of one or more accidents as a reaction to someone else's poor driving. They can also be done perfectly within the law and perfectly safely.
A spy device in your car tells them NOTHING about how safe or reckless a driver is, it just allows insurance companies to make ASSUMPTIONS about your driving which are very likely to be incorrect and/or unfair. And giving discounts for using one is the same as penalizing those who don't.
It should be noted that while the insurance companies may not be tracking you, the data they receive is likely considered "business records" and that "metadata" can be handed over to the NSA who actually would use that info to track you.
I have progressive and I went ahead with their snapshot program. It's really neat because I would go on the web site every night and look at my driving record. The web site displays the time, driving speed, time and duration of each ride, along with number of "hard stops" made. It considers a velocity drop over 7mph/s to be a "hard stop". I hardly ever made hard stops.
I had that device plugged in for six months. During those six months I made a round trip to Florida. Most of the trip I was going at least 80mph, sometimes 90 and occasionally I exceeded 100mph. It was all recorded and displayed in the graphs on the web site. Overall, I drove like a speed demon, but my hard stops averaged to less than 0.1 hard stops per hour of driving.
After the six months were over, my insurance rate went down 27%. My insurance rate was already fairly low to begin with, so 27% amounts to just a few dollars per month.
Progressive uses http://www.xirgotech.com/
These trackers are far from the best tracking hardware. Lots and lots of issues with the firmware, and bad data coming from the device.
The main issue is reliability of the tracker being used for insurance, how do you know its reporting the correct data to the company?