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."

Comments

Look, is any of this stuff news?

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Not worth worrying about

[davebarnes]

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.

Insurance risk

[Okian Warrior]

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.

Re:Insurance risk

[Solandri]

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?

You've gone completely to the opposite extreme from the one the insurance companies are trying to get to.

There are two types factors at play here: Luck (randomness), and various behaviors under your control.

Insurance is for distributing the cost of bad luck over the entire population. People agree that anyone could, randomly and through no fault of their own, get cancer or get hit by a drunk driver. And while the cost of dealing with the aftermath may be exorbitant for an individual, it's reasonable if a bunch of people get together and agree to cover the costs together for anyone in the group who happens to be unlucky.

Insurance is not for distributing the cost of risky behaviors that an individual willingly engages in. In health insurance, it makes no sense to require non-smokers to cover the extra cost smokers incur due to the additional health risks caused by smoking. Likewise, if you choose to speed or make a lot of sharp turns, it makes no sense to force safer drivers to subsidize the cost of your risky behavior.

The insurance industry would like to go to one extreme and drop coverage or deny claims for people suffering from bad luck. You want the other extreme where insurance covers everything including willingly partaking in risky behavior. The logical balance is to force insurance companies to cover bad luck cases, while allowing them to distinguish and assign different rates based on riskiness of behavior. (Note that this also "solves" the DNA profiling problem. You do not control your DNA, so any problems you're genetically predisposed to are due to bad luck, and should be covered.)

Ten years from now this will be a problem: insurance companies siphoning money from customers for no benefit.

In states which require auto insurance, there is usually a government insurance commission which limits the amount of profit the insurance companies can make. They cannot siphon off additional money. If they get into that situation, the state will force them to reduce rates to bring their profit margin back down.

Or at least that's what's supposed to happen. If that's not happening in your state, you need to figure out why (usually it's due to corruption because politicians know they'll always be re-elected because the state always votes for one particular party), and do something to fix it. The mechanism for regulating insurance rates is already in place for most people, no need to complain as if we're completely at the insurance companies' mercy.

Implications of robot drivers

[justthinkit]

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)