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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."
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!”
Cue NSA having the information since 10 ... 9 ... 8 ...
What part of Total Information Awareness do you not understand?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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 difference is you can turn OFF your cellphone when you go somewhere you don't want people knowing about.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Well, you can turn off the car and push it. Just pretend you have a Yugo.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Data collection system developed and mandated by NSA and kept under the publics radar by gag orders.
(I don't actually know, but it wouldn't surprise me at this point.)
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.
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.
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
The other big difference is that cellphones don't provide that data to your insurance company.
Driving 80mph is going to affect your rates, even when you drive in states where 80 is both legal and the prevailing speed of traffic.
But stopping at restaurants with liquor licenses could also affect your rates if insurance companies gain a method to track you.
These types of devices allow insurance companies the ability to prejudge you, without relying on your driving record. They also provide a basis for claims denial based on trivial violations of traffic laws that had nothing to do with the accident. Even If the other person was at fault.
Insurance is supposed to be an actuarial science.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
"These types of devices allow insurance companies the ability to prejudge you, without relying on your driving record."
I take it you've never been a male under 25 years old with a driver's license? Insurance companies do this stuff all the time.
"These types of devices allow insurance companies the ability to prejudge you, without relying on your driving record."
I take it you've never been a male under 25 years old with a driver's license? Insurance companies do this stuff all the time.
But its not personal. Its actuarial.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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 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?
>"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.
Your more basic, less electronic car still faces one road in/out licence plate, driver and passenger facial recognition camera arrays while driving in constitution free zones.
With some States keeping and cross referencing all data gathered - its going to get hard to escape all encompassing regional data gathering task forces.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
Multiple news reports indicate that, even when turned off, a current cell phone still provides information to track the cell phone. Since many current cell phones have internal batteries, removing the battery is no longer an option to tracking.
Multiple news reports published bullshit!