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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!
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
Well, you can turn off the car and push it. Just pretend you have a Yugo.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Judging by all the police procedurals and the two Sherlock Holmes TV shows (one in the US, one in the UK), (and setting aside the generic steampunk movies they made instead of Iron Man 4 and 5), either most people don't see him that way, or Hollywood is really trying to portray that sort of thing as acceptable.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
We once revered characters like Sherlock Holmes that could follow the threads that connected that information. Today we are horrified by that same feat.
There's just a little bit of difference between ONE man who can, IF he's interested in the case, put the clues together- and a system where any cop (or corp) can press a button and pull up detailed records about pretty much anyone.
Actually, I am fine with Holmes. He uses his abilities to track down worthwhile criminals and bring them to justice. he doesn't waste his talent on harassing basically harmless low level offenders and he certainly doesn't waste it trying to get people to buy things they don't need and that are in many cases ultimately harmful to them.
If only the corporate world had that level of moral restraint.
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.
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 had a severe adverse reaction to Sherlock Holmes as a child. Still do.
It was soon obvious that the feats of deduction based on observation described in the books were explained to the reader post-seeum, that is, explained by Holmes himself and the reader was not even invited to participate. Or Doyle was too simply lazy to describe the surroundings, opting instead for some sort of empty exercise in hero-worship. If Tolkien or Auel had described a crime scene you'd be able to spot that broken twig.
There is a certain realm way beyond the possible and the ridiculous, beyond any suspension of disbelief, a place where you cannot even enjoy a bad movie because a part of your brain is asking, "Are there people out there who actually enjoy this stuff?" and you are distracted because it leads to "Are any here right now ... and should I be worried about these people?"
I decided early on that the feats described were impossible because the human eye and brain cannot resolve and store high definition images and process them completely in real-time, excessive signal to noise ratio and quantum flux in all motion that cloaks everything in Gaussian noise. For every Holmsian 'clue' you could spot in the real world you are also presented with countless equally possible 'faux clues', or even real clues that relate to some other crime. I just knew this, though I could not describe it that way until I was much older.
I was used to comic book characters performing the impossible. They do it with style and sometimes a wink of humor. But Holmes did not fit anywhere. Not even Jesus had the privilege of having a whole Universe (obviously) constructed for the sake of massaging his ego-intellect, where a gentleman could glop around in galoshes for a whole afternoon --- ever so carefully --- so as not to disturb the tiny scrape marks in their inner heel that Holmes was supposed to divine. It seemed so scripted, somehow.
Sherlock Holmesees are just 'Just So Stories' told without the flair and nonsensical humor of Kipling. They are entirely at your expense. No will ever spot a "monograph I have written on the subject" because he had never written any. He was also a compulsive liar.
The genre has spawned a load of modern shite like some CSI and all of Numbers and what have you, that try to present as possible and grainy-real to gullible people, situations that should be setting off loud clanging false-flag and deception alarms in our heads. It would have a detrimental effect, short-circuiting the part of the mind that is supposed to step up and say "This just isn't right."
And when Hero-Holmes made inquiries into police matters, he was always of course privy to information that should not have been obtained without a warrant. The Sherlock Holmes genre prepares you to accept NSA surveillance. Implicitly trust authority when steeped in hero-worship, unbelievable coincidences do happen (when we say they do). Training wheels for Sheeple.
"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be [STRIKEOUT: the truth] [INSERT] a clear sign that you may not have thought of everything."
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
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"