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Why Letting Your Insurance Company Monitor How You Drive Can Be a Good Thing
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Kim Gittleson reports at BBC that car insurance firms like Progressive are trying to convince consumers that letting them monitor their driving behavior is actually a good thing. They say that the future of car insurance is not just being able to monitor individual drivers to give them lower prices, but also to make them better drivers. 'Now that we can observe directly how people drive, we think this will change the way insurance works,' says Dave Pratt, who says that Progressive has more than a trillion seconds of driving data from 1.6 million customers. '18-year-old guys pay a lot for insurance, but some 18-year-olds are really safe drivers and they deserve a better deal.' Better big data technologies, like the telematic driving data collected by car companies (PDF) or even information gathered from social media profiles, can help augment that risk profile. 'If I'm a driver that doesn't drive that frequently, and I have a pattern that would indicate that I drive more carefully than an average person with my profile, then I may be able to save 30-40% on my car insurance, and that's pretty significant,' says Joe Reifel. For now, using big data analytics for insurers is still in the early stages. Only 2% of the U.S. car insurance market offers an insurance product based on monitoring driving, but that proportion is projected to grow to around 10-15% of the market by 2017. And other countries, like Italy and the U.K., are already using the data to analyze not just risk profiles but also to determine who is at fault in car accidents. The future, most analysts agree is create a continuous feedback loop between insurers and consumers, so that consumers will react to the big data analyses that insurers perform and change their behavior accordingly. 'Bad drivers will at some point need to improve their driving or accept [having] to pay for the real risk they represent,' says Jacques Amselem."
> They say that the future of car insurance is not just being able to monitor individual drivers to give them lower prices
So look, I've got this bridge I've been trying to sell...
...is who decides what is safe driving?
Requiem for the American Dream
Never mind they'll see you regularly drive 10-15 over the limit and think you're a risk. How about those clowns who sit in the left lane, going up hill and don't maintain speed, so everyone jockeys to get around them in the right lane(s)? You don't see that in their data stream.
Lots more examples, which I predict this thread will include.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Progressive has more than a trillion seconds of driving data from 1.6 million customers.
Using a gigantic amount of very small units tends to make the whole thing meaningless. In more meaningful terms, Progressive has about 174 hours of data per customer.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Insurance rates (and prices in general) as set according to market statistics. I don't see how monitoring individual people will help those people.
Too much potential for individual people to get screwed, with no real benefit to the public as a whole. Forget it.
then you have nothing to fear, Citizen.
While I agree you're within your rights to let them track you for the associated discount, the premise behind this and the assumed acceptance by the privacy-less Generation is disturbing.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Without analytics, low-risk 18 year olds pay a lot of money to cover high-risk 18 year olds. With analytics, low-risk 18 year olds pay less (though not nearly as low as they should be paying) and high-risk 18 year olds are uninsurable. Why? Because you're going to have to substantially raise the price on those high-risk 18 year olds now that low-risk ones aren't covering the bill.
Now extend this logic to health care. Why is it okay to preach universal health-care and group insurance where low-risk cover the bill for high-risk, but the same isn't true for auto insurance? It's a slippery slope!
I don;t care what you heard. I don;t care what your independent-insurance-agent-father told you. I don;t care what any insurance industry flak says. I don;t care what the industry advertisements and propaganda say.
Insurance companies are NOT interested in reducing premiums. EVER!
If you hear it, it's a lie. Lowered car insurance premiums is a lie.Lowered health insurance premiums(ACA) is a lie.
If you don't know this, you are a fool!
That's not how it works, actually. Progressive's Snapshot discount doesn't take speed into account at all.
The three things they look at are:
1) How often you drive (miles)
2) What time of day you drive
3) Number of hard stops
I noticed that driving with a Snapshot for 6 months I became a lot more careful of hard stops. I gave other cars more space and drove much more defensively, even though I'm a very defensive driver already.
I think it's safe to assume that an insurance company is interested in metrics that actually correlate well to safe driving, since their business literally depends on it. They want to give the discounts to people who are actually less likely to get into accidents.
Progressive isn't the government. They don't want to just look like they're doing something about a problem. Their bottom line actually depends on it.