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Rookie Dongle Warns Parents When Their Kids Are Driving Too Fast (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Dongle Apps, a Belgian tech company, has introduced a new system which alerts a car owner if the vehicle's driver is breaking the speed limit. Initially designed for parents and guardians to keep an eye on their young ones behind the wheel, the 'Rookie Dongle', connects to the vehicle's on-board diagnostics (OBD II) port, internal GPS and mobile technologies to push real-time data to the cloud and send notifications to car owners via email or text when the driver is speeding, suddenly accelerates, brakes hard or has high RPM levels.
If the kids moved it to the parents cars, the parents would be livid with their kids over their horrible driving.
And considering most teens learn to drive from their parents, the irony will be lost on these helicopter parents that they are responsible for their precious little snowflakes bad habits.
Do these people honestly not consider that their kids are watching them speed, failing to indicate, aggressively tailgating and talking on the phone whilst driving and thinking that this is perfectly perceptible behaviour.
Sorry for answering my own question, but of course not. See: Dunning-Kruger. We need a large campaign of public service announcements that begin with the words "Parents, you are not as good at driving as you think you are".
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
What will be reported as speeding? Exceeding the speed limit in short bursts is necessary (and legal) if you are overtaking slower-moving vehicles.
Of course it's bullshit. So is the story itself - these devices are not about warning parents that their kids are driving too fast, it's a backdoor to gather driving data to sell to insurance companies. They do a very nice job of trying to conceal that fact though.
Privacy Policy
Your data will not be shared, lent out, sold or made available in any other way to third parties, unless you give us your explicit consent hereto or if we are obliged to by court.
Sounds all well and good but then you go to the general conditions, which are in Belgian (even though the rest of their site is English)
Dongle Apps is also the sole owner of the information collected automatically by the dongle or while using the corresponding Services by the Client.
The Client grants Dongle Apps explicit authorization to exploit these data in accordance with Article 13 of these conditions.
Basically, they can do what they want with the data and fuck you very much.
If the insurance company wants the data, they would just mail them out honestly, offer a discount for people who use it, then raise rates across the board by the same amount as the discount. The vast majority of customers will be using it, and the average is all they care about.
This product is about selling a false sense of control to parents, which is exactly what it is supposed to be. No conspiracy needed.
The problem with insurance companies doing that is that they get the data on their customers only. Yes, that's useful for them and lots of them do that but it does not tell them anything about their new customer or customers they want to target. Third parties going after young drivers habits will allow insurance companies to target the drivers they want while having advanced warning about potentially costly customers before they get their first quote. While that's not necessarily a bad thing, it does make the point of insurance less and less meaningful (ie: distribute the costs of accidents/liability over a large base so lives aren't ruined due to lack of money). It's a path that leads to people's options being limited due to their inability to pay high premiums.
It's already occurring due to historical data that showed that men under 25 were the most dangerous drivers, where I live that data lead to ~$900-1200/year initial premiums for young women and $2,500-3500 initial premiums for young men. It can be a serious impediment when your cost of employment for any job requiring a car (either on the job or just to get there) is 4 times hire than someone else with the same driving history as yourself. The sad part is, where I live anyway, the data that all that was based on was from a generation that grew up with drinking and driving, very little driver education, significantly lower safety standards, etc. Looking at only data from the 2000s onward, men under 25 were among the safest drivers on the road and paying among the highest premiums.
What's really wrong though is the deceptive way they go about getting the data - making it seem like you won't sell the data without explicit permission then burying that explicit permission in another language/document. It's deplorable not conspiratorial.