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Admiral Charges Hotmail Users More For Car Insurance (thetimes.co.uk)
One of Britain's biggest car insurers has admitted increasing premiums for drivers who apply using a Hotmail account. From a report: Motorists seeking cover from Admiral could be charged $45 extra if they use certain email addresses. The insurer said some domain names were "associated with more accidents" than others, raising applicants' risk profile. Figures from the Association of British Insurers to be published today show that the cost of car insurance has increased by more than a quarter over the past three years. Admiral said that hundreds of factors were used by underwriters in setting car insurance, with riskier motorists paying more. Issues included the age of a driver and their postcode.
The insurance industry is just crazy! Plum fucking loco.
At first glance I feel like this is horrible and unfair, but if they ran the numbers and for some reason hotmail users have more accidents then it's only fair they charge more for hotmail users.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I'm glad my email domain @drunktextingwhiledriving.com isn't included!
Did the insurance company dismiss applications made by users of Yahoo! email on account of being mentally unfit?
#DeleteFacebook
Only a person's driving record should be considered. If they don't have accidents and driving offenses on their record what in hell does it matter what email they use?
Try price comparison with Mac/Safari vs Windows and IE. fun fun fun. Yes, the more affluent get charged more. Yaaaazzz baby
Dont fix it.
If someone signed up for free email in the mid 90s and hotmail (now ms outlook online) still meets their needs then why is that a negative? All I can gather from that is someone decided to not use yahoo in 1997. Why is that a sin worthy of higher rates?
As I'm writing this, I can't read the whole article unless I give my contact information so I'm going to wait for somebody to post another link.
I'd love to see the analysis behind the rate increase for HotMail users - I'm guessing there are other factors that come into play that causes them to use HotMail (maybe an extra/missing chromosome?). Personally, I don't know of anybody I currently correspond with who use HotMail (checked my contact lists) but maybe this is something that is different between North America and Europe.
Could it say something about people who use Microsoft products? If I show them how much I hate Windows 10, would I get more money off my car insurance?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
That kindly sent me a preemptive e-mail the other day to tell me how not racist they were.
Sounds like they're in the shit, or they've upset a journalist at least.
Could there be a lot of Hotmail users, who have been thrown through the windshield from an accident, that have been found still clutching their phones with a half finished email?
If that's the case, then I don't have any issues with them getting higher insurance rates.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I always do those "anonymous" quotes with a throwaway hotmail account and, if I like the price, do it for real with my actual information. So that means that they'll automatically lose my business because I don't want to deal with spam from a company I don't choose to use.
I'm trying to think of why that's the case - maybe more Hotmail accounts are used as source addresses for spam and more effort is required to sort the wheat from the chaff.
I tried to search on this but couldn't find any current articles/references commenting on this.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
As long as they hide the criteria in a block box and call it "AI", they should be fine?
I mean we "don't know" why AI makes the decisions it does, right?
Who has a hotmail account? Who would create a hotmail account. Older people have them, of course. I would suggest that even older people might have an aol.com account.
They must be using one of the half-assed excuses for 'AI' everyone keeps trotting out, convincing customers that it's fully sentient and incapable of making mistakes, even if you can't talk to it or in any way have it explain it's 'reasoning' (in quotes because they're utterly devoid of any actual capacity for 'reasoning'), and therefore aren't having humans audit it's output.
Hate to think how much more they'd charge someone with an AOL email address, then.
"Admiral said that hundreds of factors were used by underwriters in setting car insurance..."
Apparently hundreds wasn't enough to avoid fucking over customers with an email address.
Time to go see if FuckYouAdmiral.com is available, for email correspondence of course.
Can't believe this isn't illegal. This is like a gas station charging red cars 10 cents more per gallon.
Let's ignore the obvious correlation is not causation argument for a brief moment, and skip to the other major plot hole in this story: To whom are they comparing these reckless Hotmail.com users? What e-mail service represents a lower incidence of automotive accidents?
Reading below the fold in that article (which requires registration -- but not confirmation of that registration, so any fake e-mail address will do fine) seems to reveal that this was a simple a|b study, comparing Hotmail.com users to Gmail.com users, where Gmail was consistently quoted lower prices. But what about Yahoo.com? How about Microsoft.com? Are you less likely to get in an accident if you're employed by Microsoft, as opposed to just signing up for their incredibly commonly used free webmail service? And for that matter, why on earth is one common free webmail service supposedly a lower risk factor than the other?
Honestly, there's actually a lot wrong with this story -- not the least of which is the perplexing lack of detail in the reporting itself.
I'm sure that my premiums are affected only positively by my email address:
crasher@frequentcarwrecker.org
It's the .org that presents me, quite rightly, as a well organised & trustworthy fellow. I am wondering whether or not I should switch to my other address as my main email address though...
pooreyesight.weakneck@1000whiplashclaims.biz
Dot biznessmen are great drivers.
If that's the only way they can stay in business given the pool they are marketing to, I'm not sure I have that much of a problem with it. Let's face it, they aren't targeting the low risk, high premium customer with those ads.
Thiny veiled age discrimmination
You do know that age is already a factor in calculating insurance prices, right?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Is the only one that relies upon NOT serving its customers. What if it's an actual statistic that Black people are in more car accidents - by this logic, wouldn't it be ok for insurers to charge them more for insurance?
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
At least every government is transparent with the criteria by which they charge people taxes.
Shame on the consumers for not holding these private tax collectors to the same standard.
How can people take action to minimize their risk if they are kept in the dark about how their risk is assessed?
Imagine if the government secretly taxed people extra based on what email they used. They would definitely demand their money back and push for a change in how the system operates.
The choice of email is an obvious bullshit criteria, but what other secret bullshit criteria are being used? The only way to prevent this type of discrimination is to demand transparency.
Why would anybody put up with being judged by secret rules?
Captcha: slaver
...and they heard Microsoft crashes more? Badabump.
my guess is there's some protected class they want to raise fees on that happens to have a higher percentage of hotmail accounts. I can't imagine what, since as far as I know they're allowed to discriminate on age and sex. Maybe race? Weird things happen with demographics and data sometimes.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I bet they charge people who don't watch Jerry Springer more...
Statistics have no greater financial significance than in insurance. Anal-ists pour over the numbers and draw conclusions that can make or break a company. Your age, origin, location, marriage status and more can put you in a category of higher or lower risk. But there are considerations more surprising than you see in TFS...
A major US insurance company offered low cost premiums to 'qualified' drivers. Many of the qualifications were publicly available, but there were some that were never spoken of. One of these secret rules given to agents was that any prospective client wearing boots was to be disqualified. Agents didn't know why this rule, but had to follow it.
...omphaloskepsis often...
general is better GO ARMY!
What about those fetish style email addresses:
ISnipedU@mail.com
HelloKitty666@gmail.com
panterarules@rockdweeb.net
nickelbackforlife@lds.org
Do these have some sort of deleterious consequence?
- Running Windows XP - Browsing with IE6 = gov job that = can pay $$$ for autos
Obligatory Family Guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I wonder if they just automatically generate statistics on everything they can and then crunch them all to see what stats maximize revenue.
Hell I have email accounts at work, on google, time warner, consolidated, Misrosoft, etc. So my rick to them changes by which account I decided to email them from? Maybe I secretly have a hotmail account I didn't tell them about. Hey! I'm finally beating the system!! This is just so well thought out.
Insurance companies already discriminate based on GENDER AND AGE, and probably on race as well. Suddenly you guys get all bent out of shape over THIS?!? Thatâ(TM)s like being mad about female genital mutilation NOT because of the FGM itself, but because you just found out that when they do it, theyâ(TM)re singing a particular song to themselves, and not a different one.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
This is the same bad maths again, and from the kind of people that are suposed to be experts in the field.
On Feb 2, 2011, an Allstate Insurance Company press release displayed the accident rates of drivers according to their zodiac signs using real data based on the birthdays of customers actually involved in accidents.
But, why bother to consider that the zodiac signs distribution is not uniform and Virgo is 45 days long while Scorpio is just 7 days?
And when called about the lousy maths, next day they yanked the press release from the company site and argued that was just a joke. No problem, right?
The distribution of the sample matters. In fact if you choose the distribution from where to sample you can cook the result that more suits your taste. Or pocket.
A few years ago (the early 2000s), IT admins were arbitrarily denying all incoming email from Yahoo and Hotmail accounts because they saw most of their problems with spam & malware as coming in this way. Those same IT admins tended to have a low opinion of anyone using those services for their email. If insurers can demonstrate a track record of more issues from people that use those services (or any other services), they have a right to adjust rates accordingly.
Interesting proposal to change the English language here. According to you I can both say "Men pay more for insurance" and "Men do not pay more for insurance" and both statements are correct.
Did you have to register for Selective Service? You know, the draft?
In the US, men cannot get things like College Financial Aid without registering.
Women don't have to register. They are not subject to the draft (which has not been abolished, merely suspended)
Equal before the law.
Sure.
Virgo is 45 days long while Scorpio is just 7 days
Most people adopt the convention that each sign lasts for approximately a calendar month, so no, you're talking utter fucking nonsense.
And when called about the lousy maths, next day they yanked the press release from the company site and argued that was just a joke. No problem, right?
Right. Because it was just a fucking joke designed to win them some free publicity, and it succeeded.
Incidentally I suspect birth date does materially factor in insurance risk, at least in the UK, due to the dates of the school year.
Most people adopt the convention that each sign lasts for approximately a calendar month
Can't follow a wikipedia link? There, look again, or need pictures?
Despite what most people adopts as convention or not, obviously what the gp states is exactly why Allstate got the results they got or are you really so math challenged to think that is because actually Virgos are 10 times worse drivers than Scorpios?
talking utter fucking nonsense.
Yourself do you mean? Because an statistical improbability of such caliber and without clear evident confounding factors to explain that huge anomaly is in practice, imposible.
Is my record how many accidents while I was in the car per million miles driven.
Virtually nothing else, it is all just voodoo.
The insurance industry is just crazy! Plum fucking loco.
It's a perfectly justifiable idiot tax.
I scrape the metamoderation system with sockpuppets for upmodded creimer posts downvote them.... multiple times if given the opportunity. Then when I have mod points I will mod down every available creimer post to make sure he stays at terrible.
I normally spend my mod points constructively but will do this anytime someone is stupid enough to mod creimer up.
That's only true because Hillary lost the election.
More 'accidents'. Just look at Birmingham for endless examples of atrocious driving on the part of non-white 'British' people...
So we whites have to pay a 'white tax' for the 'privilege' of living in an increasingly dysfunctional country, to 'baby' the third world hordes who can't look after themselves properly...
Regrettably the activity, that you have mentioned, has become the standard in the USA. It is illegal in the states that I have been in. Accidents are to be report to the LEOs, to the owner, and to insurance people. But many people just leave a note and drive away. This common and Rude practice has cost a lot of money for the innocent victim of this type of illegal vandalism/destruction of private property.
#HOTMAILlivesmatter
Because it was just a fucking joke
Then they should have waited less than a month until April 1st.