I had this exact same discussion with my insurance agent yesterday. I opted out but the agent had trouble understanding (or more likely I had trouble communicating the idea) that once everyone else takes the discount that I will no longer be paying "the normal price" but instead I will be paying a defacto penalty because I don't want to be tracked. "No, it will only ever be a discount!"

When I went to a bank open an online account I asked how and when can I change my password... guy told me "Why would you change it, when you can type anything now". Yea, why would I ever want to change my password that was easy to remember at that point, written on his keyboard, computer and browser?

In California, your auto insurance "base rate" cannot go up by more than a fixed amount (I think 40%?) upon renewal.

This explains why they give me both "Good Driver" and "Exemplary Driver" discounts. I shudder to think what it would look like to lose both discounts and have the base rate go up by 40% all in one fell swoop.

I'm moved back to Oklahoma. The only thing that went up was my car insurance. I thought it was nonsense, but 3 hail storms, crushed car (tree limbs), tornado and 2 hit and run drivers (likely uninsured). I can see why. I pay about 200 more a year. My insurance company has paid 36k to fix my cars the last two years.

My only surprise is that they haven't dropped me. Oh yeah, they paid to fix my rental car when it got crushed by a tree limb while my car was getting fixed from a hit and run.

> 3 hail storms, crushed car (tree limbs), tornado and 2 hit and run drivers (likely uninsured)

Why should any of those claims make your rate go up? If a tree crushes your car you aren't a bigger risk to insure next year.

Oklahoma has an extraordinarily high rate of uninsured drivers.

The tree that crushed my car was a result of an ice storm. We get those frequently as well. (My entire lot is covered in trees.)

Sounds like he's not parking in a garage. I could see that leading to higher rates in some ares of the US.

Geico, as an example, no longer cares if you park your car in a garage (secured) or not. I was explicitly told they no longer consider it statistically meaningful.

Instead, they go off statistics from the area code that your vehicle will generally be parked in and how far your commute to work is.

He wasn't parked in a garage before either. If the cost of insurance is based on risk, the fact that a tree falls on your car doesn't increase your risk. If anything, the risk in the future may be lower as presumably that tree isn't going to fall on the car again.

Hail storms and tornadoes are more likely than where he used to live, I'd suppose?

You are correct, but personally I see it as a good thing. Driving is by far the most dangerous thing an average person does on a regular basis. No other regular activity could easily get you or someone else killed if you stop paying close attention for a second or so, and tens of thousands of people (in the US) do die every year in traffic crashes. Therefore, market pressure towards safer driving is a good thing.

Is there any transparency to the algorithms they use? Do they penalize based on actual statistics, or just someone's moralized opinion of what "safe" driving means?

We're talking about the spy data, not generalized actuarial tables.

I'm talking about what the penalties are based on, since you implied it was arbitrary moral judgment.

See also: Health Care "Wellness" programs at US companies with programs that are partially employer paid.

Step 1: Raise rates for every participant (individuals, families)

Step 2: Demand list of health metrics and personal info, often requiring bloodwork

Step 3: Give discount to participants, use X, Y, Z tactics to "improve" health of participants (i.e. make numbers better)

Step 4: Convince everybody this is a great idea

They don't even use step 4. They just raise the "non-participation" penalty so high that you, for all intents and purposes, have to participate.

The company I work for charges a $50 per week penalty for not participating.

I'd happily cease to participate in working there if that happened to me.

Unfortunately in the US, the lack of good health insurance options in spite of Affordable Care Act (ACA) means that even after paying the penalty for opting out of soul-crushing health tracking, it is probably still cheaper to work for a company for a company-subsidized health plan than to pay for it all oneself :(.

I'm unfamiliar with these programs. What does participation entail?

For mine, participation entails a yearly health screening. The screening measures blood pressure, BMI, nicotine usage, and cholesterol (via a blood draw).

Depending on the findings, you fall into 1 of 3 tiers, which results in a penalty on every pay check if you don't fall into the numbers.

I know someone who works for Blizzard; if they wear a Fitbit and meet the goal set on it, they get a healthcare discount or a small cash kickback, I forget which.

Found a detailed presentation of the incentive plan here: http://www.myablife.com/files/HIP-Presentation.pdf

Of course this is junk, but what's more junk is that your employment is tied to health insurance.

America should have combo of single payer and private. You can get either regardless of your employment status and/or how generous your employer feels like being.

Yeah, I always thought that was insane. If you had a medical emergency when you were out of work (and with no insurance coverage), it would cost the most, precisely when you could afford it the least.

> Alternatively, self-driving cars take over before we're are effectively forced to use tracking

And since most people will use SDCs without owning them, everything will be tracked any way. They'll probably even film you in the car, like all public transport does already. And the people that own SDCs will still submit all their data for training the entire fleet, just like all Tesla drivers do already. At least they will hopefully not get filmed.

> And since most people will use SDCs without owning them

Many people here keep saying that, but I don't think that future is nearly as likely or imminent as they think.

Something about the idea of self-driving cars seems to just shut off critical reasoning in some circles, I suspect because a lot of folks in those circles don't want to deal with cars and drive. I do think we'll get to very good autopilots for certain types of roads. But this idea of app-summoned robocars is likely decades out and it's not clear how the rent/own economics will work out even then.

People seem to ignore peak vs average demand, envisioning each car being shared by dozens or hundreds of people, while most cars get used for commuting at similar times so the sharing factor would probably be more like 3-5.

Yeah, I think there are at least a couple somewhat unrelated points.

- Getting from, say, freeway autopilots to more or less arbitrary self-driving under a wide range of road and weather conditions without a competent human even present is going to be a lot harder IMO than a lot of people credit. I actually don't think the NIST autonomy levels are that well thought out. I can't help but think there's a bit of "and then a miracle happens" between 3 and 4.

- Peak demand is definitely an issue. It's not just commuting. Going away for a weekend has definite unidirectional patterns. There are also lots of reasons people will prefer personal vehicles, such as keeping stuff in them.

Agreed, the "cars become autonomous" problems are separate from the "autonomous cars means nobody owns cars anymore" ones.

I'm more optimistic about autonomy. It still seems like a crazy hard problem, but things are advancing so fast right now that it actually seems like they might get there.

But I don't see where the leap from "autonomous cars" to "shared cars" happens. The main obstacle there is simply personal: I don't think people want shared cars. People want autonomous cars (although they probably want the autonomy to be optional) so that hurdle is not a problem on that side.

I suspect that given peak loads, utilizations, etc. there are pretty unfounded assumptions about the economics associated with what would in effect be robo-taxis. Drivers today make, what, $10-15 per hour? So one would need to explain to me how taking that cost alone out of the equation suddenly makes using taxis and limos in place of private auto ownership an economically sensible thing for the majority of people in the majority of places where it isn't today.

The cost of a parking space in an urban center is also a large part of the equation.

The comparison is between a digital computer and an organic one (i.e. a human driver). Furthermore, one can't just assume that a car can drop a person off and head out to the suburbs to wait. That's a huge potential cost in both congestion and energy.

You say that like 3-5 wouldn't already be insanely good. Even 1.1 would be a huge decrease in pollution. 0.4 and it might still be worth it due to fewer casualties and the ability to safely multitask.

I'm not talking about whether it would be good. I'm sure it would be great. I'm talking about whether the introduction of autonomous cars will result in everybody ditching car ownership and using companies like Uber for transportation, which a lot of people seem to think is a given.

An insurance company started with this shit in Spain (about 3 years ago), and expanded later to France and Germany.

In case of an accident an offline dashcam (think Russia, China) is the best solution (also for privacy (offline)).

Self driving cars can't come to mass market soon enough - but I bet this will beat them there by a modest margin.

Question is... will self-driving car prevent tracking or increase it? Will Ford/Toyota start an insurance business and their cars will track us even more (they do now, yes they have built-in ~sim cards). Will card manufacturers take a deal with banks and government to report on car users so you will get a fee before you get back home?

http://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1?IR=T

http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/25/technology/ford-speed-limit/

Would car insurance still be an issue with unowned/rented SDC? I'd assume the manufacturer and possibly lender would be on the hook for the car misbehaving.

Introduce 'discounts' for participating in loyalty programs/giving company plenty of data it can sell. Raise discount prices to current prices (it's not like things are priced too high -- people are buying them as is). Raise non-discount prices to a new premium and milk the few privacy-conscious for all they're worth, getting data from the rest. Grocery stores, car insurance, same plan there's just a lot more regulation about insurance because of discrimination, etc, so it's taking longer.

There is another problem with not using the tracking device in the future. If the companies design the tracker to use CAN bus data then the people with older vehicles(even relatively safer older vehicles) are out of luck. Not even Chrysler completely stopped using their proprietary CCD bus until around 2006.

Hopefully they would design the trackers to be mostly independent by putting the accelerometers in the unit itself.

Yeah, pretty much all insurance companies seem to be trying to force their consumers to submit to such tracking.