How much were the premiums inflated in order to convince you to opt in to the tracker?

How do your premiums change when you get several years of no fault claims or no claims at all behind you?

Well, companies that didn't offer UBI-based systems (and therefore have no motivation to push me to UBI systems) offered me similarly ridiculous insurance rates. So if I'm getting screwed over it's nothing to do with the UBI systems.

I know it feels really rad and smart when we see this headlines and say "finally Americans are waking up to privacy conerns!!!11!", but the mere existence of such a headline only indicates Americans' growing apathy to digital footprint of any kind. And for good reason: if Skynet/Matrix/Hal were close to such a self-awareness, we would have already solved some pretty legit issues (e.g., poverty, greed, insecurity, life, etc.).

That is the most optimistic outlook on the AI apocalypse I have ever heard.

do yourself a favor and buy a dash cam that you control, because i guarantee that tracking device will be used against you if you get into an accident.

trust me on this one, "new driver". insurance companies never do anything for your benefit, only theirs.

How would his insurance company "use it against him"?

Proving he was at fault would also prove his insurance company had to pay for the accident.

"I'm sorry sir, the system shows you were driving 2mph over the limit when that drunk driver wrecklessly hit you, therefore you're partially to blame and we won't be paying out the full amount..."

If they wrecklessly hit you it won't be a big deal, since there was no damage. (Recklessly vs. wrecklessly. Sorry, the pun was too good to pass up)

Well, the whole point of auto insurance to pay out when the driver is to blame so.....

>> "...pay out when the driver is to blame..."

That's what auto insurance marketing says, and sometimes it even works that way. But a key part of the business model is to take your money for years, and then when you do have to submit a claim, they welsh on a technicality.

"Your vehicle is licensed in Seattle, but our records show you spent more than 50% of your time in California this year, therefore your coverage is retroactively void even though we took your money for 11 months."

If you actually read the giant auto insurance contract you signed, it is full of this and other similar loopholes, which are quite deliberately inserted to allow the insurer to manipulate the magnitude of its payouts.

I dont know. I always read my policies. My auto insurance policy is about 13 pages of large font which is written in plain, easy to understand, English. All the "loopholes" seem pretty straightforward and reasonable to me. They seem pretty easy to avoid to me.

Yea, it stands that lying about where you live to an insurance company would be a good reason to deny your claim. You were paying the (probably cheaper) Seattle rate, not the CA rate. If you split your time between two different places just get the proper insurance for that.

From my personal experiences with vehicle insurance, I think you're a bit optimistic. Does your policy have an "act of god" clause? Because that's a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. (Which is what happened to me, when a shipping truck driver totaled my car when driving it through a hurricane without covering their load, and the insurance company refused to assist because it was an "act of god")

i can say this as sure as anything else in this world: anyone who defends insurance companies has surely, surely never actually dealt with one in a time of need.

hn is full of hypersmart young people with very weak mental models of how things actually work in the real world beyond the tech industry, and probably have had very few if zero bad things happen to them (yet).

One problem with the pessimistic mental model is that it provides nowhere else to go with reasoning. For example, how can a tracking device cause problems with insurance claims, if insurance companies never pay claims anyway? If the worst is always expected, then any heuristic returns the same result.

The other problem is that it's contradicted by mountains of evidence--insurance companies pay millions of claims ever year. I know a lot of people who have been paid for losses by insurance companies, including me, even when they were at fault.

Extreme pessimism is itself a weak mental model in that it does not adapt itself to evidence. It takes no effort at all to parachute into any given conversation and say "that'll never work."

That implies an exclusively pessimistic model, however. My suggestion was to simply have a more pessimistic prior. As you say, insurance has to pay out _something_ _sometime_ by the data, and I've certainly seen some of those payouts myself (and sometimes even had them be advantageous in my favor), but if there's enough prior for adversarial interaction it seems a more more robust approach to plan for a worst case scenario even if it doesn't end up happening; or at least don't be exclusively optimistic, for this provides the same but inverted issues as exclusive pessimism.

Yes, surely I have. I've had nothing but positive experiences with auto insurance companies. Health insurance is another story.

It is a small step for a longer tail.

An insurance works that way, that a whole bunch of people pay a small "fee" into a teapot. If something happens to one person, than this person gets the teapot. So, it is a little like a lottery, but with the assumption that you will hopefully never win the price. That would mean, you never had an incident.

This general principle is already violated, when insurance companies tweaked that system to give some people within that bunch an advantage. This advantage is given by demographics (young vs. old; male vs. female; ethnic; experience; …) to those some people. That means, that all those others will have a disadvantage.

Now, this technology provides another possibility to tweak the rules, to give some people an advantage over others. That system is tweaked so long, until you have one person who will definitely pay for nothing. That means, this person is separated from the pool and pays for nothing. Because the pool still pay to cover up their ass and when something happens, it will be paid out of their pool.

I hope you can see the spiral. Basically, you will now have a advantage over others in the pool. In the long run, you and we all will loose.

That is (next to privacy concerns) one of the reason, why I am opposed to any of those tweaked insurances or valued-added insurances. We need to come back to the original idea of an insurance. That is also the reason, that I always think about and ask myself: "Do I really need this one?"

Of course, there are some, like car insurance, which you need to have. I know, I am also rated with those insurances like my age, that I don't own property but I own a registered historic car, and such things.

> If it required GPS my tune might change

What are you talking about? Of course they do. They either use GPS or GSM or both to track your position and speed. How do you think it determines what speed you are doing? Magic? What brand of device do you have? It may be true that you have one of the only systems in the world doing this (e.g. Metromile) but it is not true for 99.9% of other people with trackers.

The only reason it is cheaper is so they can gain customer base to justify their investment in the technology & infrastructure and hope for a legislative enforcement of the uptake of the devices.

They connect to the ODB port to monitor speed, and braking.

From Progressive's site: What information does the device collect? The Snapshot device collects information about how you drive, how much you drive and when you drive. It also collects your vehicle identification number and triggers an email to you if it comes unplugged. Some devices collect location data: this is only for research and development purposes—we don't use it to calculate your rate.

Sounds like these systems look for all the things that make driving fun