It really sounds like a slapped on excuse for the next incarnation of the data collection biz. How would they generate revenue if not by selling the collected data to 3rd parties? Because imo that is the most straightforward option. Missing this bit entirely in the article is disingenuous and concerning. I'm not too sure about opaque code rating drivers either, though people might be ok with it.

agreed - it is a huge sell for insurance companies.

They already do this. BUT maybe this will provide benefit for customers.

And since its collecting ALL data, including visual and audio, this is a voluntary spy device. Imagine if the government demanded that data be handed over and starts using that to spy on people. IMO this is not a stretch of the imagination.

"imagine" .. governments (and corporations) around the world do this on a consistent basis

Meh, all the purposes are real. It's a win-win. Get warned of idiots, collect data that will be useful to insurers (and probably to self driving cars too, I can imagine Google cars giving detected hotheads a wide berth).

I can see one group of people having a legit beef with this though: car rental companies. One idiot behind the wheel, and their fleet car might as well go straight to scrap.

That's imagining this system in the most perfect light: shiny, new and not gamed.

The opportunities for misinformation and asymmetricality are huge. Don't like someone? Clone their license plate for a day and drive like an ass. How could you ever prove your innocence?

Loan your car to a friend and they could tarnish your reputation. It would make it inhibitive to share vehicles.

This is technology that drives us farther apart as people in favor of a few insurance companies making even more profit than they do already. Think critically.

It would also give police even more excuses to profile innocent people.

If you want people to drive more safely, then think up ways to get more people to drive more safely. Don't expand the surveillance mechanism to every moving vehicle.

Cloning someone's license plate isn't exactly trivial and isn't exactly legal.

"One idiot behind the wheel, and their fleet car might as well go straight to scrap."

Unless, of course, they pay this nice fee to have their fleet cars whitelisted in the app, call it "bad driver protection money"!

The point being, once everyone has this thing in their car and everyone is being watched while they are driving, everyone will be marked as an idiot. Even the safest drivers make stupid moves. Even worse, by what metric is an idiot made? I drive aggressively, trying to find open space on the road whenever I can. To do this I speed and otherwise make abrupt lane changes. If I'm on a road trip and someone is following me too closely I'll speed up to 140 MPH to put some distance between us in short order. The thing is, I've never been in an accident and have literally raced cars on the Nurburgring in Germany without incident. I have a driving style which works for me and works for others around me as I'm not in accidents and I don't cause accidents. My mother-in-law on the other hand who drives five under everywhere and by most people's metrics is a safe driver has been in two accidents in the last five years. Neither of which were her fault of course (said with some sarcasm).

All I can see this accomplishing is adding yet one more gadget app for people to be distracted by.

> The point being, once everyone has this thing in their car and everyone is being watched while they are driving, everyone will be marked as an idiot.

I tell this to anyone who rages: You drive and meet a LOT of people on your way. You don't make a lot of mistakes, but you make a few at least every drive.

Now given that you meet a lot of people you are most likely seeing a ton of mistakes by people. But individually they are not really making many mistakes.

Sure some people are horrible, but not all. And often the horrible ones are behind you.

And also, no matter how "safe" you are, it only takes 1 mistake to kill a person. Example, yesterday I was driving, a guy went nuts behind me and almost killed a motorcyclist. I saw that and it distracted me long enough to almost not notice the car that short-stopped in front of me. Literally 2 more seconds and it would have been a wreck. And I consider myself a safe driver, but it only takes one moment of distraction.

This sounds like you drive like an idiot. And so you should be marked as one, and are grumpy about it. Well, tough.

Basically what you're doing is playing Russian roulette, and you keep "winning", well yeah, that happens, right up until it doesn't.

Drive like a Google car. Stop being an idiot. Get a smiley face score.

Honestly, I bathe in idiocy because it works. One of the "tricks" I've picked up is that if I'm being tailgated in town or someone is otherwise driving next to me and won't stop I'll turn off traction control and "light up" the rear end of my car. Everyone 'scatters' at that point. A lot of people don't understand this driving style. I look like a complete idiot, but people pay attention to the idiots. They watch them, they hang back, thus making the idiot a lot safer. My car stops from 60 to 0 in 97 feet. It takes someone in the average sedan nearly twice as far. The further I can keep those people away from me the better. When I'm driving I'm engaged. I drive a low fast sports car which requires full engagement. This makes me the safest person on the road no matter how bad I look to other drivers. This is a key concept when on a motorcycle as well. If you are blending in by being "good", no one is paying attention to you. If you are driving a loud bike, speeding up and slowing down aggressively, popping wheelies, and otherwise behaving like an ass, you are visible. Scare those around you and those around you will give you room and on the road and room is king.

I agree to an extent. I also drive "like an idiot" and haven't been in an accident aside from being t-boned in traffic when a very old person didn't stop for a red light. I'm also very engaged while driving and pay lots of attention to everything going on around me. I don't listen to music or eat or have children or do phone calls while driving. I also consider driving a hobby / sport and value continual life-long improvement in it. I practice in realistic driving games and I've been doing so since I was very young. I'm very interested in participating in track days and auto cross events. I do most of my own car maintenance, drive a manual, and I know how my vehicle works in quite deep detail. I also know how it handles at and beyond the limit, when it will break loose in the front and rear, how quickly it can stop and accelerate, how hard it can swerve.

This app and the related one about insurance liability (posted here maybe a week or two ago) would unfairly rate me, because I go against the risk model and win consistently. I also agree that there are MANY "safe" drivers whose indecision and timid driving leads to bad situations; merging at 45mph, slowing way down for ramps, stoping at yield signs, driving under the speed of traffic, braking unnecessarily in traffic, etc. However, since in my situation, the insurance company gets to charge me a lot more, they're incentivized against modeling drivers like me as less risky than someone who is involved in more accidents than me but drives well within the limits and doesn't understand what happens when they approach or exceed them.

I'm in exactly your same boat. Do all the work on my car myself, only drive a manual, know how my tires will perform on various pavement at various temperatures, wear driving shoes, leave the radio off, etc., because I'm an enthusiast. A few years ago I was teaching my son to drive on slick roads so we were spinning cookies, doing bootlegger turns, and using engine power rather than braking to get out of situations in the county fairgrounds parking lot. There was no one around, nothing to run into, but yet a local officer started circling us on the perimeter lot road, at which point I had my son back off for safety reasons since there was another car in the parking lot. Anyway, he decided to light us up, then threatened my son and myself (because he had a learners permit) with reckless driving charges. And so it is in the US, land of the ignorant when it comes to actually learning how to drive or having the ability to teach our kids how to drive in an abandoned parking lot. I much, much, much prefer Germany in this regard. They really do get it on this front.

> once everyone has this thing in their car and everyone is being watched while they are driving, everyone will be marked as an idiot.

I wouldn't expect that to be a yes/no thing. Shouldn't it be based on compared to the average driver, as determined by the same system?

The Yelp extortion model applied to individuals.

Maybe there'll be an opportunity to drill down in the data. There's a huge wide spectrum of people who suck at driving (senile old people, oblivious soccer mom, boy-racer, etc) and I would be very surprised if they're all roughly equivalent.

Minor nit: I think your comment would be greatly enhanced if you changed some stereotypes, e.g. "soccer-mom" for "soccer-parent", "senile old" for "old" or "people with less reflexes" and "boy-racer" for just "racer". None of those relate 100% to the gender or age of the driver, IMHO :)

Soccer mom is an accepted phrase with known meaning. "Soccer parent" isn't.

I can imagine a lot of applications for these types of systems: identifying undercover traffic police cars, finding whether someone is following you, identifying friend's cars (similar to FB's "Share your location")

People would love such systems (and I'm afraid our privacy is gone for good).

This debate happens on HN again and again, but still: what privacy are you talking about in public space? Nobody has a problem with one person with a dashcam — why suddenly connecting these dashcams to a network that shares information is a problem?

Citing the U. S. Privacy Study Commission,

The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through the automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable.

The whole report is public, and it specifically addresses insurance in this context: https://aspe.hhs.gov/report/personal-privacy-information-soc...

"No one has a problem with strangers seing you on the street, but suddenly when some guy follows you around with a camera it's a problem?"

looking -> recording -> sharing

These are all different things and our behaviour will and should change at each step.

More than that really. If every stranger who sees you on the street can (or worse, automatically does) instantly share that they saw you to a giant database that can then be easily searched it changes the act of "seeing". Now you can be virtually followed at any time by anyone anywhere who can use the database.

No one can be drowned by a raindrop. A flood is another matter.

Doing things at scale is different. Qualitatively, not just quantitatively. This has been the consistent lesson of big data and the modern internet.

> This debate happens on HN again and again, but still: what privacy are you talking about in public space? Nobody has a problem with one person with a dashcam

If I'm not that one person I'd have a problem with that.

> why suddenly connecting these dashcams to a network that shares information is a problem?

Switching from dash cams to police helps a bit. I think most people would be okay with one (or a handful) of police officers randomly walking through their neighborhood. Most locales would say it's a good thing.

Now take that to the extreme and have an officer every 10 steps, looking around in every direction, and writing down everything that's happening. Still a good idea?

Now put license plate readers facing every direction on every police car and send that information to a database where it's stored forever. Now link it to every other license plate scanner across the country, and make searching through someone's trips as easy as using a TiVo, with complete history on their location. You don't have to imagine though, because they do this today: http://gothamist.com/2016/01/26/license_plate_readers_nypd.p...

Let just call it mass surveillance

Maybe it has to do with the fact that they're recording all license plates they see, regardless of what they're doing or if they did anything wrong. They will in fact know where you are and what your driving habits are. Apart from your driving behavior, this is surely also going to be something they're going to want to sell to various companies that would find this interesting.

> shares information

Probably that bit

OK, so if I record a particular driver being an asshole on the street and then put this recording on Youtube as an individual, I would be wrong?

In Germany at least you could get into serious trouble. Dashcams are a grey area in German law. The consensus seems to be currently that they're okay for personal use, but making the video public certainly puts you at risk of a lawsuit.

If you create a database of license plates (profiles) of all cars on the road along with their whereabouts and behavior at any given time, and then sell this information to the highest bidder.... you would be a bit wrong.

Absolutely, since it would amount to trial by media, where a person is found guilty / slandered as an asshole with no avenue to defend his position / state his case.

What if he was driving like an asshole because he was speeding to the hospital or similar reasons?

Exactly. The crux of prejudice is that it makes people form an opinion before they have facts a.k.a. context. A lot of things are not what they seem at first and because people respond to well to "Occam's Razor," they choose the laziest explanation and penalize people they don't know.

A real-life example: my friend was dating a woman whose brother got in an accident. After receiving painkillers, he became addicted to them (an old story at this point). As he weened himself off of them, taking responsibility, my friend would drive him to get methadone a few times a week. A system that uses information from this one would label my friend an addict because he was so often seen driving to or parked at the rehab clinic. When in fact, my friend was a charitable, stand-up guy helping out a soon-to-be family member recover and become a stronger, productive member of society.

Just like credit scores. Their models aren't perfect, but the threshold for useful (for their benefit) is much lower, and profitable lower still. Since you're the product being sold and they're OK with many defects, and given that there are no financial consequences for you getting rolled up in a bad / inaccurate / predatory model, they don't care and aren't incentivized to fix it (and in fact in many cases are incentivized financially to keep it broken, since "hits" like that can be a selling point).

Yes