Re:Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor
by tk75x on Monday March 18, 2019 @03:30PM
(#19424328)
It sounds like the one that Progressive used. They would monitor the time of day you drove, your speed, and acceleration/braking. So if you drove fast, late at night, and braked hard constantly, you would not qualify for a discount but at least they didn't raise your rates. And the best (worst?) part was that you only had to have the thing in your car for 1-3 months, I forget which, but when you were done you sent it back and were free to go back to your original driving style.
Re:Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor
by Scoundreller on Monday March 18, 2019 @03:53PM
(#19424539)
We could raise gas taxes instead of letting insurance companies capture the profit from punishing inefficient drivers (speeding, not looking ahead and braking instead of easing off accelerator).
If the data collection is verbose enough, dead reckoning from speed/acceleration information can be used to unmask some non-driving information. It can't be generally unmasked completely, but even small correlations, like "they start slow in the morning but go faster after xx seconds" -> "they live near a freeway" -> <regional information> -> "they are slightly more likely to be rich" -> "they under-report accidents" can be inferred, leading down the same path. This is the sort of thing that I was indicating above -- a lot of "good" drivers can be lumped in with the "bad" ones to make Class B, if you can establish an attributes that appears to be causal but whose accuracy is low.