I'm curious how they know a person is definitely driving and not a passenger.
More expensive insurance is getting off easy. After getting caught two or three times people should lose their license over it, IMO. It's as dangerous as drunk driving.
That said, it is concerning how they're collecting this information.
If I'm driving down the road with a phone held to my ear, a giant soda in the other hand, and steering with my knees, and I happen to pass a police officer, I hope they'd be allowed to stop me. I shouldn't be able to hide behind "I was in my private car, you had no right to look in on me and observe my behavior there."
Some expectation of privacy probably applies to conversations inside the car. Also, there might be a different way to think about the entire record of behavior of where one drives. Neither of those would interfere with policing of the behavior you cite.
Driving is a privilege, not a right.
If they care about accuracy to put in the engineering investment, it could be right a very high percentage of the time.
You have no way to know the position of the car in relation.
You would need car sensors and per car interior data and even then it would likely confuse a driver holding a phone in their right hand and a passenger holding it in their left.
You talk about the phone keeping track of where the phone not only is but was historically in order to guess if you are driving and texting and I hear you want to design a broken system that is not even deterministically broken.
It also fails to account for people passing a phone around to someone else in the car.
I wouldn't be able to give my phone to a passenger because it would already have decided it is a a driver's phone.
Your users will only be able to use your phone if they can reverse engineer what their phone thinks they are doing.
Anyone who does not charge their phone will see car travel destroy their battery life.
One can trivially avoid such a feature by disabling GPS but most people won't have to worry about it because they just won't pay hundreds of dollars more for a phone that randomly doesn't work even in the passenger seat because it's incorrectly second guessing you.
1. This is literally almost everyone on the road (that should frighten you more than insurance companies having this data)
2. Insurance is a highly regulated industry. Each state has a department of insurance that regulates how insurers apply rate and underwriting.
3. There are many voluntary opt-in programs out there that reward good behavior and marginally penalize bad behavior. Those programs focus on a few behaviors, none of which are distraction at the moment and they are all opt-in.
Full disclosure - I work at a large insurance company and am also an EFF donor. This is near and dear.
Insurance may be "highly regulated" but regulation on what data can be collected is underdeveloped.
It's the Insurance Industry - of course they'll use it against their customers!
People are not perfectly spherical insurance customers operating in a vacuum.
In light of that, what non-adversely uses does this data have with respect to the people whom are the target of this data collection?
There are a number of insurance companies literally trying to help adjust behavior in order to save lives of those distracted and the innocent bystanders and other drivers on the road.
E.g., "OK Google, Call Home".
nothing.
Why? Because it is telling you, usually with a silent on-screen notification that you need to unlock your phone.
I have found that trying several times including swearing seems to unlock it.
But this is still creating a distraction while driving.
Very poorly thought out.
You don't even need general purpose speech recognition to call someone on your mobile, just enough to recognize a trigger sound and the name of the person you want to call. This is how I could use voice recognition on my Nokia N73 to call anyone in my address book.
Strangely enough in command line interfaces this works perfectly, so maybe we need just a more speech friendly way to call commands?
And why you’d need the cloud is beyond me. A speech assistent that fails once you don’t have a internet connection is not only annoying, in some cases it could become outright dangerous.
The reason everything currently runs "in the cloud" is very simple; it binds you to the vendor and prevents anyone from reverse-engineering the software in any sort of usable form. It's essentially DRM gone wild.
Instead we have companies shuffling data back to their servers attempting (and usually failing in my experience) to handle arbitrary commands mostly for the company's benefit
Google Assistant DID figure out which case should lead to which actions. It knew that it was supposed to call home.
Instead of performing the action, it refused to perform the action and demanded that I use my hands to unlock the phone in precisely the situation where doing so was both illegal and dangerous.
You're right about the spurious cloud connection requirement. There is no way that we need to make a cloud connection for this or many other functions, yet it seems to be the default architecture for almost everyone these days. Just because you can does not mean you should.
First, it is fully recognizing my speech.
It is then refusing to do the action because they decided that I need to unlock my phone, PRECISELY in the situation where I CANNOT use my hands to perform that action.
Also, I last summer had an opportunity/need to use an obsolete DragonDictate from circa 2009. This old software was FAR better at recognition and well-thought-out command flow than any of Microsoft's or Googles current offerings. Yes. it is hard, but doing better than a decade behind is not hard.
So, both your general premise and your specific characterization are wrong
From Zendrive's FAQ page[1]:
> How does it work?
> Zendrive measures driver safety using only phone sensors. Integrate the Zendrive SDK into your driver app, and we’ll measure your drivers’ Caution, Control, and Focus while on the road, as well as detect collisions. This is done by measuring a wide variety of safety factors, like speeding, hard brakes, sharp accelerations, phone use, swerving, length of time driving, time of day, and many many more.
> Who’s it for? How are people using this?
> We built Zendrive for any On Demand company with a growing fleet, to help them manage their growth. With in-depth analysis showing any particular driver’s safety, or fleet-wide safety, it gives fleet managers the tools they need to improve their fleet’s driving to ensure safety, reduce risk and liability, and increase savings.
> Since launch we’ve found additional types of companies getting value from Zendrive, from fleet management platform companies, to activity tracking companies and expense tracking companies who use the driving detection in the technology, to hardware companies looking for new safety features.
"Hardware companies"
Does that mean bundled by carriers and crappy Android phones? Lovely.
This was legit, too.
> The reason for all this data is that at least one in five U.S. auto insurance policies now offers a potential discount if the customer consents to a vehicle monitor.
But I would also like some kind of affirmation that the software isn't being backdoored onto everyone's phones.
1: https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/car-insurance/how-do-tho...
I wouldn't be surprised if it were silently bundled into a bunch of apps that have location access and run in the background. It gives insurers vaguely-useful data, but mostly exists to hoover up sweet, sweet location data.
EDIT: See below[1,2]. It's the extra-creepy version.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-ride-ha...
E.g., how does the thing know if you're driving or simply a passenger (especially on mass transit, like a bus)? And even if you are the driver, checking your phone at a light is probably not especially unsafe (though it could be rude or illegal). Finally, audio output app use like Maps or Spotify that doesn't require input is probably acceptable. So without knowing more about the methodology, the conclusions of the article don't logically follow.
The data can be queued locally, then uploaded when connectivity is available.
And it means you can't share your location with other people so they can track your progress. I do this on long trips so the people I'm driving to can see where I am without having to contact/disturb me.
"Zendrive now has its monitoring technology on 60 million phones, roughly one of every four U.S. drivers"
For example: How did this "monitoring technology" get on 60M phones? Do the owners know it's there? Is it hidden in other apps? Is there clear disclosure of its existence in those apps? What is done with this data? Who has access? Is it anonymized? Is it sold to third parties? Is it used for advertising or other non-safety-related purposes? How do they distinguish between drivers and passengers? What do they do about COPPA if it's on the phone of an under-13-year-old? Etc.