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
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.