Car manufacturers passing the details of how you drive (with the data aquired from onboard systems) to data brokers like LexisNexis, who then sell it on to insurance companies, who then use it in their pricing.
Isn’t this a huge class lawsuit wating to happen?
Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html?unlocked_article_code=1.b00.XhZY.qrlAuWGLvZPI&smid=nytcore-android-share
You know all those privacy policies documents that you click through or quickly sign without reading?
Presumably Chevy requested permission to share data, thereby removing any question of illegality.
What seems illegal here?
As Maphistos said… agree to share your data, data gets shared.
Sure. But you can get sued for having t&cs like that.
I say this because I assume the car manufacturer never directly warned the purchaser that this was going to happen (burying the possibility deep in the t&cs is not really the same thing).
I guess the big text in the article above the Accept button saying they’ll collect and use your data is a bit vague, and doesn’t explain they’ll share it with third parties.
Nonetheless, I would consider sharing your data a use of your data, and when I tell a company they may collect and use my data, I assume they might do that.
He may have missed it upon purchasing the vehicle. Enrollment was an explicit question from the dealer when I bought my last car. I opted out knowing I drive through batshit crazy rush hour every day.
Are you concerned about the privacy aspect or the collusion one? Regarding collusion, there had to be some kind of exception made for ISO which is the company we have here that collects data from insurers and then sells back aggregated data to them to be used in pricing and reserving decisions. Otherwise such a deal can be interpreted as collusion.
I forget the legal thingies that make this possible but it’s covered in one of our exams.
If you are concerned on the privacy aspect, I wouldn’t be surprised if a series of legal proceedings continues to shape what can and can’t be collected and in what fashion.
I’m wondering about the actuarial justification. A couple of hard accelerations and stoppages per trip is a sign of high P(accident)?
I’m going to ask a Missourian to request the data.
Also, if someone is going to track me for the purpose of determining my premium, I should be explicitly told before buying the car, so I can drive like a safe granny (not the ones who don’t stop and run into things) in a boring car.
I would think more that rolling (we call them “California”) stops running red lights, not looking both ways before passing through an intersection, extremely high rates of speed (not 5-10mph over posted), state of drunkenness, bratty kids in the back seat, a shitty touch screen for frequently-adjusted controls, etc., would be more indicative of accident frequency.
Here’s the problem I have: the technology simply isn’t accurate enough.
My car will hard brake for me if it thinks there’s a reason. This means that if it decides I am backing up without looking it will hard brake. This happens backing up out of my driveway from time to time.
My car will often remind me to keep my hands on the wheel when my hands are actually on the wheel. Are they collecting that data?
My car often shows a speed limit that is different than the posted limit. In one place in town it’s 15mph off! So it would report me speeding or going dangerously under the speed limit pretty much every day.
Also today I braked for a cat. Does my car know it was a cat? It was a black cat so I am doomed.
You probably shouldn’t have. Cats should know better. Darwin theorized that cats who cross streets without looking first would be replaced in the general cat population by those who are genetically predisposed to looking both ways.
I’m paraphrasing, but the quote is pretty close to that.
Not quite, here is a quote from the article
:
Especially troubling is that some drivers with vehicles made by G.M. say they were tracked even when they did not turn on the feature — called OnStar Smart Driver — and that their insurance rates went up as a result
I dunno which side of actuarying you are on but if it’s not P&C I can kind of sort of explain.
The variables used for pricing don’t need to demonstrate a causal connection to loss, they just need to be highly correlated. This is why credit score is used even though it can be high or low for reasons that don’t have anything to do with your driving.
For this reason credit score is a controversial rating variable. Concerned citizens may be able to change things by contacting their state’s DOI.
Two comments in different veins.
If this is a separate “accept/decline” thing, then I am fine with it. Read it. Decline it if you want. Or don’t read it and you are exposed. But I think all too often there are these types of clauses in a Ts and Cs that you essentially have no choice but to accept. Do you want to use this product, then you have to accept these Ts and Cs. For example, if this was built into my iOS settings, we would all have no choice but to just accept it.
I’m actually supportive of the idea that unsafe drivers should pay more for insurance. The issue is I don’t trust the determination of what is safe. The guy who drives down the highway at 55 (sometimes not in the right lane), never speeding up quickly and never slowing down quickly isn’t safe. He’s actually creating an unsafe situation for everyone else. And a wildly inefficient one. But I suspect he would have a higher safety rating than me.
It doesn’t make a difference if you braked for a cat or a baby or a car. You had a hard brake and somebody could have rear-ended you, whereas if you were going half the speed you might not have had a hard brake.
It’s completely normal to say that you had no choice (other than hitting the cat, but baby/car is a bigger deal), but that leaves the fact that you were driving in an area that required hard braking due to a thing. Whether it was a cat or a skateboarder or a car doesn’t change that the hard brake occurred, and the hard brake correlates to loss.
We get that.
Now, the Chair recognizes the man from Missouri…
I’ll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize the gentleman from Missourah
I was in a neighborhood and no one was behind me. I don’t really know if it was a hard brake. I don’t think I was going fast enough for that.
I didn’t want dead cat on my tires (nor my conscience). I have to say this was the most casual cat walking across the road that I have ever seen. 
Note that I’m not blaming you for anything or calling you a bad driver. And perhaps that incident did not count as a hard brake. I’m saying people in general who hard brake but say “well of course I had a hard brake when the guy in front of me suddenly stopped, that’s good driving” still, on average, are worse drivers than people who did not hard brake, all else equal.
Ok but don’t say I was speeding when your data is inaccurate. I wasn’t speeding. And going 55 in a 70 is going to be MORE likely to get me in a wreck.
I don’t have that onstar thing so possibly I am not being tracked like that.
(I’m actually MORE concerned about getting pulled over for doing 40 in a 30 where I just missed a sign and I’m going by what my car says. I am one of those people who can get stopped for going 7 over.)
