First thing that comes to mind is the new wave of fintech apps for pay/bill management (like Earnin) that take in your entire bank feed in exchange for spotting you before your next payday...
You ever watch those HD antenna television shows? We spam the poorest people with some of the nastiest propaganda that exists. Even the shows they frequently play are legitimizing and glamorizing crime.
Can you elaborate? As a non-American and non-TV watcher, I always believe DVB-T is a good way to avoid paying to cable TV yet still be able get some basic TV programs like breaking news.
What are the groups that dominate American digital antenna TV station? Who are their backers? What are their political leanings, and what kind of propaganda do they air?
I don't know what OP is referring to. Broadcast TV in the US is more or less the same as it always was, just with a lot of extra content on the sub-channels that is mostly reruns of old shows. Nothing subversive in any of it. You don't see the partisan crap that occupies subscription TV in the US. The only notable difference is that certain advertisers don't bother with broadcast so you never see their promotions.
I think Sinclair Broadcast Group is a big one, but I am just going from what I've seen when I went to visit my friend who had one setup. All the commercials were preying on people's debts, advertising for high-interest rate car loans, payday loans, those shady schools with financial assistance, etc. The show he was watching was a violent cop show where the "good" guys were literally corrupt and involved in organized crime. They were glamorizing cheating, stealing, hard drugs, etc. I couldn't stand it. Maybe I was too high, but it really creeped me out.
That may be the case, but make no mistake, people who are poor do find a way to pay for cable and tune into the propaganda networks, especially Fox, even though they can’t afford medications and proper food.
Source: worked for a cable company setting up white angry people in Oklahoma. I saw white because there literally were no other races. Every other customer was angry because Obama something something Muslim destroying the world and their Fox News is out. shudders
TV, hell just listen to music that has been popular in the inner cities and the shows that came along on the likes of MTV glorifying it. the music industry if you have not noticed has been strangely immune to the whole #METOO movement and for good reason.
Some type of regulatory-skirting financial account device that pools everyone’s money while the backing organization can gamble with it and extract huge overall fees regardless of whether they succeed at gambling...
Sounds a lot like defined contribution retirement plans, asset managers, mutual funds and hedge funds...
This seemed like a grab bag of "Here are some bad things about being poor that are vaguely related to privacy" with the only common thread being Professor Gilman's willingness to speak about them. Poverty is brutal, but I'm not convinced that the privacy lens really adds a lot.
I'm also not convinced that privacy problems truly affect the poor more. The government surveillance mentioned here is a big problem. But on the commercial side, companies are a lot more interested in acquiring the personal, financial, and medical data of the rich. And as the article admits, people making higher incomes are more likely to have their information stolen.
A lot of the evidence in this piece amounts to "surveys show that people earning under $40k worry about X more than people earning over $40k." That's a very weak form of evidence.
I think the article is quite specific and articulate about the problem: "Employers of low-income workers listen to phone calls, conduct drug tests, monitor closed-circuit television, and require psychometric tests as conditions of employment."
This makes government surveillance (as serious as it is) feel like a distant, abstract issue.
They also pay low wages, don't provide paid sick days, fire you if you're late, provide less training, and so on. There's a lot of bad stuff about being poor; I'm not convinced that the privacy angle adds a lot.
The sentence you quoted is framed to make some of those things sound worse than they are. "Listen to phone calls" - does that just refer to call centers recording calls for training/quality purposes? And "Monitor closed-circuit television" just is another way of saying "Many low-income employees work in places with security cameras." Finally, "require psychometric tests" sounds ominous, but a) college serves as a long psychometric test and b) interviews are informal psychometric tests.
The unifying thread is that employers have to invest more in supervising low-productivity workers.
Well, if you have been working in a place with security cameras, then that place has gotten worse recently, privacy-wise. 10 years ago they would dig out the surveillance tapes to try and identify a burglar. Now they might automatically detect employee behaviour: That's something that affecs poor warehouse workers.
A lot of that creepy stuff is moving upwards to white collar jobs, does that weaken the argument the article makes or does it just mean the problem is expanding 'upwards'?
> "...employers have to invest more in supervising low-productivity workers."
why do you believe these workers are low-productivity? are they unworthy of dignity and privacy as a result?
why do you believe the employers are qualified supervisors? have you never had a bad manager? might it be possible that the employers have no idea how to encourage productivity, and that low productivity is induced by a coercive and surveilled work environment?
so many assumptions packed into those little words...
This is just complete BS, drug tests are mostly required for mid-to-high paying jobs, not your typical low income job. I've never had to take a drug test for any of the sub $10/hour jobs I've worked, I've had to take a drug test for every single software job I've ever worked. In fact, I have an acquaintance who was talking about quitting weed the other day and how difficult is is. When I asked her what made her quit she said "I'm sick of making only $30,000 a year and any jobs that pay over $30,000 a year are going to require a drug test."
Having your work phone calls monitored is hardly something to get worked up about (you're using your phone for work...do you also get mad when your supervisors monitor your work in person?) and almost certainly not specific to low income employees.
CCTV is literally everywhere, nobody low income works in my building and everyone's monitored with CCTV. Big whoop.
Psychometric tests are very, very uncommon and not at all specific to low income employees, in fact, I'd argue the opposite (I mean... college is basically treated as a psychometric test)
> I've never had to take a drug test for any of the sub $10/hour jobs I've worked, I've had to take one for every single software job I've worked.
Interesting. My experience has been the opposite. Haven't been drug tested since I got my last minimum wage job working in a grocery store.
> Having your work phone calls monitored is hardly something to get worked up about (you're using your phone for work...do you also get mad when your supervisors monitor your work in person?)
Uh.. yeah, if my boss starts watching me work directly and isn't actively collaborating with me - I'm going to be looking for a new job..
> Nobody low income works in my building and everyone's monitored with CCTV.
Very curious where you are located? That's certainly not the norm in any dev shop I've worked in. There's cameras on the server rooms - and building security.. but nobody is monitoring the employees. Are you US based?
> Psychometric tests are very uncommon and not at all specific to low income employees, I'd argue the opposite (I mean... college is basically treated as a psychometric test)
College is not a psychometric test. A psychometric test is one of those "You see your coworker report to work drunk out of his mind, do you: A. Contact management, B. Pull out a 5th to help him with the Hair of the Dog, or C. Not notice because you're too high to give a fuck."
I've filled out several of those over the years - ALL for low-wage retail positions. If you want to argue high-earners are tested - the long-form interview process is closer to the equivalent.
There's cameras on each corner of the building covering the entire parking lot and parameter. Cameras at both front and back doors and entrance way. Cameras covering the entire reception area/lobby from like every angle, cameras in all the hallways, cameras in the server room. There might be more I never noticed.
Sure your cool valley startup with a flip-flop wearing CEO isn't going to require a drug test (and probably not a formal background check), but buttoned up corporate America absolutely does as well as government and most companies who does business with government. So basically most non-small-companies outside of California. Employee drug testing got popular in the early-90s, it was even the topic of a Seinfeld joke. Though I hear its becoming less common in the last few years, and some have stopped testing for marijuana.
>There is no definitive data on how many companies conduct drug tests, though the Society for Human Resources Management found in a survey that 57 percent do so. Nor is there any recent data on how many have dropped marijuana from mandatory drug testing.
>After the Drug-Free Workplace Act was enacted in 1988, amid concerns about cocaine use, drug testing spread to most large companies. All Fortune 500 companies now engage in some form of drug testing, according to Barry Sample, a senior director at Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest testing firms.
I have not once in the entirety of my software development experience been drug tested. Prior to my current job at Large Corporation I worked at a government contractor.
Not that I ever did drugs because there was no way I was going to risk the government coming down on me, but it's an example of how drug testing is still something mostly relegated to the lower paying jobs unless your employer has reasonable suspicion in the case of government work.
Off the top of my head....medical software companies almost always require it (hey, it's basically free for them, since they have their own labs), any company with older tech like Coldfusion, ADA, etc seem to test to weed out developers who are scraping the bottom barrel due to undisclosed personal problems, financial/real-estate software companies, and this is all on top of rigorous background checks that may or may not matter. The drug test matters.
> i've never heard of any place in tech that drug tested that didn't involve getting a security clearance
If the company is accepting US government contracts, and you would be working on a team under such a contract, then the company is likely to be required to drug test you even if a security clearance is not required.
That's actually pretty rare. I've worked at places that did government contracting and none of the teams directly servicing those contracts were tested, neither was anyone else at the company.
Thanks for the correction. I was really just going by what I've heard from colleagues, but my specialty is network security and the requirements may (or may not) be stricter there.
> This is just complete BS, drug tests are mostly required for mid-to-high paying jobs, not your typical low income job.
I'd offer a different take: they are required often for skilled manufacturing jobs, like for people operating precision or dangerous machinery.
I've seen many anecdotes where factory owners say that they can't find workers for machine operator positions who don't test positive for meth or opioids.
It's also possible that some of those employers are using drug tests as a sort of "morality" bar, but I'd bet they primarily want to protect their expensive capital equipment and their other non drug using employees from potential drug-use related accidents.
But I doubt there is a lot of drug testing for burger flipping or grocery bagging type jobs, especially not in a tight labor market as exists today.
Yes, that's probably a good generalization of the type of job that requires it - and "causing a lot of damage" even captures the case of high-skilled jobs that require security clearances.
My understanding is it's an insurance thing. As in, the owners' insurance rates would be crazy-high if they didn't drug test (at least) anyone operating machinery.
If we're throwing anecdata on the pile, my experience is completely opposite. I've never had to take a drug test for a software engineering position - and I would flat out refuse to if a company required one - but I've had to pee in a cup before Kohl's would let me unload their trucks.
> This is just complete BS, drug tests are mostly required for mid-to-high paying jobs, not your typical low income job.
You may have been out of the low income market for too long. The landscape has changed. The vast majority of minimum-wage jobs come with drug testing requirements in my area. In the meantime, over my entire professional software development career, I have only been asked to take a drug test twice (and declined once -- the job was nowhere near good enough to put up with that kind of nonsense).
Poor people are at risk. Even though they are poor, they collectively have more money than the rich have collectively. Target a rich person for a million, or a million poor people for a dollar, either way you have the same amount in the end. There are different ways you target each, but there are plenty of scheme to choose from on both ends. (or even in the middle)
> Even though they are poor, they collectively have more money than the rich have collectively.
That entirely depends on how you define "rich" and "poor", which is a nontrivial thing to decide. In 2019 in the US, the top 10% wealthiest households collectively have more than twice as much money as the bottom 90% collectively. But lots of people in the top 10% don't consider themselves "rich".
Of course. If you want to play games with numbers you can make them say anything you want. To reach the top 10% you need just over $100,000 in income. That isn't rich in most people's book, though it is upper middle class.
Depending on the part of the nation you're talking about. In much of the nation, exceeding 100k makes you unambiguously wealthy. In other areas, you'd have a hard time living anything more than a squarely middle class lifestyle on that.
It's not about "playing games", it's that economic conditions vary so wildly across the nation that you can't accurately characterize what's "rich" and "poor" using the same scale everywhere.
That's why I say that determining "rich" and "poor" is a difficult thing to do.
So, in your eyes, where should the privacy line be drawn? Is it OK the insurance company knows the VIN number of your car, the make, the model, the miles, the color, your name, age, address, credit score, credit card information, marital status, how many miles you drive a year, where the car is stored, your claim history, criminal history, etc? If that's all OK, what crosses the line about monitoring driving behavior?
> what crosses the line about monitoring driving behavior?
I think the privacy line is already drawn too far, but aside from that, I think if monitoring 'driving behaviour' involves GPS tracking, it crosses the line because you can use it to infer the people and groups you associate with.
2. It's a wealth of data that can be used to generate other things about you. It's also data that's traditionally very hard for other parties to get a hold of - your car's make, model and your address is typically not secret information, but for the most part nobody but you knows everything about how you spend your time.
And once your insurance company has this information, you lose control over it. They can share it with other companies, with law enforcement, with parties that may not be relied on to keep the information secure.
Wrong inferences can be made about you, can be shared out.
> ...what crosses the line about monitoring driving behavior?
First and foremost, it's only ever going to be used against me if it is used. I would basically have to bet I was never in an accident, which, given I've been hit three times while legally stopped in the last 5 years, I'm not willing to do. I suspect for the vast majority of drivers, the monitor is a net cost, not a net savings.
But also, there is not a one-to-one relationship between liability and safety. Insurance companies care about liability first, and if they care about safety, they care about it second. I'd like to see some studies on how these monitors influence driver behavior before even considering getting one installed.
For another, the monitors lack context. It is safer to travel at 75mph in a 65mph zone if traffic is going 75mph and the road (and your vehicle) otherwise supports that speed. (Put lazily without citation: At that speed there is almost no difference to increased speed in terms of serious injury or fatality, but at that speed variance, the likelihood of a crash occuring is higher. Net result: more serious injuries and fatalities driving at the slower speed.) But the monitor will only see you going 10mph over the speed limit.
And then, as a sibling poster mentions, there are the privacy issues. If it monitors your location, it is monitoring far, far more than your driving habits.
I remember reading the study but I can only find broken references to it. This is from an .edu domain and although the citation to the study itself is broken - I hope it referencing the study counts for at least something.
From memory, the TL;DR of the study was "speed differentials cause accidents, not speeding" along with "speed differentials cause more likely to be fatal accidents". A car going 75 MPH rear ending a car going 70 MPH is going to do less damage and potentially be less fatal than a car going 75 MPH rear ending a car going 55 MPH.
We have GPS trackers installed on the install vans at my work. I've seen the real time tracking maps. They track everything about the vehicle. The speed it's driving, every time it stops, every time the engine is turned off or on, you can predict arrival time at destinations based on average speed and traffic conditions taken from online.
These are just some cheap consumer model ones the boss picked up for about $100 each.
The more advanced and expensive ones he showed me, could give you even more detailed real time.information.
> Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price.
An alternative would be to only require tracking for drivers who have proven themselves to be unsafe (found to be repeatedly at fault in accidents). Car insurance is not just protection against accidents due to traffic and weather, it's also protection against negligent behavior of drivers themselves.
In the longer term, though, we need to switch to other forms of transportation that don't require individuals to self insure. Perhaps that will be self driving car and bus services, that don't have the huge risks associated with people driving, or maybe they will involve expanded rail service.
> Bad drivers are already a part of the risk calculation.
That's a weasel statement. "bad" "part" "calculation" are all soft terms. You can always tighten the metrics, which a GPS would allow for, given time and rigor.
But I do believe that we have a bias towards solutions that punish a particular person.[1]
It's an insurance company, if many people drive badly then you can be sure they've factored it in because they don't lose money over a solved problem like that.
I still don't think we should target bad drivers for extra surveillance, because I value the privacy of the bad drivers too much.
Also valuing the privacy of the bad drivers, is just valuing my own privacy down the road. [2]
Just an FYI, you are probably getting downvoted for drawing a terrible and insensitive analogy between (a) insurance companies and drivers and (b) the perpetrators and victims of a genocide. At least that's why I downvoted your comment.
> [2] At first they came for the bad drivers, but I wasn't a bad driver ...
This is an allusion to "First they came... ", a poem written by a German Lutheran minister recalling the cowardice of contemporary German intellectuals who would not oppose the Holocaust:
> You should be careful using allusions when you don't understand their origins.
Even if I tried, there is literally no way I could possibly self censor myself enough to avoid offending everyone on the internet.
These types, of threads based on offense are a waste of time:
1) If the person claims to be offended, you can't refute that because the offense is an internal state that they claim they are experiencing.
2) If the claim is that someone else maybe offended, then you also can't argue against that because now you are debating on an inference for which there is no firm evidence.
It's like those endgames in chess where you wish you didn't have to move.
Even by responding to this, I lose, because I will be likely down-voted for not being sensitive enough, even when no offense was ever intended.
However I can flip it on you. Go and find proof that I intended to offend with my comment.
I said nothing about your intentions, just pointed out the objective reality of the origin of the allusion you made. You could be very well intended - in fact I assume now you are - but just uninformed about this particular matter.
Try not to be offended by constructive feedback, and now that you know, perhaps think twice before you use that allusion in the future. I've also made similar well-intended mistakes, and I've benefited from others helping me learn and grow from them.
Suggesting that someone take care when using historical allusions they don't understand is not the same as questioning someone's intentions.
Read the thread again: Once it was clear that they were legitimately unaware of the origin of the allusion they made, the suggestion I made was to be careful in general using such allusions.
For insurance, punishing an individual is improving risk modelling.
Insurance companies are also involved in promoting technologies that reduce the risk of claims, as that expands their addressable market by lowering prices without lowering profit.
Not sure we have a propensity for punishment here, at least not in a way that stands out from anywhere else. The way I see it is we have a propensity for profit, and some people figured out that punishment is easier / more profitable than rehabilitating people (not counting any negative externalities on the entire society having to deal with having a sort of underclass of criminals).
And I would almost guarantee that someone made money off of establishing a contract to sell such tracking devices to the state, to then sell/force them on bad drivers.
Private insurance companies buy these, not the state
> to then sell/force them on bad drivers.
They don't need to be forced. Those drivers could be offered the option of installing them with a smaller increase in premium, and not installing them with a much higher increase in premium. Eventually, if their driving habits don't change for the better, they will be priced out of auto insurance, which is what happens today if you continually are at fault in car accidents.
> Those drivers could be offered the option of installing them with a smaller increase in premium, and not installing them with a much higher increase in premium.
At a certain point, that's the same as being forced.
> At a certain point, that's the same as being forced.
At a certain point, the risk you impose on the insurance pool by not driving safely is greater than your ability to pay for that risk, so you have forced (priced) yourself out of insurance coverage.
You can always go with another insurance company who will offer you terms that don't involve the tracking device, but they aren't going to extend that coverage to you for a lower price.
But not everyone can be a safe driver, which is one reason we need alternative transportation options for them.
I do think that ubiquitous, highly intrusive spying will become mandatory for all cars at some point. I don't think it will be because of insurance. I think it's more likely to come from the push for "self-driving" cars and automated roadways.
I look at Tesla's spy system as the sort of dystopian future we can expect.
This has a lot more to do with the risk pooling of insurance and competition among carriers than it does to do with some desire to mindlessly violate privacy.
To give a simplified example, say a good driver costs an average of $100 per year and a bad driver costs $10,000. If without trackers, you can get 100 customers where 10% end up ultimately being bad, the cost over the year ends up being $100 * 90 + $10,000 * 10 = $109,000 or $1,090 per customer. If trackers let you get down to just 8% bad drivers, your expected costs are $100 * 92 + $10,000 * 8 = $89,200 or $892 each.
That lowered cost means more competitive rates, which in turn drives positive selection (i.e., good drivers will be more likely to sign up for your service in the first place). Those bad drivers you passed on also aren't just going away - they're going to competitors and driving up their costs.
Isn't this the purpose of insurance adjustments? When an event occurs that would cost the insurance company money, they change their prior of what you should be paying, no need to try and "pre-crime" with tracking chips.
I would rather we not normalize technology that really has no reason to exist but to allow insurance companies to optimize the last meaningless % of their margins at the cost of a slow erosion of an expectation of privacy. (companies who already have a history of doing questionable things to deny claims and avoid liability, enoughso that I have personal stories on this matter)
This is more like advertising your insurance company in women’s magazines to pre filter your customers without offering different prices based on gender.
As the insurance company couldn’t determine your driving ability themselves, and therefore offers the same price regardless of ability, the black box allows customers to pre filter themselves before applying, hopefully reducing the average accident rate.
I think it's clear that they want to use this to minimize expenditures. The problem arises with how they use the data. The trackers don't intrinsically let them get the bad driver rate down, but lets them tune the premiums that those drivers have to pay.
Let's use your data; they currently pay ~$1,090 per customer. So for the sake of argument, let's say that they charge $1,100 and keep that $10 in expectation. Now they install GPS trackers, and they can identify two classes of behavior; class A drivers (50% of drivers), who have a 4% accident rate, and class B drivers (50% of drivers), who have a 16% accident rate. The combined rate is still 10%.
Class A drivers cost 48 * 1e2 + 2 * 1e4 = $24,800 = $496/driver
Class B drivers cost 42 * 1e2 + 8 * 1e4 = $84,200 = $1,684/driver.
So this is great -- good drivers pay less, risk profiles are narrowed, etc. Maybe the bad drivers can be given feedback that will tell them what things they can do to minimize their accident rate based on the GPS data, and get some feedback on that -- "drive slower", "stop at red lights", "stop running into parked cars" -- things that both improve the metrics for the GPS and result in safer drivers.
But maybe the metric that the adjusters found are "frequently drives in historically Irish neighborhoods", or "drives to fast food restaurants more often". Now things get diciers. And what if the things that the GPS is measuring are not proxies for how bad a driver they are, but how willing they are to settle with cash without involving insurance. Or the correlation is a false one -- it could be that most of the Class B drivers are excellent drivers, as good as Class A, but they have to pay Class B rates because they got lumped in with a secondary association not related to quality of driving.
This is a problem with any attempt to bring more metrics to bear in computing insurance rates, but is especially exacerbated by the invasive nature of GPS-based metrics, which can be used as proxies for all sorts of socioeconomic signals that allow open discrimination.
The tracker I have doesn't have any kind of location capabilities, and only tracks certain kinds of events like acceleration rates and speed. So basically as long as you keep it under 85mph and don't slam on the brakes or the accelerator frequently, you get the full discount.
Do you mind saying what kind of device you have? In some cases the only thing preventing other information being used is privacy policies, and the data may be used for gathering metrics to plan future devices.
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.
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.
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).
> Maybe the bad drivers can be given feedback that will tell them what things they can do to minimize their accident rate based on the GPS data
The issue here and my concerns with GPS trackers in general is if they are seen as providing valuable insight to how a person drives. This simply is not the case because so much of driving is context dependent. A few weeks ago, my brakes gave out briefly and I swerved sharply into the shoulder of the on-ramp I was on and finally came to a stop in the median between the on-ramp and the road I was trying to merge on to. Purely from GPS data that looks like erratic and dangerous driving when in reality I saved the insurance company money by managing to avoid hitting anything with my car.
Brake fade probably. In stop and go traffic in a hot climate brakes can get slower to respond. The brake pedal feels mushy is the best way to describe it. I've never experienced complete failure in South Florida traffic but I do know they I have to press harder each subsequent time.
If you had left more following distance you wouldn't have had to stop as quickly or as frequently. Either that or you need to maintain the car's braking system better. The point is, the brake fading is almost certainly a result of poor driving or maintenance habits, either of which should result in paying higher insurance premiums.
1. I'm already paying a higher premium just for driving in South Florida.
2. It's called bumper to bumper traffic for a reason. Following distance is <1 cars length. Anymore than that and some bozo is going to slide into your lane.
3. You know nothing of me nor my driving habits. I simply pointed out that brakes can fail or appear to fail for reasons other than mechanical failure.
> 1. I'm already paying a higher premium just for driving in South Florida.
Yes, but that's not because of your driving habits, is it?
> 2. It's called bumper to bumper traffic for a reason. Following distance is <1 cars length. Anymore than that and some bozo is going to slide into your lane.
Heaven forbid your ego take a little blow to make everybody safer.
> 3. You know nothing of me nor my driving habits. I simply pointed out that brakes can fail or appear to fail for reasons other than mechanical failure.
I know exactly what you've told me: You drive in a manner likely to cause your brakes to overheat and fade, a problem that many, many other people driving in the same conditions as you are able to avoid. Therefore, you should pay more than them for insurance, all else being equal.
I'm not entirely sure but the mechanic I trust said it was probably a bad master cylinder. That or just needed to change the brake fluid. It was definitely freaky because I like to think I do a decent job of keeping up on maintenance.
Especially when your GPS position jumps around in a dense urban environment! Let's hope the interns programming the ETL are actually looking and thinking and caring about the location data
When I had one on my car for a while (my wife signed us up for it with our new insurance, had to leave it on for a couple months) I had to struggle with driving safely and trying to keep that stupid thing happy (often by guesswork). If no-one modified their behavior with one on it wouldn't matter, but I'm sure everyone does so you're gonna risk ending up on the "naughty driver" list if you don't go out of your way to perform for the damn thing. Net effect, I was definitely at least a little less safe with it on. Hated it.
This is a nice follow-on. The one additional thing I'd point out is that when a Class B driver gets the quote from this carrier of $1,684 but gets a quote of $1,100 from another carrier, they're likely to head for the cheaper option, providing further benefit to the carrier using the trackers.
Also, I haven't worked in property/casualty insurance, but my understanding of these trackers is that they don't include GPS capabilities, almost certainly for those sorts of reasons you mention. The risk of bad headlines incentivizes carriers to do what they can to ensure that the false-positive Class B drivers are not correlated with anything potentially sensitive.
> my understanding of these trackers is that they don't include GPS capabilities
A friend has one of these in her car and it literally has an LED labelled GPS. Which makes no sense because one of the arguments I heard they need GPS to get mileage and speed, which you can already get from OBD.
While insurance is a different industry, the fact that tech companies continue to make decisions that play badly in the media spotlight suggests that 'bad headlines' isn't a huge deterrent in today's world.
Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price
What IF thanks to trackers insurance prices drop by 10x ? So that without a tracker the price stays the same as of now. Would it be "effectively" mandatory for you ?
I'm not sure what that question gets you, because this won't be the case.
An insurance company would have to drastically shrink, and so would its net profits, to do as you describe. So it quite obviously won't happen. Premiums will remain where they are. The price floor is effectively established.
(I do look forward to the next permutation, "well what if somebody lowers prices," so we can have a good round of explaining what a cartel is.)
I'm not sure what that question gets you, because this won't be the case.
But where is their price floor right now compared to their operating margins?
If the business is mostly actuarial risk, then dramatically lowering that risk by more accurately characterizing good and bad drivers would see premiums plummet.
If the business is mostly SG&A, then better assessing individual risk would be misapplied optimization and wouldn't affect premiums much at all.
(I do look forward to the next permutation, "well what if somebody lowers prices," so we can have a good round of explaining what a cartel is.)
Do you have good reason to think that car insurers have formed a cartel?
If car insurance really is a cartel, then sure, market forces won't work. But in the absence of a cartel, the generally expected outcome would be that safe drivers see lower rates than today and dangerous drivers see higher rates than today. Average premiums would probably remain about the same, because total payouts would remain about the same.
I get concerns about privacy & whether the market forces will actually work. But, pricing risk is also the fundamental business of insurance, so it seems very intuitive & logical for them to add additional parameters to quantify risk in their models. The better they can quantify the risk, the more competitive their rates can be, and the more successful they are as a business.
It's pretty much effectively mandatory right now. Just try buying a new car that doesn't have a GPS tracker installed, and that doesn't regularly phone home to the manufacturer.
My state allows you to alternatively get a 50k bond in exchange for mandatory insurance. Not sure how many states allow that, but the poor could not afford a spare 50k to save 2-3k a year in insurance. Also, I would think the bond could collect interest.
Mine as well, although I think the amount is a bit higher. It has to match the amount of liability insurance that you'd otherwise be required to carry, because you're essentially self-insuring.
What's funny (sad?) is that I don't drive much. I work from home and I rarely leave by car. And I drive a slow, lumbering vehicle so I tend to drive pretty slow. I've had 2 tickets in over 20 years of driving, and those were both really minor infractions, and no tickets in the last 10 or so years. I would save money getting one of these devices installed.
But there is no way I would opt in for even MORE surveillance. I won't even let my wife install the google or amazon home automation devices. I hate what the internet has become.
Why aren't premiums better correlated to risk? It seems like that would be an obvious competitive advantage for an insurance company, if other insurera are mispricing risk.
Similarly, the cost savings from increasing my deductible just isn’t there. Going from $1000 to $2000 should be more savings than a handful of dollars per year, since that will save insureco on just about every single claim.
There’s no way they’re charging me $100+/month if my risk of a claim is 2-3% per year.
Increasing your deductible from $1000 to $2000 also eliminates the insurer's claim administrative expenses for claims in the range of, say, $1500 to $2500, since you'll report claims in that range if your deductible is $1000 but not if it's $2000.
But insurers' models are complicated. One factor to consider here is that the population with $1000 deductibles isn't the same as the population with $2000 deductibles. For example, some of the latter group have a higher deductible because they're financially stable enough to afford a $2000 emergency expense, but others have it because they're financially unstable enough to need the cheapest coverage they can get. There's a strong negative correlation between an individual's financial stability and their risk to an insurer, so in net, it wouldn't surprise me if the latter group is riskier on average.
Also, even if raising your deductible reduces your expected claim costs by more than a handful of dollars per year, insurers in most of the US aren't required to pass that savings on to you - they can price coverage based on your willingness to pay (see [0] and [1]). On the bright side, auto insurance is arguably about the closest thing there is to a perfectly competitive market in the US - your insurer has lots of competitors, and if they're overcharging you relative to your risk, it's easy to find a better deal elsewhere.
I’m not in US, which is probably why I dream of your rates.
Our government policy (Ontario Canada) is to ask insurers how to reduce premiums, then the government lets them reduce/cap benefits and premiums go up anyway.
It’s one of the many markets we would open to more competition. A lot of US insurers would salivate at our rates.
Yes, I don't think people outside of Ontario understand how hosed we are on car insurance. I admit we have fraud, but do we have more fraud than norther Illinois? No. Do we have different weather than northern Illinois? Again, no.
The ad-based content economy is beyond parody: the first thing I saw when I opened this article about poverty and privacy rights was a full-page, autoplay video ad for Lincoln cars. The whiplash between the content and the presentation was so severe I'm going to have to wear a neck brace.
Privacy Badger detected 16 potential trackers, and uBlock stopped requests to 13 out of 30 domains the page tried to connect to. It's not usatoday.com levels of absurdity, but it's getting there.
Imagine surveillance being turned upside-down. Imagine a company unable to hire workers, because a union demands they first fire the CEO/management that looted company pensions at their previous company, or ran a predatory loan business, or tried to extort others through bogus patents.
The world would be a much different place if corporate was held personally responsible for their actions the same way labor is.
The thing is corporations exist precisely to limit liability. You don't have to start a corporation - you can run your own business out of your own pocket and accept all the legal liability. However, we make this activity undesirable through policy: (personal income is taxable in a much more punishing way than corporate income, and the legal system is incredibly expensive - the more customers you have, the more you are likely to be exposed to a crazy customer who is going to abuse the system and personally bankrupt you with frivolous lawsuits. Who would want to start a business in that climate?
one is free to start a company with those rules in the corporate charter. Heck, I'd even work there, but I'm wouldn't count on my job being around for long.
Nor would a company be around for long if it were the only one respecting environmental protections, workplace safety standards, or anti-child-labor laws.
I'm not sure how this applies in this scenario: It looks like workers, rather than the board, cast a vote of no confidence on the CEO. Publicly traded companies seem to operate fine with boards being able to remove CEOs, so what's the problem here?
This is a little off topic w.r.t. the article, but to some extent I like privacy as a currency. Despite the fact that you might make minimum wage and can’t realistically afford to pay for most services, Google gives you access to the majority of human knowledge, for free. Nobody forces you to use Google - if you can afford it, you can pay for it with time (i.e. worse results from places like DDG).
Redistributing wealth to ensure fairness is hard, but at least when we use privacy as the currency we all start with some, almost equal, amounts. The downside is that realistically this approach only works when everyone participates - I don’t think hybrid “pay or we track you” would work out to be efficient at large scales.
If you haven't worked low-end jobs it may be a surprise, but if you are a clerk in certain chain stores, you are searched by a supervisor every time you leave the building (to make sure you aren't stealing anything).
In some industries or retail sectors, a big part of being successful is preventing/reducing employee theft or employee fraud.
For example, modern POS stations often run several cameras: one pointed at the cash drawer, one pointed at the customer, one or more pointed at the employee, all synced to journals or screen streams.
I was thinking about this recently — the path to owning a small business in the 2020s goes through social media. Which means that the founder has to put an uncomfortable amount of their personal life on display in order to “sell” their brand. Anyone “hustling” at 2 or 3 gig jobs has to self-promote via those same platforms.
Basically, the only workers who are allowed total privacy anymore are white-collar middle managers. We don’t trust low-level workers and feel the need to keep tabs on them, while executives have been expected to carefully cultivate a squeaky-clean public image for the last 30-ish years.
But it basically comes down to “how much of my privacy to I have to trade for a paycheck?” The answer varies based on income level...
“I get valuable government benefits in my mortgage home deduction, childcare tax credits, my employer health benefits aren’t taxed,” says Gilman. “Those are income transfers just as much as food stamps or welfare but I am not put through intrusive questioning, verification requirements, home visits, or anything like that to get those benefits.” This is disingenuous if not flat out fallacious. They certainly are not the same and I continue seeing this type of rhetoric repeated more and more lately.
People have lost the ability to make the distinction between “taking less from someone” and “giving someone something”.
Food stamps is giving someone something. A deduction of any kind is taking less from someone.
These days people, whether they realize it or not, act as if the government has a natural right to everything you produce. And anytime the government takes less it’s welfare.
If the government takes 50% but offers a rebate or a deduction to reduce the rake to 30% people are acting as if you should grateful! As if that were a handout!
Suffice to say I disagree with this type of thinking.
I'm reminded of an observation a friend once made... "Light rail is how middle class people get to work. Bus is how poor people pick up their welfare checks." That's his nutshell parody of the mentality that makes rail projects okay, while buses are still bad.
What makes it "welfare" is that it benefits poor people, not that the money comes from the government. What makes welfare "bad" is that it benefits poor people, not the middle class or the rich.
This article is very lengthy and detailed, so eventually I gave up on trying to find in it any evidence (in the form of e.g. actual quotes from the SCOTUS decision -- which undoubtedly exist in detail and are publically available) that it isn't a one sided, alarmist emotional appeal. But perhaps I myself am letting emotions get the better of me by assuming the SCOTUS documents all their decisions, when in reality they (more) typically don't(?).
This is probably not something a lot of people will agree with, but my two cents. The issue is autonomy and consent. If people are really owner of their own data they should be able to do whatever they want with it. They should be able to sell it. They should be able to exchange it for services.
You can use WiFi for free. Why should that be frowned upon? It's your choice. We do not live in a nanny state. What should be clear is what kind of transaction you're in. What kind of data is collected. The deal should be transparent.
You can't say that this data is valuable on one hand but forbid people to trade it on the other hand. Definitely not just with an argument based on autonomy.
In my opinion (a bit tangential to the article I know)
The privacy thing is a symptom to the massive marketing budgets companies have available to them today. We're covering up the cost of living by redirecting them via advertising agencies who then get to direct the money however they want. I say, block ads. Steal from advertising companies, falsify data as much as possible. This is not the way people should be being paid. While this is a viable mechanism of subsiding the cost of living, no change will occur.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadWhat are the groups that dominate American digital antenna TV station? Who are their backers? What are their political leanings, and what kind of propaganda do they air?
Well, aside from all these stations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
Okay, it makes sense to me now. Thanks.
Source: worked for a cable company setting up white angry people in Oklahoma. I saw white because there literally were no other races. Every other customer was angry because Obama something something Muslim destroying the world and their Fox News is out. shudders
Sounds a lot like defined contribution retirement plans, asset managers, mutual funds and hedge funds...
I'm also not convinced that privacy problems truly affect the poor more. The government surveillance mentioned here is a big problem. But on the commercial side, companies are a lot more interested in acquiring the personal, financial, and medical data of the rich. And as the article admits, people making higher incomes are more likely to have their information stolen.
A lot of the evidence in this piece amounts to "surveys show that people earning under $40k worry about X more than people earning over $40k." That's a very weak form of evidence.
This makes government surveillance (as serious as it is) feel like a distant, abstract issue.
In Wall Street these were mandatory since many years ago.
Source: was tested for drugs as a part of my employment screening.
The sentence you quoted is framed to make some of those things sound worse than they are. "Listen to phone calls" - does that just refer to call centers recording calls for training/quality purposes? And "Monitor closed-circuit television" just is another way of saying "Many low-income employees work in places with security cameras." Finally, "require psychometric tests" sounds ominous, but a) college serves as a long psychometric test and b) interviews are informal psychometric tests.
The unifying thread is that employers have to invest more in supervising low-productivity workers.
A lot of that creepy stuff is moving upwards to white collar jobs, does that weaken the argument the article makes or does it just mean the problem is expanding 'upwards'?
why do you believe these workers are low-productivity? are they unworthy of dignity and privacy as a result?
why do you believe the employers are qualified supervisors? have you never had a bad manager? might it be possible that the employers have no idea how to encourage productivity, and that low productivity is induced by a coercive and surveilled work environment?
so many assumptions packed into those little words...
Having your work phone calls monitored is hardly something to get worked up about (you're using your phone for work...do you also get mad when your supervisors monitor your work in person?) and almost certainly not specific to low income employees.
CCTV is literally everywhere, nobody low income works in my building and everyone's monitored with CCTV. Big whoop.
Psychometric tests are very, very uncommon and not at all specific to low income employees, in fact, I'd argue the opposite (I mean... college is basically treated as a psychometric test)
Interesting. My experience has been the opposite. Haven't been drug tested since I got my last minimum wage job working in a grocery store.
> Having your work phone calls monitored is hardly something to get worked up about (you're using your phone for work...do you also get mad when your supervisors monitor your work in person?)
Uh.. yeah, if my boss starts watching me work directly and isn't actively collaborating with me - I'm going to be looking for a new job..
> Nobody low income works in my building and everyone's monitored with CCTV.
Very curious where you are located? That's certainly not the norm in any dev shop I've worked in. There's cameras on the server rooms - and building security.. but nobody is monitoring the employees. Are you US based?
> Psychometric tests are very uncommon and not at all specific to low income employees, I'd argue the opposite (I mean... college is basically treated as a psychometric test)
College is not a psychometric test. A psychometric test is one of those "You see your coworker report to work drunk out of his mind, do you: A. Contact management, B. Pull out a 5th to help him with the Hair of the Dog, or C. Not notice because you're too high to give a fuck."
I've filled out several of those over the years - ALL for low-wage retail positions. If you want to argue high-earners are tested - the long-form interview process is closer to the equivalent.
Typical 21st century office building, really.
Cameras for asset protection and building security != your boss looking over your shoulder while you work.
Source: a few acquaintances who worked as organizers by strategically taking jobs in certain companies.
no one's drug testing people making 100k+, but drug tests for low-level jobs are far, far more common than you think.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/employment-tren...
>There is no definitive data on how many companies conduct drug tests, though the Society for Human Resources Management found in a survey that 57 percent do so. Nor is there any recent data on how many have dropped marijuana from mandatory drug testing.
>After the Drug-Free Workplace Act was enacted in 1988, amid concerns about cocaine use, drug testing spread to most large companies. All Fortune 500 companies now engage in some form of drug testing, according to Barry Sample, a senior director at Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest testing firms.
For example, Walmart is number one on the list. Is it the CEO who is being tested, or the guys unloading the shipping trucks?
Not that I ever did drugs because there was no way I was going to risk the government coming down on me, but it's an example of how drug testing is still something mostly relegated to the lower paying jobs unless your employer has reasonable suspicion in the case of government work.
If the company is accepting US government contracts, and you would be working on a team under such a contract, then the company is likely to be required to drug test you even if a security clearance is not required.
I'd offer a different take: they are required often for skilled manufacturing jobs, like for people operating precision or dangerous machinery.
I've seen many anecdotes where factory owners say that they can't find workers for machine operator positions who don't test positive for meth or opioids.
It's also possible that some of those employers are using drug tests as a sort of "morality" bar, but I'd bet they primarily want to protect their expensive capital equipment and their other non drug using employees from potential drug-use related accidents.
But I doubt there is a lot of drug testing for burger flipping or grocery bagging type jobs, especially not in a tight labor market as exists today.
You may have been out of the low income market for too long. The landscape has changed. The vast majority of minimum-wage jobs come with drug testing requirements in my area. In the meantime, over my entire professional software development career, I have only been asked to take a drug test twice (and declined once -- the job was nowhere near good enough to put up with that kind of nonsense).
That's not what VC's obsession about scale is all about. Volume matters. Millions of poor parents buying diapers can make an empire.
That entirely depends on how you define "rich" and "poor", which is a nontrivial thing to decide. In 2019 in the US, the top 10% wealthiest households collectively have more than twice as much money as the bottom 90% collectively. But lots of people in the top 10% don't consider themselves "rich".
Depending on the part of the nation you're talking about. In much of the nation, exceeding 100k makes you unambiguously wealthy. In other areas, you'd have a hard time living anything more than a squarely middle class lifestyle on that.
It's not about "playing games", it's that economic conditions vary so wildly across the nation that you can't accurately characterize what's "rich" and "poor" using the same scale everywhere.
That's why I say that determining "rich" and "poor" is a difficult thing to do.
It's voluntary for now, but the industry is hoping people get used to it so it can be made effectively[2] mandatory.
And because people seem caught in race to the bottom competition to give up the most privacy they can, stuff like this may regrettably catch on.
[1]http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/01/14/scenario-auto-insuranc...
[2] Effectively mandatory meaning that insurance without a tracker will be like 10x the price.
I think the privacy line is already drawn too far, but aside from that, I think if monitoring 'driving behaviour' involves GPS tracking, it crosses the line because you can use it to infer the people and groups you associate with.
2. It's a wealth of data that can be used to generate other things about you. It's also data that's traditionally very hard for other parties to get a hold of - your car's make, model and your address is typically not secret information, but for the most part nobody but you knows everything about how you spend your time.
And once your insurance company has this information, you lose control over it. They can share it with other companies, with law enforcement, with parties that may not be relied on to keep the information secure.
Wrong inferences can be made about you, can be shared out.
A GPS will collect a lot of data that can be used for blackmail by rogue employees.
First and foremost, it's only ever going to be used against me if it is used. I would basically have to bet I was never in an accident, which, given I've been hit three times while legally stopped in the last 5 years, I'm not willing to do. I suspect for the vast majority of drivers, the monitor is a net cost, not a net savings.
But also, there is not a one-to-one relationship between liability and safety. Insurance companies care about liability first, and if they care about safety, they care about it second. I'd like to see some studies on how these monitors influence driver behavior before even considering getting one installed.
For another, the monitors lack context. It is safer to travel at 75mph in a 65mph zone if traffic is going 75mph and the road (and your vehicle) otherwise supports that speed. (Put lazily without citation: At that speed there is almost no difference to increased speed in terms of serious injury or fatality, but at that speed variance, the likelihood of a crash occuring is higher. Net result: more serious injuries and fatalities driving at the slower speed.) But the monitor will only see you going 10mph over the speed limit.
And then, as a sibling poster mentions, there are the privacy issues. If it monitors your location, it is monitoring far, far more than your driving habits.
So do you have a citation?
From memory, the TL;DR of the study was "speed differentials cause accidents, not speeding" along with "speed differentials cause more likely to be fatal accidents". A car going 75 MPH rear ending a car going 70 MPH is going to do less damage and potentially be less fatal than a car going 75 MPH rear ending a car going 55 MPH.
I'll see if I can find the actual study.
[0] https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/2015/09/18/is-driving-faster-...
These are just some cheap consumer model ones the boss picked up for about $100 each.
The more advanced and expensive ones he showed me, could give you even more detailed real time.information.
An alternative would be to only require tracking for drivers who have proven themselves to be unsafe (found to be repeatedly at fault in accidents). Car insurance is not just protection against accidents due to traffic and weather, it's also protection against negligent behavior of drivers themselves.
In the longer term, though, we need to switch to other forms of transportation that don't require individuals to self insure. Perhaps that will be self driving car and bus services, that don't have the huge risks associated with people driving, or maybe they will involve expanded rail service.
Bad drivers are already a part of the risk calculation.
I think the desire to track them individually is a manifestation of our North American propensity to look for punitive solutions.
That's a weasel statement. "bad" "part" "calculation" are all soft terms. You can always tighten the metrics, which a GPS would allow for, given time and rigor.
But I do believe that we have a bias towards solutions that punish a particular person.[1]
It's an insurance company, if many people drive badly then you can be sure they've factored it in because they don't lose money over a solved problem like that.
I still don't think we should target bad drivers for extra surveillance, because I value the privacy of the bad drivers too much.
Also valuing the privacy of the bad drivers, is just valuing my own privacy down the road. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
[2] At first they came for the bad drivers, but I wasn't a bad driver ...
How are you getting 'genocide' from the above comment?
> [2] At first they came for the bad drivers, but I wasn't a bad driver ...
This is an allusion to "First they came... ", a poem written by a German Lutheran minister recalling the cowardice of contemporary German intellectuals who would not oppose the Holocaust:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
You should be careful using allusions when you don't understand their origins.
Even if I tried, there is literally no way I could possibly self censor myself enough to avoid offending everyone on the internet.
These types, of threads based on offense are a waste of time:
1) If the person claims to be offended, you can't refute that because the offense is an internal state that they claim they are experiencing.
2) If the claim is that someone else maybe offended, then you also can't argue against that because now you are debating on an inference for which there is no firm evidence.
It's like those endgames in chess where you wish you didn't have to move.
Even by responding to this, I lose, because I will be likely down-voted for not being sensitive enough, even when no offense was ever intended.
However I can flip it on you. Go and find proof that I intended to offend with my comment.
Try not to be offended by constructive feedback, and now that you know, perhaps think twice before you use that allusion in the future. I've also made similar well-intended mistakes, and I've benefited from others helping me learn and grow from them.
> You should be careful
You're doing some serious backflips there. As if he isn't being careful enough for your taste. That's just useless drivel.
Read the thread again: Once it was clear that they were legitimately unaware of the origin of the allusion they made, the suggestion I made was to be careful in general using such allusions.
Yeah, that's why trucks and buses beep all over the world.
Thanks for the noise, insurance industry!
And I would almost guarantee that someone made money off of establishing a contract to sell such tracking devices to the state, to then sell/force them on bad drivers.
Profit > Punishment
Private insurance companies buy these, not the state
> to then sell/force them on bad drivers.
They don't need to be forced. Those drivers could be offered the option of installing them with a smaller increase in premium, and not installing them with a much higher increase in premium. Eventually, if their driving habits don't change for the better, they will be priced out of auto insurance, which is what happens today if you continually are at fault in car accidents.
At a certain point, that's the same as being forced.
At a certain point, the risk you impose on the insurance pool by not driving safely is greater than your ability to pay for that risk, so you have forced (priced) yourself out of insurance coverage.
You can always go with another insurance company who will offer you terms that don't involve the tracking device, but they aren't going to extend that coverage to you for a lower price.
But not everyone can be a safe driver, which is one reason we need alternative transportation options for them.
Or, once a critical mass is reached the insurance industry will lobby for it to be mandatory in all cars, selling it as a safety feature.
I look at Tesla's spy system as the sort of dystopian future we can expect.
To give a simplified example, say a good driver costs an average of $100 per year and a bad driver costs $10,000. If without trackers, you can get 100 customers where 10% end up ultimately being bad, the cost over the year ends up being $100 * 90 + $10,000 * 10 = $109,000 or $1,090 per customer. If trackers let you get down to just 8% bad drivers, your expected costs are $100 * 92 + $10,000 * 8 = $89,200 or $892 each.
That lowered cost means more competitive rates, which in turn drives positive selection (i.e., good drivers will be more likely to sign up for your service in the first place). Those bad drivers you passed on also aren't just going away - they're going to competitors and driving up their costs.
I would rather we not normalize technology that really has no reason to exist but to allow insurance companies to optimize the last meaningless % of their margins at the cost of a slow erosion of an expectation of privacy. (companies who already have a history of doing questionable things to deny claims and avoid liability, enoughso that I have personal stories on this matter)
As the insurance company couldn’t determine your driving ability themselves, and therefore offers the same price regardless of ability, the black box allows customers to pre filter themselves before applying, hopefully reducing the average accident rate.
Let's use your data; they currently pay ~$1,090 per customer. So for the sake of argument, let's say that they charge $1,100 and keep that $10 in expectation. Now they install GPS trackers, and they can identify two classes of behavior; class A drivers (50% of drivers), who have a 4% accident rate, and class B drivers (50% of drivers), who have a 16% accident rate. The combined rate is still 10%.
Class A drivers cost 48 * 1e2 + 2 * 1e4 = $24,800 = $496/driver
Class B drivers cost 42 * 1e2 + 8 * 1e4 = $84,200 = $1,684/driver.
So this is great -- good drivers pay less, risk profiles are narrowed, etc. Maybe the bad drivers can be given feedback that will tell them what things they can do to minimize their accident rate based on the GPS data, and get some feedback on that -- "drive slower", "stop at red lights", "stop running into parked cars" -- things that both improve the metrics for the GPS and result in safer drivers.
But maybe the metric that the adjusters found are "frequently drives in historically Irish neighborhoods", or "drives to fast food restaurants more often". Now things get diciers. And what if the things that the GPS is measuring are not proxies for how bad a driver they are, but how willing they are to settle with cash without involving insurance. Or the correlation is a false one -- it could be that most of the Class B drivers are excellent drivers, as good as Class A, but they have to pay Class B rates because they got lumped in with a secondary association not related to quality of driving.
This is a problem with any attempt to bring more metrics to bear in computing insurance rates, but is especially exacerbated by the invasive nature of GPS-based metrics, which can be used as proxies for all sorts of socioeconomic signals that allow open discrimination.
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.
The issue here and my concerns with GPS trackers in general is if they are seen as providing valuable insight to how a person drives. This simply is not the case because so much of driving is context dependent. A few weeks ago, my brakes gave out briefly and I swerved sharply into the shoulder of the on-ramp I was on and finally came to a stop in the median between the on-ramp and the road I was trying to merge on to. Purely from GPS data that looks like erratic and dangerous driving when in reality I saved the insurance company money by managing to avoid hitting anything with my car.
Also: when you have an automatic and can’t depend on your engine for some braking power to take a load off the brakes.
2. It's called bumper to bumper traffic for a reason. Following distance is <1 cars length. Anymore than that and some bozo is going to slide into your lane.
3. You know nothing of me nor my driving habits. I simply pointed out that brakes can fail or appear to fail for reasons other than mechanical failure.
Yes, but that's not because of your driving habits, is it?
> 2. It's called bumper to bumper traffic for a reason. Following distance is <1 cars length. Anymore than that and some bozo is going to slide into your lane.
Heaven forbid your ego take a little blow to make everybody safer.
> 3. You know nothing of me nor my driving habits. I simply pointed out that brakes can fail or appear to fail for reasons other than mechanical failure.
I know exactly what you've told me: You drive in a manner likely to cause your brakes to overheat and fade, a problem that many, many other people driving in the same conditions as you are able to avoid. Therefore, you should pay more than them for insurance, all else being equal.
Worse than this, who say's they'll use the data honestly or competently?
Maybe they will draw false inferences from your innocuous driving data and still label you a 'bad' driver.
Then, if you try and argue with them, they'll make an appeal to the data, and attempt to shut down all debate.
Also, I haven't worked in property/casualty insurance, but my understanding of these trackers is that they don't include GPS capabilities, almost certainly for those sorts of reasons you mention. The risk of bad headlines incentivizes carriers to do what they can to ensure that the false-positive Class B drivers are not correlated with anything potentially sensitive.
A friend has one of these in her car and it literally has an LED labelled GPS. Which makes no sense because one of the arguments I heard they need GPS to get mileage and speed, which you can already get from OBD.
There’s decreasing value to pooling when the risks are perfectly quantified at the customer level.
An insurance company would have to drastically shrink, and so would its net profits, to do as you describe. So it quite obviously won't happen. Premiums will remain where they are. The price floor is effectively established.
(I do look forward to the next permutation, "well what if somebody lowers prices," so we can have a good round of explaining what a cartel is.)
But where is their price floor right now compared to their operating margins?
If the business is mostly actuarial risk, then dramatically lowering that risk by more accurately characterizing good and bad drivers would see premiums plummet.
If the business is mostly SG&A, then better assessing individual risk would be misapplied optimization and wouldn't affect premiums much at all.
(I do look forward to the next permutation, "well what if somebody lowers prices," so we can have a good round of explaining what a cartel is.)
Do you have good reason to think that car insurers have formed a cartel?
I get concerns about privacy & whether the market forces will actually work. But, pricing risk is also the fundamental business of insurance, so it seems very intuitive & logical for them to add additional parameters to quantify risk in their models. The better they can quantify the risk, the more competitive their rates can be, and the more successful they are as a business.
Corporations will never, ever be in the business of making less money.
“You’re 3 seconds away from a collision with 99.9% likelihood. Your insurance is now terminated”.
# of claims filed
% of claims initially denied
% of claims denied eventually settled
Breakdown of claims by jurisdiction/claims adjuster
Total $ collected in premiums and total $ paid out in claims
Most importantly the insurer should have to make the insured data profile available to the insured
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander
But there is no way I would opt in for even MORE surveillance. I won't even let my wife install the google or amazon home automation devices. I hate what the internet has become.
I get that some risks are fairly constant (e.g. theft), but premiums could be better correlated to actual risk.
Which is more then enough because most of the insurance pricing is determined by sales and administration costs and not by price of risk itself.
Similarly, the cost savings from increasing my deductible just isn’t there. Going from $1000 to $2000 should be more savings than a handful of dollars per year, since that will save insureco on just about every single claim.
There’s no way they’re charging me $100+/month if my risk of a claim is 2-3% per year.
But insurers' models are complicated. One factor to consider here is that the population with $1000 deductibles isn't the same as the population with $2000 deductibles. For example, some of the latter group have a higher deductible because they're financially stable enough to afford a $2000 emergency expense, but others have it because they're financially unstable enough to need the cheapest coverage they can get. There's a strong negative correlation between an individual's financial stability and their risk to an insurer, so in net, it wouldn't surprise me if the latter group is riskier on average.
Also, even if raising your deductible reduces your expected claim costs by more than a handful of dollars per year, insurers in most of the US aren't required to pass that savings on to you - they can price coverage based on your willingness to pay (see [0] and [1]). On the bright side, auto insurance is arguably about the closest thing there is to a perfectly competitive market in the US - your insurer has lots of competitors, and if they're overcharging you relative to your risk, it's easy to find a better deal elsewhere.
[0] https://www.naic.org/cipr_topics/topic_price_optimization.ht...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2015/05/08/403598235/being-a-loyal-auto-...
Our government policy (Ontario Canada) is to ask insurers how to reduce premiums, then the government lets them reduce/cap benefits and premiums go up anyway.
It’s one of the many markets we would open to more competition. A lot of US insurers would salivate at our rates.
Use your tracking token (safeway club card = phone number) or your groceries will cost significantly more.
The world would be a much different place if corporate was held personally responsible for their actions the same way labor is.
Redistributing wealth to ensure fairness is hard, but at least when we use privacy as the currency we all start with some, almost equal, amounts. The downside is that realistically this approach only works when everyone participates - I don’t think hybrid “pay or we track you” would work out to be efficient at large scales.
You should be able to!
Sure, everyone should have the presumption of innocence, but these things aren't just happening out of mean-spiritedness.
For example, modern POS stations often run several cameras: one pointed at the cash drawer, one pointed at the customer, one or more pointed at the employee, all synced to journals or screen streams.
Basically, the only workers who are allowed total privacy anymore are white-collar middle managers. We don’t trust low-level workers and feel the need to keep tabs on them, while executives have been expected to carefully cultivate a squeaky-clean public image for the last 30-ish years.
But it basically comes down to “how much of my privacy to I have to trade for a paycheck?” The answer varies based on income level...
Food stamps is giving someone something. A deduction of any kind is taking less from someone.
These days people, whether they realize it or not, act as if the government has a natural right to everything you produce. And anytime the government takes less it’s welfare.
If the government takes 50% but offers a rebate or a deduction to reduce the rake to 30% people are acting as if you should grateful! As if that were a handout!
Suffice to say I disagree with this type of thinking.
What makes it "welfare" is that it benefits poor people, not that the money comes from the government. What makes welfare "bad" is that it benefits poor people, not the middle class or the rich.
You can use WiFi for free. Why should that be frowned upon? It's your choice. We do not live in a nanny state. What should be clear is what kind of transaction you're in. What kind of data is collected. The deal should be transparent.
You can't say that this data is valuable on one hand but forbid people to trade it on the other hand. Definitely not just with an argument based on autonomy.
The privacy thing is a symptom to the massive marketing budgets companies have available to them today. We're covering up the cost of living by redirecting them via advertising agencies who then get to direct the money however they want. I say, block ads. Steal from advertising companies, falsify data as much as possible. This is not the way people should be being paid. While this is a viable mechanism of subsiding the cost of living, no change will occur.