The motion sensors in your phone are able to pull enough information to determine, with high accuracy, whether or not you’re the one behind the wheel.
(X) Doubt
Don’t worry. The next paragraph provided an email address where you can send reports of inaccuracies for them to review.
Yeah was about to say, my phone can’t even tell whether I’m walking or cycling or taking a bus, I have exactly 0 hope it could tell whether I’m driving or not other than not being connected to my car’s bluetooth which will be exactly what they are doing here of course!
Motion sensors don’t provide localization. Gps on cellphones are only really accurate to a few dozen meters.
You can couple gps and motion (and changes in gps location) to fudge it. Which is why when you diverge off the route navigation provides… it takes it a moment to figure it out. In the display, they “know” you’re on the road so it doesn’t have to be that accurate, they just guess what lane you’re in based on direction and such.
They’re certainly not going to know what seat you’re in.
doesn’t need to, nor does localisation matter for this topic.
it’s a matter of centrifugal forces on turns.
And how does the phone know if you just take left turns faster? How does it know if you’re in the left or right lane? It has no way of knowing what the forces are, or if that variation is caused by something else.
Your phone has no idea which side of the car it’s on, and insurance companies and their apps really don’t care.
How do centrifugal forces determine which seat you’re sitting in inside of a car? Everyone in the car is going to be experiencing the same forces.
I always place my phone in the center console anyways, there would be zero way to tell who is driving. Not that I’d ever install such an app…
I mean it wouldn’t really make a difference if the phone is in my pocket and I’m sitting still or if the phone is in the center console.
Second rule in the book of the road is driver controls the stereo. Now more cars you have to plug in or connect Bluetooth so it’s safe to assume that if you’re connected to a car stereo you’re the driver
Not sure if this is a joke. For years my phone was the only one paired with the Bluetooth on my wife’s car as I like to play music when I drive it but she couldn’t be bothered to mess with it and listens to the radio. That doesn’t mean that I am usually the driver in the car though as she usually drives it. It was paired for the few times she wasn’t in the car and I had to use it.
I love how there’s all these science and software experts who think this is impossible, when it is clearly very easily possible. It’s not a question of if it’s good (it isn’t) or if they should (they shouldn’t).
Hiding your heads in the sand and collectively saying they can’t - in a pro-privacy group - is insane. It’s like reading about how you can hack an air gapped computer and having a bunch of Amish say it’s impossible.
Maybe figure out how they are first, then talk about what to do about it. But this collective “nuh-uh!” is nuts.
Nobody said it’s impossible, its not possible with the consumer grade hardware in your phone and what an app will have access to. Sometimes it even has issues just figuring out if you’ve turned your phone to landscape or not
Also, nobody said they weren’t going to try, the claim that they can do it with any degree of accuracy is BS
“nobody said”… and then goes on to say it’s impossible 🤦♂️
jfc you people. 🤦♂️
doubt, but I’d believe it.
If we can tell if we are in the front or backseat due to how it feels when you go around corners and such, so can your phone.
driver side vs passenger would be the same deal.
of course, this is presuming the phone is on your person. Which, if you weren’t driving - it would be.
But this kind of thing is ripe for unintended consequences at best and flat out bad data at worst.
When I drive I put my phone in the center so I can see the map. If me and my passenger’s phones are in the center, who is marked as driving when I get into an accident?
From there, why stop at one phone? Let’s put several phones in the back seat, including mine. Hell, let’s have a burner phone that I use only for driving that has a throw away account. Or let’s go back to old fashioned maps and GPS devices while our phones are turned off. Meanwhile, at home, I’ve spun up a virtual device where it is very peacefully driving a route. Perfectly. Then I have another virtual device that is driving a different route on the other side of the world driving erratically.
These companies are forgetting that the data from phones are data from devices, not people. If you’re going to spy on me, I’m going to make you fucking earn it.
“when i drive i put my phone in the center”
that’s my point. Or a holder of some kind.
as opposed to passengers who basically never put their phones in the center console.
especially for a taxi or uber. That would be insane.
again: the question is: are you a driver or a passenger? And I’m saying that that distinction is very plausible to make.
if your sole goal is to make it harder to tell in an accident, sure. This is just sensor data, not clairvoyance.
I mean this is dystopian as hell, right?
Part of the payment for this insurance service is the policy holder’s privacy?
They’re having to preempt that people are going to be paranoid that they’re going to be flagged as some kind of ne’er-do-well
I always thought it was a huge concern to let the insurance company have gps access to my phone because it gives them exact times when I am away from my home.
Insurance companies’ more nefarious employees or employee’s friends have an exact playbook for when it’s safe to break into your home, how much money you have(based on how many and the types of cars you have policies on), how many people could be at home (insured on policy), credit rating… etc. It’s not data that you couldn’t get with a bit of research and time, but having a searchable database full of customer info makes it easy to list out hundreds of targets with little effort.
Insurance companies give people discounts based on driving habits good driving habits, like the lack of speeding and hard braking… which can be determined by gps. They also charge more for people that drive more miles per year because it exposes the vehicle to more possibilities of being involved in accidents.
It’s not unreasonable for them to ask for access to your gps data… it is definitely unreasonable for you to give them access to your gps data.
There was a piece on a fairly recent Smashing Security podcast that said that some car manufacturers are sending data to the insurance companies anyway.
https://www.smashingsecurity.com/363-stuck-streaming-sticks-tiktok-conspiracies-and-spying-cars/
Yup, this is why in my own vehicles I physically disconnect the system that sends these messages.
What’s a good resource for someone who wants to do this but doesn’t know much about car computer systems?
UK you have the concept of black box car insurance that offered a substantial discount for having either a dedicated device installed into the car or an app on your phone that tracks a bunch of stats as you drive. It’s as shit as it sounds as it marks you down for every little infringement such as driving at peak times because that’s more dangerous. Get enough points and you can have your policy cancelled. In the UK there are knock on effects for ever having an insurance policy cancelled and you have to legally declare you did when asked.
While you can uninstall the app good luck making a claim if you don’t have it installed with data for that journey. They’d also be pretty suss with no data over an extended period of a few months.
Worst part of these is that it’s expensive to switch to a non black box policy when you can afford to as you get older and more experienced.
It’s tempting to opt for telematics/black box insurance because of the initial cheaper prices but the privacy violations and potential downsides make it not worth it.
You can be the best defensive driver in the world but sometimes you’re just going to have to brake hard to avoid an object that may jump on you, dinging your driving score and raising your premiums.
Contrary to what this post’s image says, I’m reading online that these apps aren’t perfect at differentiating between who’s a driver and who’s a passenger.
Have fun fighting with your insurance to get them to remove anything from your record.
Last week a squirrel decided it didn’t want to live anymore and jumped into my way while I was driving. It was on an empty slow street at night so I was safely able brake hard to avoid killing the poor thing. If I had spyware insurance they would’ve dinged me for it.
I’ll preface this by saying this shady shit gets all my hate.
It’s tempting to opt for telematics/black box insurance because of the initial cheaper prices but the privacy violations and potential downsides make it not worth it.
The overall problem here is that human psychology tends to frame this difference as a loss not a gain. Given the choice, people will see the cheaper option as the baseline, and then ask “can I afford to pay more for privacy?” instead of affirming “my privacy is not worth this discount.”
Also, those of us that have paid for insurance without such a “discount”, are likely keenly aware of the difference. For new drivers, from now to here on out, the lack of past experience presents a new baseline where this awfulness is normalized. Competition between insurance providers won’t help us here since the “privacy free” option is still profitable and is enticing for new customers (read: younger, poorer). So it’ll take some kind of law, collective action, or government intervention to make this go away.
Have fun fighting with your insurance to get them to remove anything from your record. […] If I had spyware insurance they would’ve dinged me for it.
I think this is the bigger problem. If someone has the data an insurance company wants, you probably agreed to an EULA or signed something that makes their ownership, and its sale, legal. With the “yeah go ahead and use my data” option on the table, the machinery to do this without your knowledge is already in place. All the insurance provider has to do is buy the data from someone else. When the price is right, 1st party spyware isn’t required at all.
You can be the best defensive driver in the world but sometimes you’re just going to have to brake hard to avoid an object that may jump on you, dinging your driving score and raising your premiums.
If you’re the best driver in the world, you don’t need to carry insurance because the lifetime expected spending on premiums is below the lifetime insurance payments. The only reason you carry insurance is if you’re not sure whether you’re the best driver in the world.
Once your insurance knows (better than you) where you rank as a driver, they will either refuse to cover you (because costs > revenues) or raise your rates until you fall into a high risk of changing carriers (because that’s where they maximize profits). The initial discount is simply a teaser rate, while the company collects more data. The real determination of your max tolerable premium is your personal income, which is set by the value of your vehicle. All the telematics is hand-wavy bullshit. You really might be the best driver in the world, but they’ll still raise your rates if they think you’ll pay it.
The real secret to getting a lower insurance premium is to own a cheaper car (and therefore signal to your insurer that you have less money to spend on insurance).
It’s crazy how most of those programs work. The way my insurance handles it is way better. For example, no matter how bad you are at driving, they never raise the premiums above the normal rate, so it almost always makes sense to get the tracker from a finance perspective. (The only exception is that they will raise your rates if you drive farther in 6 months than you estimated on your initial application. The flip side is that they lower your rates if you don’t drive very much. I only drive about 1000 miles every 6 months, so my premium is really low.) They also have a Bluetooth device that stays in your car that your phone must be connected to in order for it to record trip data, and if you happen to be riding as the passenger in the car, the app has an option that allows you to clarify for each trip that you weren’t the driver. I was surprised to learn they aren’t all like that.
It’s a discount right up until something happens and they use that data against you.
Just like HR, insurance companies are not your friend.
Something has already happened and they didn’t touch my rates. I’ve been saving hundreds of dollars a year. I’ve saved well into the thousands of dollars at this point. I’m not saying the insurance companies are my friends and while I am better off using the tracker than not using it, that wasn’t even my point. My point was that the trackers all function differently and some are better than others.
I would throw that app on a burner phone and leave it plugged in 24-7 in a desk.
These apps are so bad they have recorded people “hard braking” when they are home watching TV (just check the Play store for any of them and read the reviews)… there is no way this isn’t ripe for abuse
Reality is stranger than fiction https://www.communityphone.org/blogs/smart-landline-phone
I think these companies enforce compliance by hiding behind the fact that insurance fraud is a felony most places.
Well most of the suggestions in this thread constitute malice.
I think it’d be pretty easy to argue that something is fishy when the phone that’s supposed to be tracking your driving wasn’t with you on the date of your accident and hasn’t moved since you started your policy.
Spoiler: That is absolutely going against your account.
