Jokes on them, I hate cars, don’t have one, and would never take an Uber.
Meh. I have a cabin in the countryside 130 km away from my apartment and I can cycle the whole way, or take a coach with a foldable bike and pedal the 30 km left.
It’s actually in the region where I grew up so I have to get there frequently to see my family. It’s a hassle sometimes but it’s only because my government can’t adequately fund and maintain a decent transit network.
I also bike to national parks nearby, and sometimes haul my inflatable kayak with a bike trailer.
People overestimate distances and think the country side justifies a car but it’s usually just excuses. I did move in a big city eventually but I lived in small towns and cities for a decade before that. I still hated cars and didn’t have one.
For example, my mother lives on a rural road outside a village of less than 2000 people. And she works in the next town that is 7 km away. Meanwhile I live in a city and work in the same city but I have to bike 9 km to get to work.
So sometimes distances are shorter in smaller cities and towns but people still insist they need a car. People will give any excuse to use their car. It’s like cocain.
Also, here Uber is only available in major cities where it’s competing with public transit anyway. AFAIK you can’t take an Uber to a small town or a rural road.
EDIT: Also, most people DO live in a city anyway. And they still have excuses to use a car.
Today, some 56% of the world’s population – 4.4 billion inhabitants – live in cities.
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
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.
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.
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.
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. 🤦♂️
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
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?
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.
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.
I would throw that app on a burner phone and leave it plugged in 24-7 in a desk.
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.
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
OP this is gonna break your mind but you can “uninstall” apps
Yeah, but good luck filing a claim when you haven’t logged in for months.