Why Letting Your Insurance Company Monitor How You Drive Can Be a Good Thing 567
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Kim Gittleson reports at BBC that car insurance firms like Progressive are trying to convince consumers that letting them monitor their driving behavior is actually a good thing. They say that the future of car insurance is not just being able to monitor individual drivers to give them lower prices, but also to make them better drivers. 'Now that we can observe directly how people drive, we think this will change the way insurance works,' says Dave Pratt, who says that Progressive has more than a trillion seconds of driving data from 1.6 million customers. '18-year-old guys pay a lot for insurance, but some 18-year-olds are really safe drivers and they deserve a better deal.' Better big data technologies, like the telematic driving data collected by car companies (PDF) or even information gathered from social media profiles, can help augment that risk profile. 'If I'm a driver that doesn't drive that frequently, and I have a pattern that would indicate that I drive more carefully than an average person with my profile, then I may be able to save 30-40% on my car insurance, and that's pretty significant,' says Joe Reifel. For now, using big data analytics for insurers is still in the early stages. Only 2% of the U.S. car insurance market offers an insurance product based on monitoring driving, but that proportion is projected to grow to around 10-15% of the market by 2017. And other countries, like Italy and the U.K., are already using the data to analyze not just risk profiles but also to determine who is at fault in car accidents. The future, most analysts agree is create a continuous feedback loop between insurers and consumers, so that consumers will react to the big data analyses that insurers perform and change their behavior accordingly. 'Bad drivers will at some point need to improve their driving or accept [having] to pay for the real risk they represent,' says Jacques Amselem."
Re:Huh (Score:5, Funny)
Reminds me of a story. Many years ago (okay, about 20 years ago) I worked for a very small company that set up networks for point of sale systems; so small it was just my boss and me.
One evening we were heading back to town after being onsite since about 6am. Needless to say, we were both tired, so my boss was gunning it. Then comes the flashing lights. Cop stops us, and asks my boss "Do you know why I stopped you?" My boss replies "I suppose I was speeding." The cop nods. "Yes you were, sir. And did you happen to glance at your speedometer to see how much over the speed limit you were driving?" At that point, I caught a mischievous look in my boss's eye.
"God no!" my boss exclaimed. "Traveling that fast, I didn't dare look down at my dash!"
Fortunately the cop had a good sense of humor, we all had a laugh, and my boss got a ticket.
Re:if you have nothing to hide (Score:4, Funny)
This made me a worse driver. They had the data plotted online for you to monitor.
So I thought it would be fun to use my car to make patterns. I would get on a stretch of highway and then lower and raise my speed in intervals with my cruise control to make sawtooth patterns. So ever 5 seconds I'd bump it up 1 mph. Then down.