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.
Jfc my heart goes out to everyone who is financially coerced into getting one of these policies. This is not okay. People who have a voice need to push back on this. Your own devices should never be used against you.
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!
Oh good, then I’m safe. My phone doesn’t connect to my car’s Bluetooth unless is configure it every drive.
iPhone eh?
I think that we are talking about insurance policies that make you install an app on your phone directly. The app publishes directly to the Internet.
Damn thing won’t even track steps when I’ve got a purse on.
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.
if you say so. you’re completely wrong, but whatever helps you sleep at night.
You have a proof ?
Yeah ur insurance rate sky rocketing
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.
He is correct that the forces are different. The equation for centripetal force is Fc = Mv2/R.
Radius is the distance from the focal point, and each seat will be different distances.
So he is technically correct that seat position could be calculated in perfect conditions with accurate measurements.
But none of the data that reaches this service will be remotely accurate or complete enough to make that determination. It will only have one passengers phone data, and even if it collected everyones phone data, phone sensors have a margin of error well above what the difference would be. GPS data is only even marginally accurate up to something like 6ft, and really not even then. Then cars have a lot of other factors like suspension and compression in seats, etc, that would absorb enough of the forces to muddy the data even if accurate sensors were everywhere.
Tl;dr; another cocky person that took a few physics courses but walked away with a poor understanding of real world applications talking out their ass.
nope.
I bet you think the inside and outside of a record turn at the same speed.
I actually don’t. Can you describe how sitting in a vehicle driving forward mimics the force of a record spinning in a circle?
if your cars don’t turn, how do they leave your driveway? 🤦♂️ jeezus you people are dense as heck.
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…
You would do that in a taxi?
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.
If the gyroscope moves while the car is in motion, they can be pretty sure that you’re not driving. Or you’re texting and driving, but if the car is going a certain speed and you’re texting, you’re going to have bigger problems very soon.
I’ll just put my phone in the trunk in the future.
What if my phone is sitting in the cup holder in the center console… What if I sit it on the passenger seat and it slides of on a turn and slams into the dash? Will they assume I’ve been in some horrible accident.
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. 🤦♂️
You should look in a mirror, because you’re the densest one here, you’re just not getting it
It’s possible with high precision sensors in a device meant for that purpose i.e. NOT your average phone
Its NOT possible with any sort of degree of accuracy with the commodity grade sensors available in most consumer available devices
The “app” that they “pinky promise” is accurate, isn’t. It can tell when you’re moving and coupled with GPS even what speed and that’s about it. Any promises about being able to determine where you are in the vehicle are a lie.
The sensors built-in to your phone are done so for the job of determining the position of the device relative to YOU the PERSON NOT relative to where YOU AND your phone ARE in the physical space i.e. is it in your pocket, are you trying to rotate to landscape, is it upside down. NOT where you and your phone together are in physical space i.e. what seat you’re in.
yes, with your average phone.
I’m sorry you failed highschool physics.
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.
My friend keeps her phone in a purse, which she puts on the floor of the passenger side whether she is driving or a passenger sitting shotgun. It’s always in the same place. When we take Ubers she usually sits in the middle so she can see, and puts the purse between her feet. Thus her phone is almost never on her person in the car.
I suspect this is true for a lot of people who use purses or other bags as every day carry. Or perhaps it’s actually in the passenger seat, lots of people use that for bags when driving solo.
So while it may be true for you that your phone is on you while a passenger, that’s a ton of people it isn’t true for at all, who would then be in the “bad data” camp.
right, but your friend doesn’t put their purse in back seat if they’re sitting in the front, or visa versa, right?
no person driving should have their phone on them when they’re driving, so it’s an easy spot to exclude. The rest is logic, sensors and probability.
Well now you are just moving the goalposts with that “does she put it in the back” nonsense.
Again, her purse is always in the same spot when she’s either driving or the passenger sitting shotgun. How are they going to sort out her data when it’s almost always in the same spot?
And the same for anyone else with that habit. Or who uses the passenger seat to hold their bag.
no moving of goalposts.
the topic is “driver or not”, nothing more.
there are four options to sit in, generally speaking.
you’re saying both people in the front have the same gyro data. That’s fine; my point is she’s not in the back - or if she is, such as in a taxi or uber (which is the original situation) - it’s detectable.
do you remember when phones started automatically remembering where you parked? they did that by knowing a) your speed changing b) the pedometer counting (among other things). My point is: this isn’t as impossible as you and others seem to claim. That’s it.
Why wouldn’t I have my phone on me while driving? Where else would it be?
in a phone holder attached to your windscreen or vent.
So if I throw my phone on the passenger seat whenever I’m not using my GPS, I must never be driving!
I’m not sure what you’re saying, but it sounds like the opposite of what I am, and what’s the opposite of what’s legal in most places.
It’s illegal to put my phone on the passenger seat??? Please, show me what law is be violated, because that sounds utterly ridiculous.
But the point I’m making is that you can’t make an assumption on who is driving based on where the phone physically is. I could be a passenger or my phone could be on the passenger seat or just sitting in the center console while I drive. I could be a passenger and my driving friend is using my phone for GPS on the dash.
There are way too many confounding variables to begin making guesses on driver based on phone sensor readings.
in some parts of the world, it is, yes. And they put up cameras to catch and fine people for it. Ridiculous or not. 🤷♂️
two different things: yes, you can make a plausible determination of a person’s position in a car based on sensors. yes, you can also not have enough data to make that determination.
It’s absolutely possible with things like usage and gyroscopic sensors. You want to say software could never figure it out, I’ll leave you to it. It’s high school level physics.
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
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and we know for a fact that most of these companies have dogshit IT security, doubtless at most of them the janitor can sign in with his corporate ID and access customer data without anyone noticing.
Why would you give gps access to your insurance company?
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.
Did they give you a fitbit?
I could imagine you get discounts on insurance.
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.
Laughs in a 2002 econohatchback
What’s a good resource for someone who wants to do this but doesn’t know much about car computer systems?
Automotive groups, forums, clubs that focus on your individual brand of vehicle, or better your specific vehicle.
Brands generally keep the same style or type of system across their range, so if it works for one car in the brand it is much more likely to work on another.
My Chevy volt, for example, has a separate controller from the engine controller, and I could just airgap(unplug) it.
Others you may have to remove the antenna, replacing with a dummy load to not permanently damage the circuits.
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.
They have those in the US too.
Such an obvious scam. “Do this thing that might lower your rates.”*
~in 99.99% of cases rates increased~
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.
Don’t do it. It’s a bait and switch. You’ll get the initial discount, then you brake hard one day because someone cuts you off… and next thing you know your rate goes up. Also if your take a turn too fast. If you speed. If you accelerate hard (RPMs go above normal range).
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.
Competition between insurance providers won’t help us here since
the insurance firms are a cartel anyway and the price variance is more a consequence of your region and your vehicle than your carrier.
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.
Hide it on a bus
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
Wouldn’t be surprised at all if they just randomly select a few customers every once in a while to raise their premiums.
Kind of sounds like a landline
You must have one crazy landline if it lets you install apps on it.
Reality is stranger than fiction https://www.communityphone.org/blogs/smart-landline-phone
Ha those are indeed some crazy landlines! That’s really funny.
Isn’t everyone’s phone also their refrigerator?
I got rid of mine because I kept mixing up the receiver and the ice dispenser
I think these companies enforce compliance by hiding behind the fact that insurance fraud is a felony most places.
They’d have to prove malice first
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.
I’m waiting for an app that feeds their app fake data on that burner phone.
Lmao you’re giving me ideas
Spoiler: That is absolutely going against your account.
Me, on the phone with my insurance company: “No, you don’t understand! It wasn’t me driving, we just have very similar telematics!”
The insurance company: “Beep boop! I am a computer! Talking to me automatically raises your insurance premium another 5%”
I don’t install insurance apps. I also usually run with gps test running showing me in the middle of a local lake.
Good luck state farm we are all rooting for you. /s
Car tech today spies on you. Manufacture of said car collects that data and then sells it to lexisnexis, who then sells that data to auto insurance companies. Which in turn analyze the data and determine to upcharge you for your driving.
They’ll never lower the rate, they’ll just keep raising it until you finally become a pirate and drive dirty.
Thanks Ford, for your American patriotism. Fker.
They’ll never lower the rate
This is only true if the insurance companies are colluding and are actively stopping anyone else entering the market.
If one companies rates are too high then customers will go elsewhere.
If you undercut your opponents too much then you are just leaving money on the table and are susceptible to being bought out
Oh for sure you’ll have to move to another insurance company to hopefully get a better rate. But your current insurance company, never ever lowers the rate unless you had tickets in the recent past and those tickets fell off your record. That’s the only time I’ve ever experience my rate lower and it was roughly $40 less per month.
Outside the US there is a no claims bonus /discount that lowers the rate if you drive without accident.
Yeah supposedly we in the U.S. have this… but it’s BS. Or maybe the option does exist but I was never given a discount with a clean driving record of 8 years.
The cost of entering the market is so high that it’s functionally impossible for any new carriers to enter the market without having major investor backing. The only way to make the cost reasonable for most people is to have a very large risk pool; you can’t get a large risk pool without having a lot of people signing up, which means already having the infrastructure in place to handle that kind of numbers.
If you insure, say, 1000 people, and 999 of them are incredibly safe drives, and one of them drives drunk and kills a busload of school children–costing the insurer a “mere” $1,000,000 because that was the limit of their liability–that means that every person in that risk pool needs to pay $1000 annually for that single accident, and that’s just to break completely even, without accounting for any of the overhead involved in running an insurance company.
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Of course it’s 2013. It’s always 2013.
I have believed for years that 2012 is the year that enshittification of everything truly began with windows 8, but 2013 seems to be where it started picking up the pace with everything else. (iOS 7 and YouTube with Google+ anyone?)
People thought the world was gonna end that year.
It didn’t, but everything did turn to shit.
OP this is gonna break your mind but you can “uninstall” apps
Sometimes. This assumes that the phone companies aren’t selling the data to insurance companies.
Yeah, but good luck filing a claim when you haven’t logged in for months.
There’s a number on your insurance card lol
Let me rephrase: “good luck having your accident claim accepted when they’ve been billing you for the zero miles you’ve allegedly been driving.”
Jokes on them, I hate cars, don’t have one, and would never take an Uber.
Found the guy who lives in a major city
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.
Hark at Simeon Stylites here
I prefer to be compared to Diogenes of Sinope, thank you.
How are your philosophy chops?
This should 100% be illegal.
Enough to tell if you’re the one driving lol
