Trading privacy for survival is another tax on the poor

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.

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.

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.

I look at Tesla's spy system as the sort of dystopian future we can expect.

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)

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.

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.)

Corporations will never, ever be in the business of making less money.

I get that some risks are fairly constant (e.g. theft), but premiums could be better correlated to actual risk.

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.

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)

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".

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.