Insurers Know How Often American Drivers Touch Their Phones
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
"Zendrive now has its monitoring technology on 60 million phones, roughly one of every four U.S. drivers"
For example: How did this "monitoring technology" get on 60M phones? Do the owners know it's there? Is it hidden in other apps? Is there clear disclosure of its existence in those apps? What is done with this data? Who has access? Is it anonymized? Is it sold to third parties? Is it used for advertising or other non-safety-related purposes? How do they distinguish between drivers and passengers? What do they do about COPPA if it's on the phone of an under-13-year-old? Etc.
From Zendrive's FAQ page[1]:
> How does it work?
> Zendrive measures driver safety using only phone sensors. Integrate the Zendrive SDK into your driver app, and we’ll measure your drivers’ Caution, Control, and Focus while on the road, as well as detect collisions. This is done by measuring a wide variety of safety factors, like speeding, hard brakes, sharp accelerations, phone use, swerving, length of time driving, time of day, and many many more.
> Who’s it for? How are people using this?
> We built Zendrive for any On Demand company with a growing fleet, to help them manage their growth. With in-depth analysis showing any particular driver’s safety, or fleet-wide safety, it gives fleet managers the tools they need to improve their fleet’s driving to ensure safety, reduce risk and liability, and increase savings.
> Since launch we’ve found additional types of companies getting value from Zendrive, from fleet management platform companies, to activity tracking companies and expense tracking companies who use the driving detection in the technology, to hardware companies looking for new safety features.
"Hardware companies"
Does that mean bundled by carriers and crappy Android phones? Lovely.
This was legit, too.
> The reason for all this data is that at least one in five U.S. auto insurance policies now offers a potential discount if the customer consents to a vehicle monitor.
But I would also like some kind of affirmation that the software isn't being backdoored onto everyone's phones.
1: https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/car-insurance/how-do-tho...
I wouldn't be surprised if it were silently bundled into a bunch of apps that have location access and run in the background. It gives insurers vaguely-useful data, but mostly exists to hoover up sweet, sweet location data.
EDIT: See below[1,2]. It's the extra-creepy version.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-ride-ha...
I'm curious how they know a person is definitely driving and not a passenger.
More expensive insurance is getting off easy. After getting caught two or three times people should lose their license over it, IMO. It's as dangerous as drunk driving.
That said, it is concerning how they're collecting this information.
If I'm driving down the road with a phone held to my ear, a giant soda in the other hand, and steering with my knees, and I happen to pass a police officer, I hope they'd be allowed to stop me. I shouldn't be able to hide behind "I was in my private car, you had no right to look in on me and observe my behavior there."
Some expectation of privacy probably applies to conversations inside the car. Also, there might be a different way to think about the entire record of behavior of where one drives. Neither of those would interfere with policing of the behavior you cite.
Driving is a privilege, not a right.
If they care about accuracy to put in the engineering investment, it could be right a very high percentage of the time.
You have no way to know the position of the car in relation.
You would need car sensors and per car interior data and even then it would likely confuse a driver holding a phone in their right hand and a passenger holding it in their left.
You talk about the phone keeping track of where the phone not only is but was historically in order to guess if you are driving and texting and I hear you want to design a broken system that is not even deterministically broken.
It also fails to account for people passing a phone around to someone else in the car.
I wouldn't be able to give my phone to a passenger because it would already have decided it is a a driver's phone.
Your users will only be able to use your phone if they can reverse engineer what their phone thinks they are doing.
Anyone who does not charge their phone will see car travel destroy their battery life.
One can trivially avoid such a feature by disabling GPS but most people won't have to worry about it because they just won't pay hundreds of dollars more for a phone that randomly doesn't work even in the passenger seat because it's incorrectly second guessing you.
1. This is literally almost everyone on the road (that should frighten you more than insurance companies having this data)
2. Insurance is a highly regulated industry. Each state has a department of insurance that regulates how insurers apply rate and underwriting.
3. There are many voluntary opt-in programs out there that reward good behavior and marginally penalize bad behavior. Those programs focus on a few behaviors, none of which are distraction at the moment and they are all opt-in.
Full disclosure - I work at a large insurance company and am also an EFF donor. This is near and dear.
People are not perfectly spherical insurance customers operating in a vacuum.
In light of that, what non-adversely uses does this data have with respect to the people whom are the target of this data collection?
There are a number of insurance companies literally trying to help adjust behavior in order to save lives of those distracted and the innocent bystanders and other drivers on the road.
E.g., "OK Google, Call Home".
nothing.
Why? Because it is telling you, usually with a silent on-screen notification that you need to unlock your phone.
I have found that trying several times including swearing seems to unlock it.
But this is still creating a distraction while driving.
Very poorly thought out.
You don't even need general purpose speech recognition to call someone on your mobile, just enough to recognize a trigger sound and the name of the person you want to call. This is how I could use voice recognition on my Nokia N73 to call anyone in my address book.
Strangely enough in command line interfaces this works perfectly, so maybe we need just a more speech friendly way to call commands?
And why you’d need the cloud is beyond me. A speech assistent that fails once you don’t have a internet connection is not only annoying, in some cases it could become outright dangerous.
Instead we have companies shuffling data back to their servers attempting (and usually failing in my experience) to handle arbitrary commands mostly for the company's benefit
The reason everything currently runs "in the cloud" is very simple; it binds you to the vendor and prevents anyone from reverse-engineering the software in any sort of usable form. It's essentially DRM gone wild.
Google Assistant DID figure out which case should lead to which actions. It knew that it was supposed to call home.
Instead of performing the action, it refused to perform the action and demanded that I use my hands to unlock the phone in precisely the situation where doing so was both illegal and dangerous.
You're right about the spurious cloud connection requirement. There is no way that we need to make a cloud connection for this or many other functions, yet it seems to be the default architecture for almost everyone these days. Just because you can does not mean you should.
First, it is fully recognizing my speech.
It is then refusing to do the action because they decided that I need to unlock my phone, PRECISELY in the situation where I CANNOT use my hands to perform that action.
Also, I last summer had an opportunity/need to use an obsolete DragonDictate from circa 2009. This old software was FAR better at recognition and well-thought-out command flow than any of Microsoft's or Googles current offerings. Yes. it is hard, but doing better than a decade behind is not hard.
So, both your general premise and your specific characterization are wrong
Insurance may be "highly regulated" but regulation on what data can be collected is underdeveloped.
It's the Insurance Industry - of course they'll use it against their customers!
And it means you can't share your location with other people so they can track your progress. I do this on long trips so the people I'm driving to can see where I am without having to contact/disturb me.
The data can be queued locally, then uploaded when connectivity is available.
E.g., how does the thing know if you're driving or simply a passenger (especially on mass transit, like a bus)? And even if you are the driver, checking your phone at a light is probably not especially unsafe (though it could be rude or illegal). Finally, audio output app use like Maps or Spotify that doesn't require input is probably acceptable. So without knowing more about the methodology, the conclusions of the article don't logically follow.
When I went to their website, I was soon greeted with a chatbot that asked":
"Welcome $myCompanyName! What brought you here to check us out?"
I've never visited them before. I'm at an office that shares an internet facing IP address with another company (I might go ask one of them to visit the site, to see if they've just linked that IP address to the company I work for, or if they're even creepier than that...)
Sneaking a look in dev tools is interesting...
https://js.driftt.com/embeds/1556584410000/w8e7my5ng92y.json
Looks like they're specifically targeting 18 companies with tailored messages and CTAs.
I'm really interested in who is selling it; I've been puzzling over this for a while. Lots of companies have high accuracy employer to IP address data like that -- think GSuite, Office 365, etc -- but who on earth has an incentive to sell it? In the case of GSuite, google keeps data like that for itself. For Office365, the value of the data pales next to the $100/year/user they charge.
One guess is maybe the Adobe suite? Still, I kind of think this would be too sleazy for them.
There's a call to: https://customer.api.drift.com/targeting/enrichment/clearbit
That returns a json payload with a big hash of "conditions" with encoded-looking keys...
(And "too sleazy for _Adobe_"? That's something I thought I'd never hear...)
https://gethelp.drift.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019504314-Cle...
Let me walk back that "too sleazy for Adobe" -- too sleazy for my guess for the $ on offer. The money probably is not large; maybe low to mid 6 figures tops. That type of money probably can't even get you a callback from a BD person at Adobe; they don't get out of bed for under a million dollars.
I'm surprised at Clearbit's accuracy. It knows my (very small) business which is really impressive to me
That is discounting the obvious possibility of looking at ARIN allocations, where in some cases the IP address might be registered to an ASN belonging to the company. In that case it’s a simple lookup.
Perhaps tracking via frequent flyer signins? That would do a good job of getting business users.
This is an important problem, but ham fisted solutions which invade privacy are not the answer. We need better regulation of this stuff.
I never really touch the phone at speed unless but stopped or slowly moving forward at 5kph? I’ll change music or check google maps for a better route ️
So yeah, using your phone on the highway, in really any situation unless its park-and-sleep traffic, is kind of a dick move.
I'm perfectly content for a phone to detect via GPS/IMU that it's in a moving vehicle and send up a big angry prompt like "Please confirm that you are a passenger and not driving this vehicle. Phone interactions are being logged and will be available to law enforcement if a collision occurs."
I say this as a bike commuter who sees phones being used at stoplights every day, and as a parent of kids who walk to school. But also has a driver who occasionally fiddles with Google Maps on the road and could use the reminder myself.
(I also think we need change-lanes-to-pass bills, better bike infrastructure, more regulation on car infotainment systems, and GOOD approaches to punishing and preventing distracted driving).
"Please confirm that you are a passenger and not driving this vehicle. Phone interactions are being logged and will be available to law enforcement if a collision occurs."
Clicking OK on that dialog box sounds like informed consent to me.
I'm not against using technology to improve public safety, but I'm against half-assed ideas which would never hold up under reasonable peer or institutional review without a lot more careful consideration of safety and privacy.
maybe I'm just one of those freedom-addled american cowboys, but I don't ever want to get a message like that from a device I own. save that for the computers at work or jail.
Why is this a problem? I don't mess with my phone while I'm driving, but if I'm sitting at a light for a minute or two, I'll take a peek if, say, a text message came in while I was moving, just to make sure it isn't something important from my wife or daughter.
that said, people expect to go when the light turns green. violating people's expectations as always at least a little dangerous on the road. they should know better, but they don't.
But generally there is a progression to events which follows what one would expect when walking:
1- Polite "excuse me mis/sir/mam" - tap on the honk 2- Louder "EXCuse ME mis/sir/mam" - double tap/one a little louder 3- Very loud "EXCUSE ME PLEASE?" - loud honk
Inevitably, a significant percentage of the time I see this, the person that is being inconsiderate and blocking traffic/a doorway will be annoyed at the person trying to move around. I wonder if there is a study as to the percentage of the population that has this type of reaction.
Honking at a distracted driver is both legal and appropriate.
And that's assuming the entire pack of cars doesn't just catch back up to the one in front of you, where you had to wait anyway, dropping the actual time loss back to about zero.
Minutes? 3 seconds? Whatever. No one has a right to other people's time. I can't help but feel that anything else is a sense of entitlement over other peoples time.
That's not to say someone should blare their horn after 3 seconds, but definitively a tap or two... and if that doesn't work, then get progressively louder.
And when I say "about zero" I mean that it can in fact be exactly zero.
That is why there is an expectation of you paying attention. Including during a red light. That means not using your phone.
I can assure you, if you are using your phone at a red light, it takes more than 0.01 seconds to notice the change in light, put the phone down, look at the street in front of you to make sure there isn't anything new since the last time you looked and go. In fact, if it took you the 0.01 seconds you say, it would literally be impossible for someone to honk you in time before you take off. The amount of time quoted is mind mindbogglingly small.
I don't get honked at. When I'm at a red light, I'm paying attention. If I need to use my phone, I pull over. Therefore, when a light changes I generally move along as quick as possible. If for some reason something falls in my car, I'm having a conversation with someone next to me or I get distracted (happens once or twice a year) and someone honks, I defer to them, since I know I'm in the wrong by not being on the ball.
I defer because I have no entitlement over the time of the person behind me. I'm not making up excuses saying how little time it is. I understand it's wrong of me to impose on them unnecessarily. Using your phone while driving is not necessary. It's all very logical. Basically:
My pleasure < Their Right to not have people impose on their time.
I always find it strange when an issue isn't addressed but instead denied by making it seem small (generally with gross underestimations). I remember a coworker once got fired for stealing a box of pens. When caught he claimed "I didn't steal, it was just a box of pens! It's basically worth nothing." - I think the boss actually fired him for giving that argument instead of owning the issue.
* Exceptions could be made for checking the traffic in GPS or some other activity that aids driving (knowing you need to change lanes with advance notice is important). Checking messages emails isn't one such activity, though I've seen a lot of friends and colleges do it much to my chagrin.
That's not what I was doing at all. I was calling your standard impossibly high, using an intentionally minuscule number to show that every driver violates the idea that "any amount of time[...]isn't cool"
And obviously if you waste so much time you get honked at you've done something wrong. So far I've avoided being honked at for that reason.
But there are ways to use a phone that don't waste time! If you keep the cross light in view and put the phone down when it turns yellow, that's plenty of time to focus on the road situation.
Except... you are arguing against a cartoon of what I said. You even intentionally edited it out to make it seem like I am being unreasonable. I'll post your quote with the missing part included: "amount of time needlessly"
Needlessly. An important part of what I said. If you aren't wasting peoples time needlessly, you are within my standard. Therefore, my standard isn't unrealist.
Let's be clear about the chain of events:
mikepurvis complains about cell phone use during red lights. tasty_freeze posts saying: why is this an issue
rconti tries to take a middle ground by saying 'he does the phone checking at a red light to, but he is highly consious of other people and he notices that many who check it during a red light aren't as concious and implores other people to be so. He explains the chain effect of how a few seconds of your delay can cause several minutes of delay to other people.
Dylan16807, you, post how this knock on effect would only happen if there were 'more than a hundred people stopped directly behind' (as if that is impossible) Furthermore you state: "And that's assuming the entire pack of cars doesn't just catch back up to the one in front of you, where you had to wait anyway, dropping the actual time loss back to about zero"
Which sounds a hell of a lot like denial through minimizing. So I post saying: "even if it is 'about zero'... any amount of time needlessly taken from other humans against their consent isn't cool right?"
It seems like a statement you seem to agree to but haven't stated as much.
Instead, you edited my words to try and prove the point that I have 'unrealistic expectations'.
To me, it sounds like you feel like arguing. Though I might be missing your point, so feel free to clarify what that point is and how it is relevant to the chain of communication as originally posted and recaped on this post.
At that point I was just calling out an exaggeration, which is not the same thing as denial. It might be possible in a very niche case, but "if you ever" portrays it as a typical result.
> So I post saying: "even if it is 'about zero'... any amount of time needlessly taken from other humans against their consent isn't cool right?"
You interpreted "about zero" in a different way than I meant it. You seemed to take it as a small amount in every case, when I meant that it could often actually be zero.
The difference is important, because you can make an argument that a small delay harms someone, but you can't make an argument that zero delay harms anyone.
> It seems like a statement you seem to agree to but haven't stated as much.
I agree that small delays can be harmful, but there's a threshold before I think we can assign blame.
> Instead, you edited my words to try and prove the point that I have 'unrealistic expectations'.
I'm sorry I omitted words. The omitted words don't change my argument. If you think they do, I think you're misunderstanding the argument.
"You do realize even if it is 'about zero'... any amount of time needlessly taken from other humans against their consent isn't cool right?"
Every time someone drives they waste some amount of others' time needlessly. Everyone, always.
When you said "any", were you using it in a non-literal sense? Or do you think other wastes of time are not "needless"?
If you answer "no" to both of those, then I think your standard is impossible, and you're holding phone-users to a higher standard than everyone else.
I'm really not trying to distort your view. If I'm still not understanding something, it's not on purpose, and I really welcome correction.
Please believe me. I did not have any intent to distort your statement when I removed those words. I did it to make it clearer what words I was focusing on. To me, "waste" implies "needlessly" in this context.
-
And then entirely separate from that, I assert that it's possible to use a phone while stopped without causing any delay, if done right.
Therefore this statement:
> every time someone drives they waste some amount of others' time needlessly
Is absolutely incorrect. Following good driving techniques means no needless wasted time happens when driving. By the very definition of the word needless. Anything that is within good driving techniques is needed. By the very definition of good driving techniques.
Since cell phone use to check messages (the point which you are answering to) is not needed to operate a motor vehicle, IF time is wasted on this (again, the point you are literally hitting reply to), any amount, it is a needless imposition on other people. As someone who can communicate effectively pointed out, this has a knock on effect. (again, the point you are replying to)
Using words by their actual meaning helps communication. Playing games and saying 'driving is not needed' is a silly ego defense that doesn't further the understanding of reality and the finding of truth. Especially because there are people who clearly need to drive. And the who point that was being made was 'when driving', not if driving is needed.
This is all very basic.
BTW, in the middle of the hair splitting defensive posting, you forgot to clarify what the point you were making when replying to rconti - because that is the topic we are supposed to be on.
> you forgot to clarify what the point you were making when replying to rconti - because that is the topic we are supposed to be on
"At that point I was just calling out an exaggeration, which is not the same thing as denial. It might be possible in a very niche case, but "if you ever" portrays it as a typical result."
I think that's about all I have to say so uh good luck in life!
What I routinely see, though, is folks with their heads solidly down and noses buried in their phone. Just in the past week I've seen two folks _watching video_ on their phones while I was bike commuting. This is terrifying.
And sure, not everyone peeking at their phones at full stops will also be looking while they're moving. But folks who look at their phones while moving will definitely be looking at full stops, too.
The same distinction should apply with phones. Browsing the news and playing games is not OK. The risk is unjustified because it is not necessary to operate the vehicle. Running a map program is justified. The alternative would be something awful, such as parking right on the freeway to look for directions.
Looking at your phone propped in front of you on a windshield or dash-mounted holder is fine. Looking down at your phone in the center cupholder while still driving is not fine, and I've had the unfortunate experience of almost being in accidents because the rideshare driver is doing something that dangerous.
I've become cautious about taking my foot off the brakes for the same reason. Even when it's safe for me to start rolling, I don't trust them to not hit their accelerator when they're on the phone and notice my vehicle moving away from them.
A peek is probably safe enough, but using a phone is not.
I am now similarly cautious about such "false starts" — I try not to start rolling until I think I'll be able to continue smoothly accelerating to normal speeds.
But in that case allowing the phone in the car at all is also on the same continuum. Wanna ban that?
https://oppositelock.kinja.com/ruminations-on-stoplights-and...
Because you have things to concentrate on while stopped at the lights. Has that pedestrian crossing the road made it across or are they about to step out in front of you? Did you notice the cyclist overtaking on the inside that is now in your blind spot? Is the intersection in front of you clear or are you about to cause gridlock?
Not killing people is far more important than whatever message your wife or daughter sent, if that was truly important I'm sure you've got time to pull over.
If you aren't willing to be attentive then you shouldn't be trusted to operate heavy machinery.
I truly believe anybody driving should at least once drive both a smaller vehicle (such as a motorcycle) and a large one (such as a truck) - to get different perspectives on what the road is like. It's the same road, so it's important to understand.
I have seen close calls by other bikers but they are either 1) riding their bike like they are in the suburbs (in other words, they might as well be deaf and blind), 2) clearly highly followed on Strava with vibrant tight neoprene and riding like its a closed course in the countryside, or 3) fixed gear prick skid stopping and aggressively weaving all over traffic with a Bluetooth speaker and calf tattoos. If you see any of these bikers, keep your distance.
Occasional gridlock for my commute (London) and it often is the hellscape I make it out to be because, uh, that's the hellscape I'm experiencing - pedestrians will step out without looking, even if you're ringing a bell; taxis will change lanes without warning; there's a large number of construction lorries with blind spots; and many drivers don't understand the concept of "leave room".
> but they are either [stereotypes]
Alas, I am none of those stereotypes (although I do ride a single gear, it's not fixed.)
Because when the light goes green zombie drivers looking at their phone move forward without checking that it is safe to do so.
You need to be aware of your surroundings ... including the (motor)bike who has just carefully manoeuvred his/her handlebar past your wing mirror, so you don't punt them into the ground. This is why we have laws, tests, licences!
The laws exist, but I have yet to see an effective enforcement mechanism.
Humans are good at noticing what other people are looking at, so it doesn't take more than a moment to figure out if someone's looking at something either than the road. From there, it's a relatively safe bet if they're not looking at the road, they're looking at this phone.
I see this all the time in a car, but maybe Ive trained myself to pay attention to this considering how many drivers use their phones while driving.
So track people when they are the passenger, or are on a train? I'm not sure that strikes the right balance.
This makes sense if you sort of assume all trips are by car by default, but in places with mass transit this is a useless nuisance for people who mostly take the bus or train.
Although I know this would hurt some really nice passengers who like to set up the driving directions for their partners.
Even if you knew I was the one driving, just looking to see that my phone was in use wouldn't be accurate.
If they can't tell whether you are the drive or the passenger, it seems like their data on distracted driving would be extremely tainted.
Knowing that you do or do not not fiddle with your phone on the road too much as a passenger or driver might be enough of a signal.
"we can tell with technology and science" ie. "magic".
If they can get the bluetooth id of the car you're paired with, maybe they could say "this is the common car driven".
And if they had location information, they might be able to match it offline to other data, like a license plate as you drove past a license plate reader.
and if they don't have any of that, maybe I should shut up because now they have ideas.
I would think the opposite. When I'm the passenger, I connect to Bluetooth so I can control the music and navigation. It makes no sense for the driver to do that.
The data and interpretations are pretty cool though. We came up with signatures for texting, talking (both phone to ear and holding in hand for speaker), and a few other common activities.
Not saying they are doing anything like this, just that it is possible.
More so, especially if you know the type of vehicle someone owns. Without knowing the type of vehicle, you would need data from both sides to differentiate between passenger and driver. But it should be trivial to detect the gradient (slope) of the sensor curve while the vehicle is turning either direction to determine whether a passenger is on the left or the right side. Doubly so with more than two dimensions of measurements available (vehicles normally sway a bit on one side or the other while turning one direction or the other). Simple physics that every suspension will follow... Your body will also sway a bit in three dimensions differently if the phone is on your person. Using these principles, you could also determine whether someone was siting in the front or the back, too. Knowing the type of vehicle, or given enough variance in measurements (more data points is better), it should be possible to infer the position of the sensor due to the gradient of the arc in the turning radius.
Just spit-balling here... lol
Obviously, it's inference though, it's not 100% accurate, and it doesn't have to be.
Although presumably that is correlated with not using phone at same time!
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-ride-ha...
"The company doesn't work directly with services such as Uber and Lyft, but a number of apps, such as Sherpashare (which is primarily used by ride-hailing drivers for services like Uber and Lyft), HopSkipDrive, eDriving and a variety of navigation apps use Zendrive's technology to monitor ride safety."
Hurray for malware. What other apps is this hiding in?
Will I be charged more for my insurance for selecting a podcast?
Why am I not charged more for changing the climate controls through a touchscreen UI that might require the same level of attention?
How do they have their surveillance tech on so many phones? Do people know that's what's going on?
I am the only person in my family I know that doesn't use my phone while driving. Something I don't think has been addressed here is that there is much less social pressure on people to not use phones while driving. Nobody would let someone drive a car if they knew they are drunk but many people allow others to use their phone while being the driver.
I find that appropriate.
The biggest US cities, like Chicago and NYC, have pretty great public transportation.
Then wait for about 40 years as the people in power continue to do things exactly as they had been done before, just because no one ever got fired for keeping the applecart upright. Then the US will go all in on public transportation and walkable urban centers.
If this trend of us collecting datapoints for every muscle twitch continues, we will not be needing a "right to not incriminate oneself" any more, our devices will be the ultimate provers of our guilt. We sign off our freedom for... what? 10 bucks a month savings in car insurance and "you're a Captain Picard!" in a facebook "which Trek character are you" dumbass quiz?
So the expert was doing something that has been demonstrated to be nearly as distracting.
I am very skeptical of this recent study. Yes, it’s good that drivers are looking forward instead of at their laps, but a good driver is looking all around and making risk calculations about people and cars not directly in front of them.
https://vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2019/02/020519-vtti-handsfree...
Societal pressure plus draconian penalties has put an end to omnipresent drunk driving. The same will work for distracted driving... but only if society decides to take action.
android auto is honestly kind of frustrating from a UX perspective but I'd argue the voice controlled music app is safer than fiddling with a radio/cd player and integrated google maps lets me know ahead of time when I'm about to hit a slowdown on the highway so I can be ready to hit the brakes earlier.
Toss in the studies showing that handsfree usage doesn’t lower the distraction factor and I’m wondering whether the answer is banning anything short of a full HUD and that only for navigation.
If it were up to me I’d ban touchscreens in the front row: voice or, better, buttons & knobs with distinct tactile feel, and the display has to be the same level as the instrument console and limited to navigation & basic info display. I think that’d avoid a lot of crashes but I imagine it’d get too much negative reaction until the toll of distracted driving is widely recognized, just as drunk driving took many years of awareness.
For phone calls specifically. I doubt podcasts do the same thing, or someone would have put out a study about how radios are as bad as drunk driving.
Thirty years from now, people will look back on this time and wonder what the hell we were thinking. (The answer, of course, is that we weren't, because we were too distracted by our phones to do so.)
The common thread is that people do not like being bored, but some boring things are required each day. We filled the idle time with newspapers, music, and now reading newspapers and listening to music on our phones. It's nothing new. I am not worried.
The underlying problem is that commute times are too long for people to remain attentive to the mind-numbingly boring task of driving. That is what we should focus on fixing.
Since this might be in Uber and Lyft apps, I wonder if disabling those apps till I need them will solve this issue.
However, in n-years time, when all insurance companies will start using this data openly and stupid politicians will pass laws to allow this, what will happen to all the privacy conscious people, will they even be able to buy insurance as reasonable rates?
If you want entertainment like music, audiobooks, or podcasts you can get a cheap, basic MP3 player and load it up before car trips and plug it into the aux input. Though, honestly, this might not be necessary as long as the phone is out of reach and alerts are off/on silent; so a phone with notifications disabled bluetooth streaming podcasts from the back seat should be fine.
The important thing is its entirely out of your reach and you don't hear the notifications.
Something funny but captivating like the dollop or a good book and I won’t even check it on transit
This perception of danger then allows for the conversation about real issues that need solutions (usually education) to bottom out and begin calls for the use of government violence to prevent people from doing what they want. Encouraging the use of force against people who haven't done any violence or fraud themselves is a very bad thing.
The circumstances have to justify it. Misuse of the word addiction helps that false justification.
Yes, and that meaning applies fully to smartphone apps for many people.
> By applying it to things that are just actually rewarding, as opposed to things that hijack the reward system via direct manipulation to skew responses to predicted reward
Again, this applies to apps as much as it does to cigarettes. In both cases, you do get a short-term sensation of reward followed by regret and negative long-term consequences.
How you you say this seriously? You are completely ignoring the direct biochemical effect of nicotine on the reward prediction system.
A computer application does NOT have this effect.
[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/smartphone-addiction-drug-6...
[2]: https://www.promisesbehavioralhealth.com/addiction/new-studi...
> It stimulates neurotransmitter receptors in the brain’s reward center with a huge surge of dopamine — an organic feel-good chemical, or neurotransmitter.
They're still repeating the same old wives tales about the dopaminergic systems being related to feeling good. This was known to be false even back in the 1970s. They encode for reward incentive salience, not actual feelings of pleasure. Given this the entire rest of the article can be disregarded.
But, that leaves the actual study cited. This seems to be a 1000 person study of self reports of behavior by college students through text. Self reports are not going to tell you anything but the biases of the people involved.
And at the very most, if we accept this study's conclusions at face value then all they're saying is that people have built up habits relating to phones. Dependence. This is the word you want to use. It is definitely not addiction.
What you are doing is the equivalent of saying that it's fine to play video games late because "people are addicted to it". Most people aren't. They simply have deep rooted bad habits. Playing Flappy Bird every time you commute isn't an addiction. Wanting to finish your level before logging off isn't either.
An addiction is when your mind is always focused on the addictive behavior. You have an urge than can never be fulfilled. It's a shifting goalpost because your tolerance increases as you spent more and more time attempting to satisfy the urges. It gets so bad it takes over your life, become more important than your career and family.
Actual gambling, gaming & internet addictions are life breaking. People die from it [1][2][3]. Entire families get broken from addiction. People lose careers over it.
Don't throw the word around haphazardly.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/19/world/taiwan-gamer-death/inde...
[2] https://www.jacksonville.com/news/crime/2011-02-01/story/jac...
Recall that the article that spawned this discussion is talking about people using their phone while driving and the subsequent 15% rise in car fatalities in the past year.
Where I live (Eastern Canada) they made it so that first offence is $600. Second offence double that. If the person is on a probationary licence then they lose it. Otherwise you lose 5 of your points in the demerits points system[1]. Repeat offenders lose their licence for up to a month.
They are investigating outright making it a criminal offence because the population consider the issue a serious one.
Not only are you not allowed to hold a phone you are also not allowed to have it in a cup holder. You can only use it if attached to the vehicle and for navigation or vehicle performance analytics features. They have cops driving in raised unmarked trucks and bus to spot drivers using phones.
We also saw at the same time an increase on government paid TV and radio ads educating about the issue.
Those measures made it so that according to surveys, "97% of adult Quebecers consider that distracted driving is a very serious or quite serious problem".
[1] Adults with full licenses have 15, young adult 12 and teens only 8. That means tha a teen who loses 5 points for having an active phone in the car will then lose their license for failing to obey a stop sign (-3 pts).
Neither does gambling or sex, but people can be addicted to those as well.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
> Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences. [...] The two properties that characterize all addictive stimuli are that they are reinforcing (i.e., they increase the likelihood that a person will seek repeated exposure to them) and intrinsically rewarding (i.e., they are perceived as being inherently positive, desirable, and pleasurable).
It is a psychological definition of addiction. It is all about compulsive behaviour of seeking for some stimuli and nothing about the hijacking of the reward system or use of government violence. What does it mean to hijack the reward system and how to demarcate it from "to be actually rewarding"? Is eating of high-carb food actually rewarding? You can get a lot of cheap calories this way.
When you learn a behavior and reinforce it long enough, any disruption to that has a nasty tendency to "break" people. Take solitary confinement, or soldiers-- trained to lose their sense of self during boot camp and adopt a career specialty, a team identity and a surrogate "family" over the course of years and then get everything taken away due to RIFs. it's not just PTSD that contributes to veteran suicides.
With phones, we have entire generations who learn to swipe before they even know how to wipe. Kids and teenagers are on-call 24/7, ready to respond to meaningless notifications and updates anytime anybody on Earth does anything. Even in cases where they're being bullied to the point of suicide, they'll check in regularly for another dose of abuse until the bitter end. Go to a restaurant and count how many "couples" are on their respective phones instead of interacting with each other.
Our behavior is being shaped in ways our primitive understanding of psychology has yet to adapt to. Nobody is in a hurry to put down their phones because they're so connected the rest of the time, the isolation that follows is its own form of withdrawal.
Doesn't make it an addiction, but when compulsivity drives your behavior, you're not that far removed from it either.
Disclaimer: it doesn't stop people
> You’ll also lose your licence if you passed your driving test in the last 2 years. [Your licence will be cancelled (revoked) if you get 6 or more points within 2 years of passing your test.]
> The law still applies to you if you’re: stopped at traffic lights[,] queuing in traffic[, or] supervising a learner driver
I don't really care how they're stopped, but they're a public menace.
And yeah, we need protected bike lanes.
You can make a road with a protected bike lane after all.
Think amsterdam.
Every time I see it, the driver is looking down at what I assume is a phone. They are so eager to get back to their phone they stop the car early.
A particular counterexample is the Idaho stop.[2]
[1]: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/10/was-californi...
Same in Oregon. I'm guessing it has something to do with intersections controlled by "yield" signs in California, which we don't see many of here.
not sure what the common nomenclature of what you described is though.
I'm so glad that this is legal at least somewhere. I hate sitting at a red for minutes with a full view of a clear intersection.
Maybe I do need the rules to protect myself from those people, but I wish people wouldn't get into this moral panic as though touching a cell phone is the equivalent of blacking out your windshield.
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Making phone-use irresistibly addictive is one such path, I think.
If a red light sensor sees more than a 2? 5? second gap between cars, it will immediately switch from green to red.
People using cell phones at the stop light regularly create such gaps.
The gaps mean everyone waita multiple light cycles.
Knowing you will wait multiple light cycles encourages you to use your cell phone while you wait.
What's worse is that many people in the comment section of this article seem to be surprised that they are being tracked by the tracking devices they choose to carry.
And lest anyone claim this is due to safety items like advanced airbags, that same article shows _pedestrian_ fatalities are also down.
Now this could be for a host of factors. But the article isn't anything other than a scare fest and a reminder that anyone from FB talking about potential privacy issues should be shamed into silence.
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