The Apps That Snitch On Your Driving Raise Your Insurance Rates

Apps like MyRadar, you know, looking for weather report. It’s the weather forecast, it’s not looking at police radar. It’s looking at weather forecast. Or a gas buddy. You know, it’s got your location and it’s supposed to help you save costs on gas. So you tell it, you know, this is a grade of gas, I’m looking, what are people reporting the prices are in various places around here. But anything that looks at your GPS stuff can also make judgments about how you’re driving. And are you going to speed limit in that particular spot? Because they can overlay the speed limit everywhere now.

How fast are you stopping? How fast are you starting? These features that are anytime that there’s any motion or GPS information from your phone, these apps are reporting it to an analytics company called Ariti. And this was founded by Allstate. We were laughing about this the other day. And my son said, yeah, just like a big brother, Allstate is there. Not like a good neighbor anymore. It’s a big brother. It’s your Stasi, it’s your neighbor reporting you to the Stasi. So Allstate, the insurance company in 2016 creates this other party, Ariti. And then they paid for the access from this data from, you know, like an app that looks at the weather or an app that tells you gas buddy, that tells you what the gas prices are.

They pay them for this data. You know, all these apps that are free, well, you are the product. And this is what they’re collecting about you. What is not made clear when people sign up for the features is that Ariti also analyzes how risky their driving is for insurance purposes. On GasBuddy, for instance, users can turn on a feature that rates the fuel efficiency of their drives. Oh, yeah, I’d like to know just how fuel efficient I’m being powered by Ariti it says when you log onto it. And then they agree to Ariti’s privacy statement, which is say you don’t have any privacy if you do this.

This agreement is a small gray font under a big red button labeled join the drive. The company then sells this access to the driving scores of tens of millions of people. Auto insurance companies can request a person’s individual driving score, which is delivered instantly, according to all states website. The scores look at driver’s performance behind the wheel, how often they break suddenly or speed or use their phones, according to Ariti. Yeah, even look at that. Of course, it doesn’t count if you’ve got these new displays and this isn’t just Tesla, which only has like an iPad at the center.

That’s their only instrumentation. I don’t have any other instruments there, but you know, I’ve found it to be the worst design possible to have to try to drive while using, and it’s not just the Tesla, but I’ve rented cars from GM and others and years past where there’s something there that you’ve got to try to do by pinching and dragging and getting your finger on it, as opposed to having some kind of a tactile knob or a button or something like that, that you can push. And so you’re trying to do this and looking down and away from the road.

That is really dangerous. And yet they don’t give people tickets for that. I find that to be far more distracting and dangerous than using a phone while I’m driving. And, but of course it’ll tell them if you’re using the phone as well. So they score all of this and then Ariti will, Ariti pays a gas buddy for this stuff and then Ariti sells it to other insurance companies. And then the insurance companies charge you. Not all insurers are using Ariti’s driving data. Most of them are, but a spokesperson for GEICO and for USAA said they collected driving behavior only from people who had downloaded a dedicated smartphone app to track how they drove.

So they’ve got apps for that. And I guess, you know, they, they bribe people. This is the way it’s going to operate. They’re going to say, well, your insurance rates got to go up. And, uh, but you know, you can get a discount if you give us all the information about your driving. And if you limit yourself to a certain amount of driving and that type of thing. So that basically will blackmail us with higher rates. But at the moment you have to, uh, you have to voluntarily sign up for that. They’re not doing it in a deceptive roundabout way, like all state and the rest of the insurance companies.

How does this work out? Well, last year, Rob Leather and a tech executive in Texas got a, an email from Toyota. Good news, Robert, you’ve been identified by Toyota insurance as a safe driver. He said, so what is all this about? Uh, he started investigating it and he found out after a month of phone calls, emails, and data privacy requests to Toyota and to this connected analytic services, which was there, uh, it turned out that, um, that was, um, just an insurance data broker. He got a report in January that detailed the previous six months driving of his SUV.

And he said it had a couple of different parts. How many times had his car’s safety systems been engaged and the number of times that he had braked and accelerated at a rate quote, that ensures view as harder than necessary for defensive driving. There was also a Microsoft Excel file with time stamped list of every offending event, the latitude and longitude for where they occurred. And in the speeding tab, there were more than 200 second by second entries for the handful of drives during which he had exceeded 85 miles per hour.

Cause I guess they realize that’s the maximum speed limit anywhere, but they could easily map the speed limit to the particular spot where he was. And in Atlanta speed cameras have issued 300,000 to $500,000 worth of bogus tickets. This is what’s going to be happening with all the surveillance stuff. We’re still, as I mentioned the other day, we’re still getting occasionally about once every couple of months. We get some garbage from Texas toll, even though we’re not there and been there for years. They’ll claim that we’re driving on some road or something and it’s new stuff.

It’s not, you didn’t pay this payback. No. And it’s such a hassle. You wind up spending an hour getting these people to remove this thing, but I’m not going to pay them the dollar. And if you don’t pay them to dollar 50 or whatever it is, then it starts snowballing rapidly. Innocent drivers in Atlanta and properly issued $75 tickets for speeding through a school zone. What they were doing was they would have a school zone where they during school hours, when it’s flashing, it’d be 25 miles an hour. Otherwise it’s 35 miles an hour, but it wasn’t looking at the time that people were driving through.

So if you drove through there, when school was not in session, when the, or when the, you know, it was not kids were not coming and going from school, when the yellow light was not flashing, the speed limit was 35, but they always treated it as if the speed limit was 25 and issued $75 tickets to people 4,500 speeding tickets since last November. They’re going to refund those. But again, once we turn all this stuff over to AI, there’s no end to it. And now, as we look at other, uh, this is the issue with artificial intelligence and all this stuff.

It’s going to be constant eyes on everything that you’re doing and making judgments about what you’re doing. Yeah. Who are they to say they’re not in the car? They’re just looking at these raw issues about how quickly, uh, you turned or, um, you know, put on the brakes and that type of stuff. Uh, they’re looking, issuing these speeding tickets without being, they’re not even paying attention to the time of day. The David Knight show is a critical thinking super spreader. If you’ve been exposed to logic by listening to the David Knight show, please do your part and try not to spread it.

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