Your insurance company may be spying on your driving. Your car may be helping them do it. If it isn’t, they still have ways of getting into your phone, and it’s often not obvious they’ve done so.
“While you can see your credit score, you will have a harder time finding out what your driving score is. But auto insurance companies can get it — and that could affect the rate you pay,” The New York Times reports.
The report comes after Times reporters got General Motors to cancel a program tracking drivers’ behaviors behind the wheel. Other automakers and non-insurance-related phone apps are still capturing data on your driving and selling it to insurance companies.
Modern smartphones include accelerometers that can detect when and how a phone moves. Insurance companies have long sought to use phones to record how often drivers speed, brake, or accelerate hard.
They sometimes do so openly through apps that promise discounts for safe driving. However, privacy-conscious consumers have proven reluctant to sign up for those programs. “So the industry has taken a different tack, getting data about how people drive from automakers or apps that drivers already have on their phones,” the Times explains.
GM Stopped the Practice Recently
This spring, the Times reported that General Motors was collecting telematics data, including information on sudden acceleration, hard braking, and speeding – on owners of its cars through a program meant to help them become more fuel-efficient drivers. GM sold the data to insurance companies through a third-party company, LexisNexis.
Some owners reported they’d never enrolled, only to find out later that dealerships had enrolled them without their knowledge.
Shortly after that report, GM promised to stop selling the data and shut down the program. The company hired the auto industry’s first chief privacy officer to reform its privacy practices.
But Other Automakers, Unrelated Apps Continue
“But data is still being collected from other automakers,” the Times reports.
Some apps that seem unrelated also collect and sell telematics data.
“One, Life360, is used by parents to keep track of their children. GasBuddy helps people save on fuel costs.” All collect data and sell it to insurance companies through a service called Arity, owned by insurer Allstate.
Allstate’s website boasts, “Insurers can access Arity’s behavior dataset to request a person’s individual driving score, which is delivered instantly.”
Users typically grant permission for this through the apps’ terms of service (TOS), which are long, often opaque legal documents few users read through in detail.
Some Drivers May Want This
Not every driver will object to the data collection.
“Alan Demers, founder of InsurTech Consulting, predicted that everyone would eventually have a driving score, and that good drivers — which most people think they are — might well prefer it,” the Times notes.
Michael DeLong of the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America told the Times, “There’s a lot of unfair discrimination in auto insurance. Auto insurance companies use a lot of socioeconomic factors, like your credit score or your job or your education level, like whether you went to high school or to college or whether you’re married.”
Many might prefer to be judged on their actual driving habits.
But Driver Privacy a Growing Concern
However, few who signed up for gas price tracker GasBuddy likely knew the apps were tracking their driving and selling the data.
Driver privacy is a growing issue for car shoppers.
In an analysis last year, privacy researchers from a prominent tech watchdog group found “cars the official worst category of products for privacy ever reviewed.”
Researchers found that many automakers reserved the right to collect and sell data from cars and even the phones that connect to them. Owners often consented to the practices in paperwork signed as part of a car sale, though Subaru’s policy even specifies that passengers consent to data collection just by entering a car.
Nissan’s privacy notice, the group said, says the company “can collect and share your sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic information and other sensitive personal information for targeted marketing purposes. We absolutely aren’t making that up.”
