[DRIVE] Trading Privacy for a Discount? - Comments Page 1

This article is so good, may I post it to my FB page?

Since insurance companies are highly regulated under state and federal laws, perhaps a legal requirement that they not share personal driving data with anyone else is needed.

Looking at the results on my phone of St. Farms In-Drive I see that I turn corners too fast, accelerate too fast and brake too fast, which is totally wrong. I do however receive an A+ for Speed and Time of Day. I have tried making my turns and accelerations at a snail's pace and as I have always done, creep up to stops, but no changes were made to my scores. I'll give it one more month.

I consented to try this out with a new company I had just signed with. I faithfully let it keep track of both of my cars for three months. The estimates I got said I should get a discount of between 12-15% on my auto insurance.

I got a five dollar rebate in the mail! When my insurance came up again this year, the rate was 12.9% higher. My insurance agent said the company had raised rates across the board.

So much for a discount. I think it's a bait and switch marketing option. I'll never do it again and would never encourage anyone to try it... and I will be getting another insurance company.

Too bad you can't make the insurance companies guarantee to provide lifetime credit fraud monitoring if they're ever hacked. You know, like happened to Equifax.

Fuhgeddaboudit!

Remember, auto insurance companies share all information about you with other auto insurance companies.

This is in an effort to combat insurance fraud of course, but it was disturbing to discover what they know about me when I recently switched companies.

I think anyone who trusts insurance companies to control this data is dreaming. No thanks.

I tried one of these for a short time (not with my insurance company) and came to the conclusion that they were not intending to have many people come out ahead.
The two black marks that would have come against me were occasional accelerations that were too fast and too fast of stops.
It would beep when accelerating too fast so I knew when those were. I needed to get turn left onto a busy street on my way to work so you have to get up to traffic speed (40 mph) quickly.
They listed their braking limits so I looked up the timing for yellow light times. If you were to follow their deceleration rate, you would need to run some red lights.

Every few years I shop for auto insurance. I just did that as my policy expired just 5 days ago.

When I was shopping I kept in the back of my mind thoughts of the discounts offered by some companies that use the data device. I live in a part of NJ where rates are high and I've been with GEICO for about 6 years now without a data collector.

I don't work for GEICO and don't represent them in any way, shape or manner but even factoring in the discounts offered by insurers that use a data device they couldn't beat GEICO's rates for me.

Even if they could beat GEICO's rate the discount would have to be substantial for me to get plugged in to yet another personal data collector.

I'm guessing if you have either a 800 + horsepower Dodge Challenger Hellcat or Demon and a lead foot, you're insurance rates will accelerate fast than the car. if you have one of these devices plugged into the car.

With all the hacking of electronic devices, these days, I wouldn't be surprised if some hacker cracked the coding of these devices and reprogrammed them to always show slow accelerations and soft braking and top speeds of just 55 MPH.

Seriously, it would be better if the insurance companies offered a true 10-15% discount for any driver that completed a safe-driver course that offered true accident avoidance training.

It's fairly obvious to me where this is going. In the not too distant future, anyone who does not sign up to this "data collection" will be considered to be hiding bad driving habits by the insurance industry, and slugged mercilessly. It's almost as immoral as health insurers pushing for DNA tests for all health cover.

I, like many others I suspect will add a little extra pressure to foot brake when reversing out of my driveway. This automatically adjusts the brakes. What will the device do with data? report you as almost hitting something every 10th time you pull out of your own home? Doing the right thing may cost you points.

We did this on our vehicles a couple of years ago. The website we could access showed a map of our travels and where we went too fast, braked too hard, etc. We received a 10% discount on our insurance, which we still have. One family member lived in another state and bought their own vehicle and decided to stay with the same insurance company. They told this family member that the device should work in the new vehicle -- until there were problems with the battery being drained overnight and the auto repair determining it was the device. Once the device was left off, no more battery problems! After contacting the insurance agent, the family member was told that they had discontinued the program in that state since the devices were causing too many problems! So no discount for the insurance on the new vehicle...

Blinded by the prospect of receiving a substantial discount, I made the mistake of letting an auto insurance company monitor my vehicles with their devices, for what they said would "probably be for 1-3 months". It ended up being 6 months and felt more like 6 years. You can bet I kept close tabs on the results their site showed for both my car and my mini van. The stats were amazingly skewed - to the point that you'd swear two different people were driving them, even though I was the only one.

Anything other than slow acceleration or deceleration, triggered one/two tones in the vehicles and added line-item events on my records. A quick-changing traffic light (ESPECIALLY with so many intersections now having cameras) causes everyone to brake hard to avoid receiving a ticket in the mail, so they're guaranteed a fair number of line-items from those. And I lost track of how many times drivers ahead of me slapped on their brakes unexpectedly due to false starts, bad judgement, lapses in attention, texting or talking on phones, nearly running over pedestrians or whatever, so... the company gets to rack up some more line-items for our inability to predict others' stupidity. (Apparently, ESP is expected, to qualify for their best discounts.)

I called the company several times over the months to challenge line-items shown, especially since I had to crawl through construction zones DAILY, with heavy equipment lunging in and out of traffic or workers appearing out-of-nowhere in front of us... The company always had someone with a soothing, not-to-worry voice assuring me that they were aware those kinds of things can happen and suggesting not following the car ahead so closely (what, in bumper-to-bumper traffic traveling less than 5 mph???)

In the end, I learned to be a much safer driver... driving at times when NO pedestrians or other cars were out-and-around doing ignorant stuff ahead of me or honking behind to get me to speed up; going miles out-of-my-way to reroute errands, avoiding all construction zones AND most importantly, staying away from all intersections with cameras, so I could blow-through quick-changing red-lights, not having to touch that dreaded brake pedal.

The tiny discount I ended up with for a half-year of unnecessary stress, was laughable and didn't come close to paying for all the extra gas and wasted time. Never again. E-V-E-R!

So right now they offer discounts of "UP TO...." and make this voluntary. I can guarantee that once they reach some threshold of acceptance, it will become mandatory and if you are a "bad" driver, your rates will go up quickly.

This monitoring system is out of touch with the reality of everyday driving. If you have to brake really hard to avoid a collision, is that counted against you? Absurd.

Just a gimmick to make drivers think they can substantially lower their rates. These companies are not on your side.

I used this and received a 20% discount, but I'm retired so my time of day driving probably helped. However, I was able to correlate their "hard braking" to yellow lights. It taught me to run yellow lights. !! I wrote them (Right-Track) and they gave a total BS response and said their algorithm was appropriate. My running of yellow lights reduced the "hard braking" issue.

I have done this with Liberty Mutual. First when I signed up and the next when my teens started to drive. Needed to get the best discount available. Everyone who agrees to use the monitor for 90 days automatically gets a 5% discount up to 35%. I got an 8% discount and my wife a 6%. Teens got 5% as expected. Other than the privacy issues discussed, I have found that it is nearly impossible to get more than an 8% discount unless you never drive after 12 midnight, never accelerate more 1-2 mph in a few seconds and never brake more than similar rate. What appears to be normal braking and acceleration without anything unusual happening, you get dinged for "hard " braking and "rapid acceleration".
Therefore, under the guise of discounts that are nearly impossible to obtain is the tracking part that as mentioned, is a real issue.

I don't think I would get very many discounts...