Drivers Accept Monitoring Devices to Earn Discounts on Auto Insurance

Drivers Accept Monitoring Devices to Earn Discounts on Auto Insurance

September 30, 2012

Forbes - More and more drivers are inviting their insurance companies to ride along and monitor their driving.

The idea behind so-called “pay as you drive” or “usage-based” insurance is simple enough. As State Farm puts it: “Safer drivers should pay less for auto insurance.”

Nobody can argue with that in theory.

But privacy advocates worry that the new forms of insurance discounts – especially policies that employ GPS data — create the potential for corporations to monitor a lot more than just how many miles we drive, and how fast we do it, especially location.

For their part, the insurance companies promise not to misuse the data. Progressive Insurance, which has been advertising its “Snapshot” device for more than a year now, says its monitoring device doesn’t even use GPS technology and can’t capture location data.

Progressive says its device measures how often you brake hard, how many miles you drive each day and how often you drive between midnight and 4 a.m. It does not track whether you’re speeding or your location, the company said.

However, many competing programs using GPS data potentially could, even if the insurance companies promise not to use it.

“The best way to protect a consumer’s locational privacy is to not collect the data in the first place,” according to a statement from two California-based groups, PrivacyActivism and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Those groups point out that one of the biggest aims of pay-as-you-drive programs is simply to capture actual miles driven. Cars already have a device that does that, called an odometer, they said. In other words, insurance companies could find some other, less-invasive way to capture mileage, they said.

Therefore, the groups argue, it’s unfair to make drivers choose either to accept a monitoring device and get a discount, or refuse the device to protect their privacy, and miss out on the discount.