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Comment by akakakak | Hacker News Reader

My car insurance offers a small tracking device to estimate if you're a risky driver. It got GPS, acceleration sensors and Bluetooth to transmit the data over your smartphone.

I registered for the beta and like it a lot. I'm paying 30% less with no effort - just because I'm not driving as crazy as everyone else.

at least on paper, data protection is fine - is being processed by a separate company with a very restrictive privacy agreement, storing and handing over only a 1-10 integer for several driving skills (speeding, acceleration, hard breaking).

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I'm not sure I'd want my insurance company to give me a tracking device, but I wouldn't mind getting some feedback on my driving just for the sake of personal improvement and peace of mind.

Does the paper spell out what happens if they have a breach and your detailed data - including location - gets posted to the internet?

Does that mean it couldn't be used to decline you coverage in the event of an accident where the data showed that, for example, you were doing 33 in a 30?

Exactly, data of incidents never makes it to the insurance company in the first place. They only get like monthly stats of your general driving skills - just had a look in the contract, it's just a single percent value that they get.

Besides, the legal requirements for denying coverage in Germany are pretty high.

If you're crashing with 130 in a 30 zone, you won't need digital evidence.

Your car already records data like your speed prior to a crash if anyone cared enough to go retrieve it.

True, and I believe that accident investigators are very good at accurately deducing a vehicle's speed from the accident scene. My concern here is that as an organisation the insurance company is motivated to find ways to not pay you. Providing this information to them is giving them another thing to turn to, to refuse your claim.

Not all cars. My 2017 VW has a clear message in the manual that it does not have a data recorder.

Sounds like a "bad" thing for them to do, from our perspective. But what if this actually caused those drivers to drive below the speed limit. On some level, this just easily solved a problem that's been plaguing city governments for decades if not a whole century. They've tried fines, tickets, speed-cameras, traffic-stops, police presence on the roads, etc. An entire industry has spawned off to cater for all this "societal fluff" of trying to get people to not do things by metaphorically "spanking" them. And here we have a semi-reasonable solution to the problem that's cheap, self-enforcing, and all it requires is for us to have some level of trust for the tracking devices/data/company.

That seems pretty unobjectionable to me. It's generally good that insurance companies encourage people to behave in ways that result in fewer payouts. Car insurance companies encouraging people to drive in a safer manner, health insurance companies encouraging you to go to the gym, fire insurance companies encouraging sprinkler systems, etc.

Which company?

I did this with CosmosDirekt back when I still had a car. 40% cheaper than the usual contract. I was rated as the best 2% of the app users.

I had to drive 400km to get a score. Of course, I drove like my grandma was about to have a neck operation to get that score.

I've seen ads for it in the UK: https://www.moneysupermarket.com/car-insurance/how-does-blac...

It'd be cool (from a hacker point of view) to spoof the smartphone's GPS/accelerometer data: put a delay of, say 10 seconds. So you can accelerate like mad off the red light, but the blackbox app receives a spoofed acceleration curve which is gentler. I guess it's harder if you like going over the speed limit, e.g. you'd arrive to your destination after driving 90 mph, but the app still has to spoof you being 20 miles away doing 70mph (the highway limit in the UK).

HUK; a German company

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