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I've wanted to write a post complaining about Progressive's driving monitor program/device called 'Snapshot' for a while now. It's an incredible invasion of privacy in exchange for a few dollars off your car insurance bill.

The thinking behind it is almost perverse. It can't do anything to make you a better driver. It does reward you for following patterns that are consistent with good driving behavior. But do we need to allow insurance agents into our cars to be good drivers? The best reason to drive safely of course is prevention of injury to yourself or others, and to avoid the significant costs and inconvenience that come from being involved in accidents.

Without the data collected by this sort of device, insurance rates are determined largely by historical driving record. Get into fewer accidents then the average person, and stay out of avoidable accidents, and you'll pay less.

What do we accomplish by adding this new layer of monitoring? If you do get into an accident, this device will not lower your rates. If you do not meet the optimal driver profile then this kind of program will not significantly lower your rates.

The insurance companies own commercials can't seem to come up with a valid justification. I've seen 2 television spots for the device and service.

The first features a guy complaining that someone else, whom he considers to be an inferior driver, is getting the same low rate from another insurance provider they both share. Presumably both drivers have the same driving record. Are we really so petty that we'd give up our privacy to spite our neighbors? Wait... I don't think I want you to answer that.

The 2nd newer commercial adds nothing new, except to report that the service is proving to be popular - whether or not this is true is unsubstantiated. Again, I fail to see how popularity has anything to do with a decision which is ostensibly about saving money. It is a leap to imagine that the popularity implies that people are actually saving money with the device. That may be what Progressive would like you to infer, but Progressive is not explicitly making that claim.

Both commercials emphasize how easy it is to install the device. Of course not installing it is even easier.

Progressive isn't the only insurer offering this sort of program. State Farm has a similar program called 'Drive Safe and Save with In-Drive' that monitors:

• how much you drive
• when you drive
• braking
• turning
• acceleration
• speed

There is even a vehicle tracking (GPS) 'feature' that allows the insurer to monitor where you drive.

Though the providers explicitly state that the data from these devices is not now used to raise your rates, the potential is certainly there to use the data to raise rates and even deny coverage.

• Drive a lot and pay more
• Drive at the wrong time of the day (usually late at night) and pay more
• Brake heavily and pay more
• Turn in a way that suggests you aren't in control of the car and pay more
• Accelerate too quickly and pay more
• Drive faster than the speed limit and pay more

That's a lot of potential to pay more for a service that is presumably about paying less. It could certainly be argued that it makes sense to raise rates for people who engage in risky behavior, if only so that the rest of us don't need to absorb the costs. Insurance providers already do raise rates based on demographic information. So why not details of an individuals driving behavior? In the short term it probably because the insurance companies are trying to establish these programs. It's easier to do that with the promise of lower rates than the threat of higher ones. Asking users to voluntarily install a device that might result higher costs would be a tough sell. Of course long term insurers are in the business of making money, and so the greatest potential of these services for insurers is the prospect of raising rates for drivers who are likely to increase costs, or minimizing exposure to risk by denying coverage to such customers.

Progressive bases their decisions on a sample of activity taken over a period of at least 6 months. State Farm requires that you keep the device installed at all times.

So what's the big deal? Why am I bothering to write a post about this? If I don't like the service than I just shouldn't use it, right? Well because this is the sort of thing that starts out as a choice and eventually, after we become accustomed to it, becomes the norm, and perhaps even required.

If I haven't convinced you, then maybe this opt ed from USA Today. From the article:

But there are reasons to believe things will evolve in a more troubling way. Most drivers probably don't know it, but millions of cars are already being "monitored" by manufacturer-installed "event data recorders" that function somewhat the way black boxes in airliners do.

They typically record the last seconds before an accident, but they don't transmit data outside the car, and they're read only after an accident. What insurance companies want to do is more invasive, but financially seductive enough that it might be inevitable.

"It will be a 'choice,' but it will not be a choice," says Brian Sullivan, editor of Risk Information, which publishes newsletters for the insurance industry. Sullivan likens the monitoring devices to the club cards that give shoppers big discounts at grocery stores and drugstores in exchange for letting stores and marketers know exactly what products shoppers buy. Eventually, the cost of refusing to take the deal becomes so great that shoppers pay a significant penalty for retaining their privacy. So if you have a store's club card, the same logic might eventually persuade you to let the insurance company ride along as well.

Or insurers could demand installation of the devices.

So if I didn't convince you, does that have you concerned yet? For those of you who said no, I can show you where this is headed... Ever heard of Ginger.io? I hadn't either until this weeks issue of BusinessWeek. Ginger.io is a company that came from research at MIT that focused on monitoring cell phone usage patterns to determine 'when people are unwell'.

From the article titled 'The Nurse In Your Pocket':

In 2009, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave a dorm full of students smartphones and tracked where they went, who they called and texted, and at what times they communicated. The researchers found that the data pouring out of the phones could reliably tell when a student was ill: Those stricken with the flu moved around much less, and those who were depressed had fewer calls and interactions with others.

Are you alarmed yet?

...

Anmol Maden, the PhD student who led the study, concluded that the findings might be useful outside of the dorms. There are now more than 60 million smartphones in the U.S., and they're "incredibly powerful diaries of a person's life," he says ...

Are we OK with doctors and others pouring over 'diaries' of every thing we do on our smartphones -- especially as we continue to route more of our lives, everything from personal and professional communication to spending, through these devices?

Keep in mind that these will not be our personal doctors. At least not directly. Your doctor is busy enough without taking the time to compile, compare, sort through, and analyze 'the tens of thousands of data points coming out of a smartphone each month'. No, what we're talking about is the healthcare industry having access to this information. Imagine for example, an insurance company refusing to cover treatment because an analysis of your cell phone records shows that the disease you didn't know you had is most likely pre-existing condition. Or being denied care because your activities increased your chances of getting sick in the first place. The possible use cases uses abuses are endless.

More from the article:

When someone deviates from that pattern, Ginger.io can trigger a response .. alerting friends or doctors that they may need to intervene.

A 'need to intervene' when someone 'deviates from that [normal] pattern' of behavior? Yikes!

The company expects its monitoring algorithms to get better as phones and accessories evolve to collect more data. ... "There's just so much infomation on [smartphones], and there's so many new sensors," says Singh the potential ... "is only going to continue to grow."

The name for this sort of thing is 'population management'. According to ginger.io it is based on studies into 'objective quality of life' and 'behavioral segmentation'. All of that sounds umm… wonderful and not at all creepy.

Progress has never seemed quite so ominous as it does with the use of these increasingly pervasive, closed devices and software services that watch and us do things on our behalf without requiring that we are actively involved, or even understand what they are and how they are being used. We're not even the clearly the user of these things. We're something more like a variable in someone else's equation.

Take a moment to think about what we're giving up with services like this. It's the sort of thing that no one would dare push without making us complicit in the move. It's not that your rights can't be taken from you. They can. But it's so much easier to convince you to give them away without a struggle. We're shaping our future right now, with the choices we make every day. Choose wisely for all our sakes. Please. I would tell you to do it for your kids, but if we cared about kids then education wouldn't be the mess that it is. So do it… because I asked nicely.