The real purpose of this app isn't the rating system, that's just the hook to get people to run this app and point the camera out their dashboards. The real purpose is to crowdsource collecting data about the drivers on the road in order to sell that data to interested parties.
It really sounds like a slapped on excuse for the next incarnation of the data collection biz. How would they generate revenue if not by selling the collected data to 3rd parties? Because imo that is the most straightforward option. Missing this bit entirely in the article is disingenuous and concerning.
I'm not too sure about opaque code rating drivers either, though people might be ok with it.
Meh, all the purposes are real. It's a win-win. Get warned of idiots, collect data that will be useful to insurers (and probably to self driving cars too, I can imagine Google cars giving detected hotheads a wide berth).
I can see one group of people having a legit beef with this though: car rental companies. One idiot behind the wheel, and their fleet car might as well go straight to scrap.
That's imagining this system in the most perfect light: shiny, new and not gamed.
The opportunities for misinformation and asymmetricality are huge. Don't like someone? Clone their license plate for a day and drive like an ass. How could you ever prove your innocence?
Loan your car to a friend and they could tarnish your reputation. It would make it inhibitive to share vehicles.
This is technology that drives us farther apart as people in favor of a few insurance companies making even more profit than they do already. Think critically.
It would also give police even more excuses to profile innocent people.
If you want people to drive more safely, then think up ways to get more people to drive more safely. Don't expand the surveillance mechanism to every moving vehicle.
Maybe there'll be an opportunity to drill down in the data. There's a huge wide spectrum of people who suck at driving (senile old people, oblivious soccer mom, boy-racer, etc) and I would be very surprised if they're all roughly equivalent.
I can imagine a lot of applications for these types of systems:
identifying undercover traffic police cars,
finding whether someone is following you,
identifying friend's cars (similar to FB's "Share your location")
People would love such systems (and I'm afraid our privacy is gone for good).
This debate happens on HN again and again, but still: what privacy are you talking about in public space? Nobody has a problem with one person with a dashcam — why suddenly connecting these dashcams to a network that shares information is a problem?
I wonder how well this will scale with time. I've certainly done things while driving that were reckless to varying degrees, I suspect most drivers have as well. How long until 50% of cars on the road have been tagged doing something reckless? Of course I can imagine a number of ways to handle this.
On a more broad note, I wonder how useful it really is to know that a specific vehicle acted recklessly sometime in the past. Seeing someone behaving poorly is good reason to avoid them on the roadway. However I also imagine a scenario where one driver did something to warrant an alert, and some time later every car on the roadway is trying to avoid that vehicle. Is there really any danger from that vehicle in the current situation?
What I would like to see is a map showing where the most incidents occur, and what type of incidents occur there. I assume most drivers genuinely set out intending to behave well, but do not for various reasons. Identifying locations where incidents happen would give civil engineers some valuable data about how their designs impact behavior, and would give police valuable information about where their presence would be useful.
I presume that the system would simply indicate the proportion of times that a vehicle is seen driving and performing a dodgy manoeuvre. If I'm seen on the roads 1,000 times and seen performing a dodgy lane change once (and I would like to apologise to the Mondeo driver on the A21 yesterday), that's the fact that should be recorded.
The thing is that there's not a 1:1 relationship between a "risky" maneuver and causing an accident. An example could be an F1 driver who takes curves at 20mph over the recommended speed in a sports car. Compare this mentally to a Prius driver who drives under the speed limit in the left lane. The Prius driver is "being safe" but causing a long line of tailgaters and people passing unsafely on the right, as well as agitating people and causing them to drive more aggressively. I doubt that the first few iterations of this system will take psychological effects on other drivers into account (if they ever consider that / have a profit motive to do so at all).
There is definitely a gradient of severity with "reckless" driving.
Have you ever driven full speed through a red light? Sat at a complete stop of a freeway in an attempt to merge in to traffic? Taken a U-turn on a freeway? There are things that don't cause an accident, but once a driver does, they should probably not be allowed behind the wheel for at least a year, some things possibly even a lifetime ban or some additional evaluation.
There is an interesting dichotomy because smart phone usage has really caused a big problem with distracted driving. Even Geico experienced an increase in claims last year, and I suspect this was why. When I watch traffic sometimes over 50% of drivers are looking at a phone screen rather than the road. At the same time, mobile sensors are enabling something which will end with roads being extremely safe and killing very small numbers of humans a year.
There is a lot of talk about privacy and freedom on the internet. Privacy and freedom on the road is dead in all dimensions. You won't be anonymous, you won't be able to take go somewhere when the police/authorities are looking for you, there may not even be private ownership of any vehicles in the US in 10-15 years.
Assuming that insurance is correctly priced, buying a policy in any form is negative expected value. The companies that write such policies would slowly bleed dry if that wasn't the case. However, that's irrelevant unless you have the bankroll to withstand tail risk. Given that most people don't, as a society, you pretty much have to make things like auto liability insurance compulsory.
If you're a "good driver," as defined by a lack of tickets and accidents, you get discounts. There's really no way to tell if you're _actually_ a "good driver" because "good driver" is a hidden variable, and the only observables from an insurance standpoint are tickets or accidents. I know horrible drivers who never have accidents and avoid tickets via luck or skill. Conversely, you can be a good driver who's unlucky enough to have multiple accidents in a short period of time. Outcomes = baseline truth + random noise.
Most corporate data grabs bad news, but I'm ok with it when it comes to pricing insurance (outside of health). If I run a business that has rock solid, well enforced policies in place to mitigate risk, I don't want the insurance company's priors over my company's sector driving the premium. I only want to pay for coverage on idiosyncratic risk - the risk that remains after addressing everything that I can. Same goes for driving habits. Things like health are almost entirely idiosyncratic risk (ergo, let's agree that doing this for health is a bad thing), but when that's not the case pricing policies using true states (the baseline) and not observables (baseline + noise) puts you as the policy buyer more in control, not less.
That said, I have major concerns over the implementation. A breach is all but inevitable, so there needs to be a means of updating models online, and rules against data retention. It's also bad news if flawed models or corner cases incorrectly price someone out of a policy and there's no sanity check. Unfortunately, that's not too different from the actuarial status quo.
> Assuming that insurance is correctly priced, buying a policy in any form is negative expected value
Actually it's quite rare for insurance companies to record an underwriting profit, I believe. Their profit generally comes from investing the pool of premiums. If you invested your premium instead of buying insurance however, then I suppose the expected return would have to be better.
Yes that's totally correct but they're factoring the entire reinsurance/reinvestment pipeline into how aggressively they can price the policy in the first place.
Most people on HN knew about expected value but they don't know too much about expected utility. I suggested reading about it and St. Petersburg paradox
> Nexar will face some ethical dilemmas. For example, should the app inform users when it spots a license plate that’s the subject of an Amber Alert?
Absolutely. I'm not one to normally fall victim to the mindless "think of the children", but Amber Alerts are rare and specific enough that they seem perfectly useful and legitimate usage of this tech. (I find most of the rest of the tech between useless and invasive, but flagging Amber Alert tags I'd support.)
Here's where I believe "think of the children" madness works in favor of people who think like I do. Law enforcement and the DoJ will be very reluctant to start issuing Amber Alerts for drug dealers, bank robbers, bail skippers, and the like. Even missing elderly get Silver Alerts (where they could have just as easily be lumped into Amber Alerts).
Amber Alerts for my area come to my cell phone and I can't recall getting more than one per year. Looking up stats for 2014, they ranged from 9-21 per month (nationwide). I'm pretty comfortable that surveillance over-reaches will be a long time coming to Amber Alerts (if ever).
This strikes me as one of those great and terrible ideas. It has a tremendous potential for good, but it is one opt-out checkbox (Share the data you collect with the police to help catch criminals!) away from convincing the surveilled to create their own big brother.
I'd expected autonomous vehicles to do it, but not that it would be a business targeted at drivers. Not clear what the end user benefit is. A system that recognizes unmarked police cars would have a market, but there would probably be objections to that.
As is typical today, it uploads all the data to a server and the service operator keeps all the rights to the data. Sigh.
Using it to pass around hard braking info is not useful, though. That's what radars are good for. They'll always see the car ahead, whether it's equipped or not. The widespread use of radar-controlled auto-braking is the next big thing in auto safety. BMW, Mercedes, etc. already have it, so it's a proven technology. Not car to car communications, which don't solve any non-advertising related problem.
There seems to be a disturbing trend of Israeli developers creating software that crosses some serious ethical lines. A few offhand: this, an iPhone backdoor exploit they're hiding and have provided to the us government, I believe the biggest license plate reader developer is Israeli.
Can anyone speak to this? Am I observing this on some kind of bias?
This is probably just confirmation bias on your part. That being said, based on the political situation in Israel and the security culture in that country, it isn't surprising that many tech companies there would be developing tools that perpetuate that status quo. As a contrast, you would probably never see an app like this coming out of a hackathon in Gaza.[0]
It's not just you. With a heritage of Soviet-era immigrants and an atmosphere of paranoia, the space of "technological solutions" in Israel looks different than it does in other cultures. If I had a moment (in a meeting atm), I'd go through and research some of the strides their scientists have been making in oppressive technology.
Also, Stephen Hawking himself has recently participated in a boycott of Israel: [1]
Why won't the app report every tiny detail on the driver it knows best... You? This seems like a sure fire way to invite yourself to higher insurance rates and a big presence in every law enforcement database that tracks peoples' movements.
There'd have to be a very big reward for me voluntarily becoming Big Brother, and especially for tattling on myself.
Readit News
I can see one group of people having a legit beef with this though: car rental companies. One idiot behind the wheel, and their fleet car might as well go straight to scrap.
The opportunities for misinformation and asymmetricality are huge. Don't like someone? Clone their license plate for a day and drive like an ass. How could you ever prove your innocence?
Loan your car to a friend and they could tarnish your reputation. It would make it inhibitive to share vehicles.
This is technology that drives us farther apart as people in favor of a few insurance companies making even more profit than they do already. Think critically.
It would also give police even more excuses to profile innocent people.
If you want people to drive more safely, then think up ways to get more people to drive more safely. Don't expand the surveillance mechanism to every moving vehicle.
Unless, of course, they pay this nice fee to have their fleet cars whitelisted in the app, call it "bad driver protection money"!
People would love such systems (and I'm afraid our privacy is gone for good).
On a more broad note, I wonder how useful it really is to know that a specific vehicle acted recklessly sometime in the past. Seeing someone behaving poorly is good reason to avoid them on the roadway. However I also imagine a scenario where one driver did something to warrant an alert, and some time later every car on the roadway is trying to avoid that vehicle. Is there really any danger from that vehicle in the current situation?
What I would like to see is a map showing where the most incidents occur, and what type of incidents occur there. I assume most drivers genuinely set out intending to behave well, but do not for various reasons. Identifying locations where incidents happen would give civil engineers some valuable data about how their designs impact behavior, and would give police valuable information about where their presence would be useful.
Have you ever driven full speed through a red light? Sat at a complete stop of a freeway in an attempt to merge in to traffic? Taken a U-turn on a freeway? There are things that don't cause an accident, but once a driver does, they should probably not be allowed behind the wheel for at least a year, some things possibly even a lifetime ban or some additional evaluation.
There is an interesting dichotomy because smart phone usage has really caused a big problem with distracted driving. Even Geico experienced an increase in claims last year, and I suspect this was why. When I watch traffic sometimes over 50% of drivers are looking at a phone screen rather than the road. At the same time, mobile sensors are enabling something which will end with roads being extremely safe and killing very small numbers of humans a year.
There is a lot of talk about privacy and freedom on the internet. Privacy and freedom on the road is dead in all dimensions. You won't be anonymous, you won't be able to take go somewhere when the police/authorities are looking for you, there may not even be private ownership of any vehicles in the US in 10-15 years.
What we should be interested in is the top one percent.
If you're a "good driver," as defined by a lack of tickets and accidents, you get discounts. There's really no way to tell if you're _actually_ a "good driver" because "good driver" is a hidden variable, and the only observables from an insurance standpoint are tickets or accidents. I know horrible drivers who never have accidents and avoid tickets via luck or skill. Conversely, you can be a good driver who's unlucky enough to have multiple accidents in a short period of time. Outcomes = baseline truth + random noise.
Most corporate data grabs bad news, but I'm ok with it when it comes to pricing insurance (outside of health). If I run a business that has rock solid, well enforced policies in place to mitigate risk, I don't want the insurance company's priors over my company's sector driving the premium. I only want to pay for coverage on idiosyncratic risk - the risk that remains after addressing everything that I can. Same goes for driving habits. Things like health are almost entirely idiosyncratic risk (ergo, let's agree that doing this for health is a bad thing), but when that's not the case pricing policies using true states (the baseline) and not observables (baseline + noise) puts you as the policy buyer more in control, not less.
That said, I have major concerns over the implementation. A breach is all but inevitable, so there needs to be a means of updating models online, and rules against data retention. It's also bad news if flawed models or corner cases incorrectly price someone out of a policy and there's no sanity check. Unfortunately, that's not too different from the actuarial status quo.
Actually it's quite rare for insurance companies to record an underwriting profit, I believe. Their profit generally comes from investing the pool of premiums. If you invested your premium instead of buying insurance however, then I suppose the expected return would have to be better.
This would only be true if the value of money was linear.
The value of money is not linear.
A 10% chance of a 1000$ loss can be far more harmful than a 100% chance of a 100$ loss, especially at low income.
Most people on HN knew about expected value but they don't know too much about expected utility. I suggested reading about it and St. Petersburg paradox
Absolutely. I'm not one to normally fall victim to the mindless "think of the children", but Amber Alerts are rare and specific enough that they seem perfectly useful and legitimate usage of this tech. (I find most of the rest of the tech between useless and invasive, but flagging Amber Alert tags I'd support.)
Amber Alerts for my area come to my cell phone and I can't recall getting more than one per year. Looking up stats for 2014, they ranged from 9-21 per month (nationwide). I'm pretty comfortable that surveillance over-reaches will be a long time coming to Amber Alerts (if ever).
http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=346
As is typical today, it uploads all the data to a server and the service operator keeps all the rights to the data. Sigh.
Using it to pass around hard braking info is not useful, though. That's what radars are good for. They'll always see the car ahead, whether it's equipped or not. The widespread use of radar-controlled auto-braking is the next big thing in auto safety. BMW, Mercedes, etc. already have it, so it's a proven technology. Not car to car communications, which don't solve any non-advertising related problem.
Can anyone speak to this? Am I observing this on some kind of bias?
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858963
Also, Stephen Hawking himself has recently participated in a boycott of Israel: [1]
[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/is-stephen-hawking-s-acade...
There'd have to be a very big reward for me voluntarily becoming Big Brother, and especially for tattling on myself.