Surveillance via Auto Insurance

How do I surveille thee?* Let me count the ways...™

The problem:

There is a growing movement to surveil the drivers of cars — for insurance purposes. One idea is that vehicle insurance premiums should depend on verifiable, periodic measurements of how far a car has been driven... Another idea is that vehicles should collect data on the way that they are being driven (location, speed, acceleration and braking patterns, type of roads, time of day, smoothness of steering, etc)... The problem with these proposals is that they are often accompanied by a technical proposal for a tracking device that sits in your car and transmits voluminous data over wireless or satellite links, so that insurance companies can decide how much to charge you.

The solution:

Briefly, EFF's view is that there is a perfectly good, ubiquitous and tamper-resistant device avaialable for measuring vehicle mileage: the odometer. It may be good policy to require fine-grained dependence of insurance premiums upon mileage — but if so, the data should be collected by examining odometers rather than 24/7 wireless or satellite surveillance... The best way to protect drivers' privacy, of course, is to not record any facts about where and when and how they are driving at all... If governments are persuaded that they should allow insurers or anybody else to use detailed information on location or other vehicle observations, they should mandate that these schemes not upload any information from vehicles except for the premium itself, and they should require that the privacy properties of any technology being proposed for vehicles be audited by the computer security community before it is deployed.

Related Posts:
Surveillance via Residues on Paper
Surveillance via Mobile Phones
Surveillance via Pizza Delivery
Surveillance via Abandoned DNA
Surveillance via Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems

* with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning

[image credit]