[mindslight]

oof. That's certainly what the reps and suits are pushing, continual surveillance plus unaccountable black box "AI" for a "discount" instead of doing the work to make their models accurately price risk [0]. And I'm sure it'll be inescapable as surveillance culture marches ever on. Eventually the financial pain of opting out of surveillance will be untenable for most. But at this point in time, unequivocally, fuck that noise.

It also suffers from the same misguided metric problem inherent to all surveillance based behavior conditioning. Speed in curves and acceleration are more like evidence of someone driving actively rather than driving poorly - ie paying attention and not texting/phoning/spacing out/etc as if they're in some living room on wheels. But those things are easy to measure and scare the typical middling slushbox SUV driver, so here we are.

There's a point to be made for speed (kinetic energy), but I'd still say that someone driving the usual prevailing speed on the highway is being much safer than driving slow and being a moving hazard. In fact now that I'm thinking about it I'm left wondering if part of the reason for so many terrible drivers these days is this surveillance based insurance. Because I doubt the nanny watchers are knocking people for things like camping in the middle lanes of highways while going below the speed limit.

[0] I've got a second car that I had been leaving insured while meaning to get it back on the road some day, but even dropping the miles driven on that to near zero affected its rates very little. I ended up just giving in and dropping the coverage.