Mike Blake/Reuters
By Kashmir Hill | The New York Times
You know you have a credit score. Did you know that you might also have a driving score?
Driving scores are based on how often you slam on the brakes, speed, look at your phone or drive late at night — information that, likely without your knowing, can be collected by your car or by apps on your smartphone. That data is sold to brokers, who work with auto insurers.
These scores can help determine how much drivers pay for insurance. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: Experts say that basing premiums on how we actually drive — rather than on our credit scores and whether we’re married or went to college — could be a fairer system, and ultimately improve road safety.
But this tracking will only lead to safer driving if people know that it is happening.
How it happens
The smartphone apps collecting driver data might not be obvious at first glance. One, Life360, is popular with parents who want to keep track of their families. MyRadar offers weather forecasts. GasBuddy can help you find cheap fuel on a road trip.
But all of these apps also have opt-in driving analysis features that offer insights into things like safety and fuel usage. Those insights are provided by Arity, a data broker founded by Allstate.
Arity uses the data to create driving scores for tens of millions of people, and then markets the scores to auto insurance companies.
“No one who realizes what they’re doing would consent,” said Kathleen Lomax, a New Jersey mother who recently canceled her subscription to Life360 when she found out this was happening.
Arity says that insurers ultimately need consent to link a person’s driving data to their auto insurance rate. But in some cases, the request for smartphone data may appear as boilerplate contract language — “third party data and reports” — that online shoppers regularly click past without reading.
Chi Chi Wu, a consumer rights lawyer, raised an important concern regarding data collected this way: How do insurers know when a person is driving a car, versus riding in it? (Arity said it “uses advanced technology” to determine this.)
Insurers are also getting driving data directly from people’s cars. I’ve previously written about how General Motors sold data on millions of drivers to LexisNexis, a practice it ceased after our story.
A Chevrolet assembly line. | Carlos Osorio/Associated Press
But any car with an internet connection, which most modern cars have, can send data back to the automaker.
Rob Leathern, a tech executive in Texas, was surprised last year when he got an email from Toyota saying he could get “big savings” from Progressive because he’d been identified as a safe driver, based on information collected from his 2023 Sequoia.
He didn’t realize his driving was being monitored and wanted to get to the bottom of it. It took a month of emails, phone calls and data privacy requests to find out that a data broker affiliated with Toyota called Connected Analytic Services had a Microsoft Excel file with second-by-second records listing every time he had driven faster than 85 m.p.h., slammed on his brakes or accelerated rapidly.
The possible upside
For a previous story on automakers sharing people’s data, a law professor told me that people who sign up to be monitored by their insurers, in what are commonly called usage-based insurance plans, drive better as a consequence. If drivers knew they would pay more for risky driving, we could get safer roads as a result.
Those roads have gotten more dangerous in the U.S., as a recent Times Magazine story detailed. There are more fatalities, and people are driving faster. At the same time, the police are giving out fewer tickets.
That decline in ticketing has been a problem for insurers, because traffic citations are a metric for how risky a driver someone is. It’s part of why insurers want access to real-world driving behavior, one industry expert told me.
And drivers — at least the good ones, which most of us think we are — might actually want that, too. Because the way auto insurance is priced right now can be quite unfair, said Michael DeLong of the Consumer Federation of America.
If you have a bad credit score, for example, you will pay more for auto insurance even if you have never been in an accident or received a ticket. For that reason, DeLong is in favor of insurers looking at driving behavior instead. But he has concerns: Consumers need to know it’s happening, he said, and we need to be wary of possible new forms of discrimination.
Driving late at night can hurt a person’s score because of the poorer visibility and greater percentage of tired and inebriated drivers on the road. But that could in turn penalize low-income people who work a night shift, such as janitors.
So how do you know if this is happening to you? Check the privacy settings on your car’s dashboard system and smartphone apps. If an app connects to your car, or gives you feedback about your driving, that’s a good place to start. But don’t worry about Google Maps or Waze. Google, which owns both apps, said it doesn’t provide driving data that’s linked to individuals to third parties.
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