Last week,
Insurance Business reported on
Desjardins’ new Ajusto app, which tracks data in real-time to monitor such driving behavior as acceleration, braking, and distance trends.
Although users saw a 12% average price decrease on their premiums, critics are voicing concerns over whether the savings justify the loss of privacy needed to determine discounts.
In fact, some British industry experts have warned in UK media that drivers who refuse “black box” devices could one day be denied coverage entirely.
Canadian legal analysts have echoed this apprehension, arguing that user-provided data could be leveraged against drives in multiple venues, including a court of law.
“Canadian privacy law at the moment would not stop that. If they do blow a stop sign and hit somebody, then you can be damn sure either the prosecutor or the prosecuting civil lawyer is going to ask for that information because it’s relevant. So, to say it can’t be used against me is 100 per cent wrong. You’ve given them the bullets,” John Lawford, executive director and general counsel for the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, told
The Globe and Mail.
Other financial leaders point out that self-identified “bad drivers” tend to opt out of these types of programs as a whole. Subsequently, they will never qualify for a telematics-related discount and thus pay more as a discriminated against demographic.
In addition, drivers may be able to engage in such behaviors as quick acceleration but still manage to avoid accidents, but because the data only takes into account the former, they will still need to pay relatively higher premiums.
Lawford just hopes that consumers are more wary of their telematics habits than their digital ones, which are vulnerable to outside eyes, including advertisers.
“Everybody embraced social media even though it was damn clear that you were building a profile which everybody can look at – and can be mined for all sorts of relationships,” he told
The Globe and Mail. They gave it away for free and we all seem to live with that. The same thing is happening with insurance.”
