David Sirota: Big Brother in Your Car

from truthdig:



Big Brother in Your Car

Posted on Sep 6, 2012
By David Sirota


Your chipper TV friend Flo, otherwise known as Progressive Insurance’s ubiquitous shill, wants you to be excited—very excited. As you’ve probably learned from her effervescent commercials, she and her Big Brothers in the insurance biz want you to see their new tracking devices for your car not as a privacy-destroying step to justify raising your government-mandated car insurance premiums. Instead, they want you to see the gizmos, which record your vehicle’s every move, as a great innovation to get you premium discounts for safe driving.

Yet, despite the happy TV ads, questions are nonetheless swirling around this so-called “telematics-based insurance”—questions that Flo doesn’t want you to ask, because the tracking system is so frighteningly invasive and arbitrary.

To appreciate that disturbing reality, consider how the system operates. Quoting a Progressive manager, FoxNews.com reports that the tracking technology “works on algorithms that use your driving style to predict how likely you are to have an accident and how expensive it will be if it happens.” Among the myriad data points that could be collected are braking frequencies and commuting routes.

This may seem innocuous, but the potential use of such data makes the film “Minority Report” seem less like fantasy than spot-on prophecy. In that flick, humans have developed technology to fight “pre-crime”—that is, to stop crimes before they occur and punish people for allegedly preparing to commit said crimes. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/big_brother_in_your_car_20120906/