To the extent that the information is accurate, I agree. If you make an agreement with a company and buy insurance based on your statement that you don't have a pool, but then you do have a pool, I don't see any reason why we should be upset that you didn't get away with lying to the insurance company.
I pointed them to my address on Google Maps which has my correct location, but they said their system isn't wrong and the address coordinate mapping can't be changed anyway. Go away.
Then another insurance company told me the same thing. I thought maybe I was going to be uninsurable completely based off of a computer error.
Luckily, Lemonade has smarter systems and got my location right, so I was able to get insured with them. But I'm not sure what I would do without lemonade.
Insurers with better information will be able to judge risk better, so they can undercut competitors on lower risk or avoid taking on higher risk. That really is what a competitive insurance market should be like right?
The solution was to complain vociferously to the folks that maintained data sources. In those days it was Google, someone else, and it turned out the remainder of the defective commercial products were put out by a predecessor of, I think, the folks who eventually published or supplied the data for HERE We Go. Basically, every few months I would call them or write messages to them, social engineering who might be in a position to fix it. They did respond pretty quickly, for a bigcorp, but it took a few years for the prior versions of their database to cycle out of usage.
I think that is very reasonable law: If n organisation makes decision about your relations, you should be able to force them to process correct information.
(I have used that clause ones, when a bank wrongly reported that I had an open account of a certain type, which resultet in that I could not open that type of account at another bank.)
I worked it for a year and was unsuccessful in removing it. Ironically, my wife passed away but the accident is now associated with her car. They did figure out however, that I’m no longer eligible for a multi-driver discount.
That is some breathtaking hubris.
Me too. So. many. lemons :-)
(The article and other things I'm reading suggest that cancellations are because footage finds trampolines and pools --- in which case I don't even understand how anybody can have sympathy. It's fine to have insurance risks on your property! But disclose them!)
False positive with similar circumstances would be a nightmare.
This is part of the risk one takes buying property. It’s more than offset by the benefits of buying property. Or else everyone wouldn’t be telling me what an idiot I am for renting.
They can decide not to renew for any reason - including that they just decided not to do house insurance at all anymore.
> if their insurance is cancelled based on inaccurate information
In all highly advanced countries (G7 and similar), insurance is insanely strictly regulated. If they cancel your policy for a b/s reason, and your protests are ignored, then tell the regulators. They will fix it quickly and slap a huge fine on the insurer.
If insurance companies can cheaply inspect everyone’s house from space, the end result will be to lower prices for people with homes in perfect condition and raise them for everyone else.
This is potentially problematic because the people with houses in poor condition are the least able to afford added costs in general.
I'll note that there's nothing at all redistributive about sneaking a trampoline onto your property, too.
Further, I'll note that working class people also take pride in their houses and pay to keep them up, and they too are being asked to subsidize people who are getting rate breaks from false assessments.
Later
My municipality will make an interest-free loan of up to $25,000 to cover the kinds of property repairs we're discussing, if you're income-qualified (ie: not too rich to just pay to replace your own roof).
I guarantee you income is correlated with state of home repair. If insurance companies can more easily access state of repair, lower income individuals will end up paying more than they did previously.
Regardless of whether that is fair, it is a change from the status quo, and it’s obvious why some people would consider that problematic.
Just don’t get insurance and nothing of yours will pay for anything belonging to anybody else.
Every new data point partitions the statistical population size into two smaller parts, each with their own larger variance (ie the insurance company's risk). The insurance company could statistically combine the risk from each partition into the same original, but it's more likely they'll focus on the higher independent risk figures and raise premiums an outsized amount to cover each individually. And this effect is going to be more pronounced the more lopsided the partition is, leading to similar monoculture incentives as we see in the mortgage/housing bubble. For example, I'd bet there's somewhat of a correlation between insurance claims and whether a house is painted beige.
That is how rates can go up even when the extra data is fundamentally sound. But there can also be just enough extra information to be damning, but not enough to exonerate. For example after the "Do you have a trampoline" question, is there a follow up of "Do you let guests use it" ? Or perhaps a more formal "opt out of all liability coverage for the trampoline" ? Likely not.
Then of course there are places where the model is irrelevant or even outright wrong, because the thing being singled out seems like it rocks the boat. Like the driver surveillance devices that penalize focused acceleration due to perceived association with racing, when it's much more likely that the driver is actually paying attention to driving. Or penalizing people for going over the posted speed limit, when it's actually safer to go the prevailing speed of the road.
In fact your price will propably increase since more overhead needs to be allocated to fewer customers.
That's exactly what insurance is. The whole premise is that they will dip into other people's payments to pay you if you ever encounter a covered issue. If insurance only ever paid you back some fraction X of your own contributions, why would you ever buy it? It would make infinitely more sense to deposit whatever you would have paid to insurance in a high yield savings account.
Another poster here, Scoundreller, recently responded to one of my comments on another topic with this insight:
> The funny thing about insurance is that as it becomes perfect at assessing risk, it becomes worthless.
> Oh, you’re about to have a $x claim this year, your premium is $x + y% admin fee.
> Just self insure and save yourself the y%.
There's likely a point where the more accurately priced a policy is the less worthwhile that policy is to purchase, which really wouldn't be a good thing for the insurance industry. The use of aerial photography probably isn't enough to put them over that threshold, but the closer they get, the less attractive their offerings will be. Considering that the insurance companies mentioned in the article have billions in revenue and assets I'm not sure they have a compelling need to resort to this level of surveillance in order to make good money. None of them appear to be going broke due to rogue trampolines anyway.
If the goal is redistribution, then using accurate risk data as a starting point seems preferable.
Nobody will see lower prices. Perhaps these perfect homes might see slightly smaller increases year to year.
> houses in poor condition
The point of the thread is that they're dropping people for random noise in satellite photos. The house might be perfect, it's just the photo that's wrong. But they don't care.
I'm not that optimistic.
Insurance companies are very keen to get as much risk as possible off their books before the climate gets even more extreme in its volatility
Good goes with bad, so long as the bad goes, some good going too is undesirable but OK because they are aware if the catastrophic climate events looming
The insurance companies are behaving logically, probably legally IANAL, but for people who are simply caught in the wash it is unfair
This is part of the huge systematic disruptions we are all going to have to adapt to, or die from, due to climate change
Worrying times
What prevents it is there are no customers willing to spend $1m on our cars.
This is the Law of Supply & Demand, and how markets work.
Why shouldn't I want them to be running drones over our houses? Worrying times... for pirate trampolines!
Because it’s creepy.
Also, what is the aerial photo of a roof going to indicate in terms of “cataclysmic climate events looming”?
Also is it a coincidence or a pun that your name is worik and it is common for you to sign your posts with something about worrying?
Yes climate change has caused an upheaval in some geographical regions.
But there are many economic forces at play, from the treatment of real estate as an investment making every home a million dollars to insurers all being reinsured by a ever smaller pool of reinsurers.
I suppose you could offer an explanation for the satellite photo, but in that case you’ve already been dropped, so getting your policy reinstated is going to be a much bigger lift.
Sure, an undeclared pool is a problem. However, the insurance company should have to put the pictures into evidence and allow a legal rebuttal. Bureaucracies get things incorrect like "wrong address" all the time. People need the right to challenge these behemoths.
We've been through this once already in the US--it was called "rescission" in healthcare until the ACA made it moot by requiring coverage of preexisting conditions. It's a bad thing and invariably needs to be made illegal.
Your friend brings over a trampoline for Timmy's birthday party, you can take the risk of injury with no intent to claim on insurance. You can remove it before inspection.
Now you get pinged out of the blue by a satellite.
Adults don't need constant supervision. Should you believe they do, why not leave a multi-camera drone above your suburb and every insured house can be monitored for infractions 24/7.
There is no reason for the insurance company to withhold the image as evidence of a problem. Google Maps knows where my trampolines are, why is the insurance company hiding their cards?
An insurance company that surveils you 24/7 and makes sure you comply, is not covering any risk, it's a protection racket.
Yes, if they do a scheduled inspection, it is easier to defraud them.
If my insurance goes up, and it has, because of people defrauding insurance companies then I would fully expect my insurer to protect their bottom line and my rates by dropping those customers playing unfairly.
What I don't agree with is insurance companies punting the decision making process to an algorithm. At that rate we end up with Google "support" from a company that, as paying customers, we should be able to have a conversation with.
The last thing I'll mention is that it goes a long way to know your insurance broker. As an example I've known mine for the last ~15 years and they have helped remediate a number of, what I'll describe as standard process issues, when I've contacted them and in a few cases even proactively.
“What’s the big deal the data is already available, relax”. On top of that, it comes with an air of condescension as if no one had ever thought about that before.
One concern with things like this is that it’s different when you have to send someone out to inspect a home vs inspecting thousands of homes at a time. Once you have data in that volume, you can start to infer things that do borderline encroach on privacy.
What is the case here, and it might be what you were trying to point out, is that this kind of data is already collected regularly and is by the books legal. The concern here is simply at the application.
At this point the cats out of the bag and the best we can hope for is at least some level of protection through legislation.
I acknowledged that all this info is already out there.
That insurance companies can demand to inspect your home.
And even further that that this aerial footage is already widely available.
My comment was specifically calling out that collecting data one house inspection at a time is different than collecting data at high volumes.
But let’s gloss over the fact that someone didn’t even fully disagree with you, but even then you couldn’t get over that one point that you didn’t like.
> The strategic alliance allows customers seamless and integrated access to EagleView technology within Verisk’s Xactware platform
Xactware is a product that customers (read: insurance companies) use to figure out how much money to pay on a claim.
The whole idea is to speed up the claims process. Insurance agents don't need to go out to people's houses to examine roof damage. But we also had a department doing some pretty sophisticated stuff around preventing claims fraud, so I'm not surprised.
1: https://www.verisk.com/company/newsroom/verisk-and-eagleview...
Verisk makes the process notoriously difficult compared to other companies, you have to start an "ethics" report in their ticketing system
https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain/media/en/gui/69464/ind...
The one thing in the back of my mind is also that there’s a risk of this backfiring over time. When you are unknown to potential creditors, employers, etc in whatever platforms they choose to use to look you up, that’s the ultimate sign of risk.
In contrast, if you set up a high fence around your pool in order to sunbathe naked, aerial photography would probably be an invasion of your privacy? If your roof was designed in a similar way, one might be able to argue it was wrong for the company to observe aspects of it without permission. (Although they might have gotten permission via the insurance contract...)
I think this legal standard becomes tricky (or at least ought to receive more scrutiny) when we start talking about pervasiveness and permanence. Just because I know that an arbitrary person might take a picture of me in public doesn't mean I expect every single thing I do outside to be recorded forever by a technological invisible stalker hovering over my shoulder at every outdoor moment.
That a law against such a practice does or does not exist today is rather besides the point.
Can you share how to go about it? Do you have a blog post?
Some officials are elected and some are appointed which all depends on the state. Appointed officials are usually more reasonable and elected are not because higher rates = mad voters = re-election chances lower.
For a long time, insurers have struggled to get sufficient rate changes approved. A literal quote for you during Covid was, “Son, I’m looking out my window at downtown {city} and I don’t see many cars on the road. We won’t approve the rate increases.”
This was with actual data of losses increasing due to supply chain disruption of auto parts, labor increases and many more things.
We basically had to write policies and hope for the best despite knowing the data / trend lines forecasting major losses.
Fast-forward and what do you have - major losses by all of these companies - and so these companies have two choices: - Try to get rate approvals - Exit the market or line of insurance
For California, the latter is the better option because at least for auto you cannot use credit, telematics or other very predictive attributes to price the risk. This results in essentially pooled risk which in aggregate drives up rates for all. Simply put, California officials did this to themselves.
For other states, the first option works but the rate increases are now significantly higher because it was near impossible to get any adequate rate increases last few years.
So, the bill has come due and it sucks for everyone as it’s either a) higher prices or b) can’t get insurance (Florida folks for certain types) or c) limited suppliers not being able to get reinsurance to share the risk results in higher rates that customers can’t afford so they go without.
https://assets.ctfassets.net/nnc41duedoho/BNR4qtOTGPJuyQADtK...
I wonder if the difference was largely because of Canada's more strict lock downs. The roads were nearly dead here for quite awhile.
I understand that the state has a strong interest in ensuring that insurance companies are adequately capitalized, but I don’t understand the state interest in directly regulating premium prices. (Or is that not what you are referring to?)
Car prices are not regulated because there are plenty of options for the consumer.
I would say overall there's no good answer to this problem that everybody would be happy with, just maybe one you consider "less bad" than the other ones.
Source: https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/judicial-law/gove...
Or, to be precise, the benefits are concrete go to precise groups of people, the costs are abstract and diffuse. Same thing as protective tariffs.
So, it’s a complex thing but the state has a vested interest in drivers being insured because of state / federal funding for roads, infrastructure and all of that.
The original intent was to stop humans from being greedy assholes and to provide a stick for when they messed up. Without the states involvement, insurance would likely go the way of used auto with “buy here pay here” lots which is a net negative for the state & society as a whole.
They want to make sure that “fair” prices are set so that there isn’t an overly disproportionate amount of people who need the insurance not having insurance. In reality, the less risky drivers do for all intents and purposes help off-set the cost of the more risky people but all of that is hidden in the premium logic.
At the end of the day, what has happened though is the state’s regulatory group overstepping their bounds (in my opinion) and ignoring good faith proposals with data showing why rate increases are needed which leads to situations we’re in now.
Having been in that world (I left it) I can honestly say there has to be some regulations or regulatory body because a lot of these folks spend so much time looking at numbers (actuarial science in general) they forget the fact there are humans behind those numbers.
Why wouldn't they be?
The only reason why you might believe they shouldn't be is if you fell for the "free market knows all" nonsense.
The state interest stems from the political interests of elected officials. See comment above by @broprogrammernot.
For all? I'd think it reduces rates for some and increases it for others.
I didn’t deal much on commercial insurance btw, I have _some_ awareness of that.
All of these things have either reduced or stabilized over the last two years, but prices seem to keep going up. Strange!
The observation is that if you aren't able to discriminate at all or subdivide the pools, the only response is to up the average rate to cover the aggregate risk as best you can estimate it. This gets tricky if your ability to change rates is constrained, also.
These things are always in fundamental tension, and also in tension with privacy. It's not an easy problem.
The point is pooling unpredictable risk. You don't know ahead of time if your house is going to flood. You do know ahead of time if your house is on a flood plane. Therefore, people with houses on a flood plane pay more for flood insurance.
The alternative is that low risk customers can't get insurance because they'd have to pay the same as high risk customers and that isn't worth it. Additionally, then people build tons of houses in extremely high risk areas because they can buy insurance for the same price as someone not doing something stupid, which is a moral hazard. Existing regulations have already caused this to happen in many cases.
If you can’t use predictive attributes, many not allowed in California, you’re not going to get reinsurance interest because you can’t really balance the risk across different risk types for drivers.
So the end result is the customer pays more, despite their driving record being clean, because that’s the only way to manage through the risk.
In practice, you are going to find they are never arbitrarily doing it. They are doing it because the price no longer covers the cost of providing the insurance. Just like when I decide the price of X isn't worth it anymore, I stop doing the transaction. The reasonable response would be to increase the price, but in some situations it's not possible due to regulation.
For home insurance, usually it's a mortgage requirement, which is not by law. In condominiums, the community may require it of individual owners, and then it's not really law either.
You're free to go without insurance on a house that you own, but so long as the bank owns it, they're going to make insurance mandatory, and that has nothing to do with lobbying.
It's a stressful situation for many property owners. They may not realize the impact that recent high inflation has had on repair costs, especially when prices tend to spike up higher after major disasters.
If I have any sort of risk mitigation (file backup, fire alarms, spare tire, a generator, whatever) I can test that it works periodically. So I know I'm actually safe for the event.
For insurance, you can't know what bullshit they'll come up with to deny a claim when the time comes for it.
You're left with having paid for the insurance all that time for nothing! Much better to have put that money in a piggy bank instead.
If you actually feel like you could recoup of the cost of paying for insurance by instead keeping the money in a piggy bank, you are buying too much insurance. There’s a sweet spot for insurance and overpaying for too little insurance is a you-problem.
And I know plenty of people myself, who had legitimate accidents not of their own fault who were left $10-15K out of pocket after insurance and settlements.
Let's start with a car that was two years old, I owed $22K on. Car was totaled and most of the comps from the insurer was $25-28K. Oh good, says I. And then they find one 150 miles away that is $13,500. This drags the value down to about $20K. While there's obviously something wrong with this entry, "Doesn't say salvage title in the ad, so it's a valid comp".
It takes them over a month to figure this out, all the while they have me in a rental, and then try to tell me that they're only covering one week of rental coverage. Had to threaten to sue to get compensation for my injured wrist/arm (which was hyperextended when the airbag went off as I was holding the steering wheel).
I still ended up losing out on $6K 'equity' in my car, having to come up with another downpayment, and months of calls from various medical providers who were having a hard time getting my insurer to pay their bills.
For another driver who ran a stop sign, t-boned me, and whose insurance had admitted 100% liability within 48 hours.
But I do think the total bullshit is that companies are just using it to come up with essentially fake reasons to drop customers:
> Cindy Picos was dropped by her home insurer last month. The reason: aerial photos of her roof, which her insurer refused to let her see. ... Her insurer said its images showed her roof had “lived its life expectancy.” Picos paid for an independent inspection that found the roof had another 10 years of life. Her insurer declined to reconsider its decision.
I also don't have a problem if an insurer decides to leave a state entirely - that decision is essentially saying the state has made it impossible for them to adequately price risk, and that's something the state should fix if so desired.
But these BS cancellation reasons seem like a case of insurers wanting to have their cake and eat it too. I'm not very familiar with state-by-state insurance law, but I'm assuming they have to come up with some reason to drop a homeowner that already has a policy, so this looks like they're trying to find BS reasons to just drop potentially less profitable parts of their portfolio.
If the roof needs replacing (in the insurance company’s view) then charge whatever the rate is that covers that and still makes them a profit. Don’t just deny coverage.
That's from https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/homeowners-insurance/flor..., which explains how the roofing scams work in that state. The legislature is working on it.
How else are execs going to pay for that third vacation home?
What you can do, which the U.S. already does, is government-run insurance, socializing the losses among a population. Flood insurance, for example.
It amazes me that people in the US would even consider installing a roof that would only last 20 years.
In the UK, you wouldn't consider reroofing anything that your grandparents remember being installed. Ie. Stuff doesn't get reroofed till it's 100 years old. Even then, you'll normally inspect and only replace the damaged bits.
My 350 year old house still has part of its original roof and slate tiles etc.
I’ve never seen slate roofs in California, so not sure if these are to code here. We looked at metal and other materials, but the problem is the weight is different, so now you are engaging an engineer to evaluate structure, submitting plans, dealing with code updates. Or just new asphalt shingles every 15-20 years. The payoff isn’t there and folks don’t tend to keep houses for generations, unlike in the UK.
I think you may be overestimating the extent to which UK houses are held for "generations.
In order to have a better roof, you probably must have a better entire house under it also.
It sounds odd to my ear to matter-of-factly state that the US is deprived due to being capital-poor.
I mean, I'm not disputing anything specific, but where do middle-class people have better access to consumer finance than the US?
If you'd asked me what single fact represents American homeowners to people interested in economics around the world, I would've guessed it's the access to 30-year fixed rate mortgages.
As far as I know this is a deliberate policy in the US, that has not been emulated by those envious of the American economy, but why I haven't a clue.
As I noted in another comment below, roofing slate is essentially unavailable in the USA due to geology - what does exist is of much lower quality than a good welsh slate. Still, in some ways I agree with you: roofing materials in general in the USA are far less durable those used in the UK and Europe, for reasons that I don't entirely undestand.
That said, it amazes me that huge numbers of people in the UK live in essentially uninsulated and almost uninsulatable buildings. Sure, winters are mild, but anytime you have the heat on in the millions of homes built post-WWII, a huge amount of is just leaking through the brick walls. US stud framed construction has its problems if done carelessly, but it does have the benefit that its easy and obvious to insulate your walls to some degree, and not hard to do it to Passivhaus standards.
That makes sense. Roofs last a pretty long time in the PNW as well, for similar reasons. Mostly we just get rain. Not a lot of particularly hard freezes, our idea of big hail is 1/4 inch, etc. It's pretty routine for a garden variety "25 year roof" to actually do all 25 years, and even 30.
An extension that was done in the 1980s has had to have its roof replaced once already due to what I have to assume was poor workmanship by the builder.
Tile and metal roofs last much longer than asphalt roofs in Florida, and while it's definitely more up front, they're generally more resistant to extreme weather (tiles are very heavy and metal is generally fastened down very well) and may get you an insurance discount. It's also for aesthetic reasons, as tile roofs are a very classic Florida look, and the stereotypical Key West house has a metal roof.
I think the biggest difference, though, is that the stereotypical single family US home of the 19th/20th century US expansion is on a large plot of land and has - so far - been one to get remodeled/expanded/revised several times in a hundred years. Houses are generally treated as mutable things, and people also often expect to move within a few decades, spending more to put in something that will hold up a hundred years instead of twenty seems foolhardy to many. If you sell it the buyer will likely want a cosmetic refresh; if you keep it, you likely will too.
For Americans who don't know anything about housing in the UK, there is an interesting article at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house
Being Wikipedia in 2024, I wouldn't assume it's not all AI hallucinated references, but still, it's interesting.
Where I live we call a century-old home a "tear down" because it's probably in horrible condition. There are a handful in my neighborhood but they get sold at a discount, usually for new construction.
I just sold a century home myself, after my mother passed. There was a little bidding war for it, even in this market. There's a character to the century homes that you cannot get in a new home at anywhere near the same price point.
I'm sure healthcare insurance companies are inspired by the actions of the home insurance companies. "you declared you never smoked but our drone footage shows you and a plume of smoke in the same area. The AI detected it as cigarette smoke. Your coverage is cancelled and this is our final decision. "
Climate change is coming for America’s property market Insurance is supposed to signal risk. Policymakers should let it https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/09/21/climate-change-...
Parts of America are becoming uninsurable Blame growth in hazardous areas, climate change and bad policy https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/09/21/parts-of-...
Health insurance has it easier too because there’s not really a concept of correlated risk in human populations. Most people do a decent job avoiding hurting themselves but when a flood comes, there’s not a whole lot anybody can do.
I think we have to get much more serious about prevention. People are doing this:
Fire safety:
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/24/1195331310/red-roof-house-fir...
Storm safety:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mexico-beach-home-survives-hurrica...
We need to mandate this kind of building in new construction and modified construction.
It may be worthwhile to subsidize this, to help with turning existing high risks into low risks.
We need to be more severe on forbidding building in danger zones, and more accepting of insurers pricing these based on risk, so they don't have to leave the state, and others can be priced to more common levels of risk.
We also need to not allow rebuilding in areas that will have these problems again, without some way of mitigating. We should not have to pay for someone's third house in a flood zone. But if you can make it flood proof after the first one, great.
It is. The NFPA (National Fire Protection Agency) writes the National Electric Code and other safety codes that get adopted into law as building codes. It was started by a coalition of insurance agencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fire_Protection_Assoc...
The subject property, by the way: https://www.google.com/maps/place/2350+Buttes+View+Ln,+Aubur...
Those in Auburn are, by the same idea, subsidizing windows that get smashed when parking downtown, or even if you walk, the extra risk that you are hurt by someone while walking in a place with more crime per square mile.
You can live far away from a downtown and have to get your car smogged, because we wanted cars in the cities to provide for clean air.
I don’t mean we need to accept all risk in society, but for me there’s a very worrying trend against ANY risk/cost that doesn’t directly benefit the person advocating against it.
Ultimately I know it comes back to the current economic situation, because if everyone feels like they’re struggling there’s less thought to care for others.
>"It could get interesting from a privacy standpoint as... a property could be monitored daily at high resolution," he said. "It is a bit Orwellian."
https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=1812931943850&w=GaxRXZW2Vc...
This is often approached through the lens of consumer protection. As a result, making thing flexible to allow insurance companies to say "Hey, you really need a new roof, but if you choose not to here's the price of that risk" is not prioritized. Approving rate increases is.
We are literally going to be monitored from the sky by AI for a lot of things, and from a legal standpoint at this stage there is nothing to stop anyone from doing it.
Of course we can elect politicians that change the law. Might be a hard sell if the motivation is to stop detection of illegal things.
Sources: (no general right to privacy) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Park_Racing_%26_Rec...
The Privacy Act (https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/privacy-legislation/the-priv...)
If we're talking morality I don't see how it's moral to ask the law to protect you from being found out doing the wrong thing. If these people don't pay their fair share the rest of us have to pay more.
What if a law change prevents the government from enforcing environmental legislation from illegal land clearing or dumping? What if a farmer illegally diverts more water than they are allowed to from a river or with a well? It's not just about you and me but the whole country.
On robodebt: that has nothing to do with privacy, tax records aren't private from the government? That's just bad tax enforcement.
For another toy example, what if speed laws in the US were fully enforced 100% of the time - they would be yanked immediately, because they are dumb and mostly just used to fund the police. We only tolerate them because they aren't enforced on us very often as individuals. It's like a medium-skill lottery to see who pays for the police.
Or maybe people would adjust their behavior and respect speed limits? Laws that are sporadically enforced at the discretion of police officers are awful. It just enables discrimination.
But partially enforced laws are the worst.
Compare to somewhere like Australia where you get fined for just going a few km/h over the limit and the use speed cameras extensively.
https://www.qld.gov.au/about/newsroom/increased-penalties-fo...
Whereas it seems to be common in parts of the US for everyone on a freeway to be 10 miles/hour over the limit and nobody cares
If that doesn't work, there are tutorials on YouTube for building guided anti aircraft missiles.
My bet is aerial images are just one way of many that they’re dropping customers.
When I worked at Google I knew a developer who was building a prototype service similar to Google Flights, except for auto and home insurance. I don't think that product ever shipped.
The dev on that team told me that a key thing they learned while doing the analysis is that the optimal strategy with auto and home insurance is to automatically switch providers whenever it's time to renew.
It could be because your current company has collected things about you that they aren't allowed to share with other insurance companies.
The product the OP is talking about made quite a buzz in the business when it was first released (I do think it came out for a while). It was a price comparison tool, and the reason it failed was because it was hard to get the big brand names on board. The big brand names didn’t want to compete on price alone, because they spent so much money on their brand. They already had a ton of customers coming straight to their website.
Sorry for any formatting or spelling issues here, I’m using voice to text.
In fact they're actuarially very, very boring!
- What companies the customer quotes - What amounts they are offered
You should always quote competitors because stuff changes and there are sign-on discounts offered as well.
Is there not an equivalent in the USA?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36268907 ("French tax officials use AI to spot 20k undeclared pools (2022)", 166 comments)
I know insurance brokers who have revisited a clients renewal, because Google Maps and/or the council's GIS photography shows activity or buildings counter to the client declarations. Is it a final decision? No. It's used to prompt the client to review their coverage and amend their submitted documents. Sometimes, those amendments mean the brokers are no longer able to get coverage, and the clients go somewhere else.
I'm an infra guy by trade and really enjoyed learning about the tech while on their team. Mind blowing stuff to me!!
Even if you don’t have a mortgage, your home is probably worth several times your annual salary. Most people can’t afford that loss if it burns down, gets hit by a tornado etc…
A huge number of Americans have no retirement savings at all [1]. For some of these people who do own a house, selling it at retirement is the only way they can avoid poverty (or at least maintain their quality of life), especially with the possibility of a future government significantly cutting Social Security benefits.
Even those with retirement savings often treat their houses as an asset to be leveraged or sold at retirement to help fund the latter stages of their lives [2].
These are all good reasons to carry property insurance even if you don't have a mortgage on the property that requires it.
1. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/retirement-baby-boomers-with-no...
2. https://www.axios.com/2023/03/11/how-americans-are-using-the...
I don't remember my house insurance (or medical, or any other kind really) being this detailed. I just picked rough estimates for the value of my structure and the items inside, and that was about it? There might have also been a waiver about not doing any hazardous activities like open fires or storing chemicals on the property.
It definitely wasn't this detailed.
Trampolines can indeed cause accidents but is that big of a risk to have one? That feels so out of place it's beyond comical.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/pediatrics/...
Trampoline installed well (i.e. staked down) with proper netting = who cares
Trampoline unsecured, no net = wind risk, personal injury risk, death risk
Perfectly accurate insurance pricing would be for each policy to cost exactly the amount of covered losses in the period covered plus the overhead of managing the insurance, which obviously would be pointless.
There's no pooling of risk at all.
When you buy insurance, you aren't just pooling risk with other customers with the exact same risk profile as yourself. You're pooling with all customers of the company. (Plus all customers of any reinsurance company, etc.)
Insurance has always been a negative-EV trade for the average person, but there have been mispricings that make it positive-EV when you have more information than the insurance company. However, the inefficiency meant that you also had to pay for the uncertainty on their estimate of your risk.
With less uncertainty, the spread in the market should go down, and your premium should converge to something close to your actual risk plus the cost to assess your risk.
Negative EV in terms of dollars, but not necessarily utility. For most people, a 1% chance of losing their $500k home is worse than paying a $5100 premium.
“All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” - Charles Munger
But we don’t actually know the future that well, so even if we know that some houses are riskier than others, it’s still worth buying.
I predict that they are preparing substantial layoffs; thats the only thing that even begins to explain this situation. out with the old, in with the drones
> The red-flagged images are providing insurers with ammunition for nonrenewal notices nationwide.
I don't think your comment is wrong, but it's not representative of the problem the article is bringing up.
I think they should have to give people time to fix the problem before dropping them.
A neighbor literally just got a letter in the mail, "We think your trees are over your roof. Policy cancelled immediately." (The tree was over his daughter's playhouse in the back yard, the algorithm saw shingles obstructed by a tree branch and flagged it. They don't even bother with human review.)
There should be a warning period, "Hey we saw this, and if you don't fix it in 90 days we'll have to drop you." They certainly take money before doing an inspection... they're happy to have you start paying them right away as soon as you move in. Anyway there should be a time period for cut off of service.
Insurance companies are free to do inspections, but there's still the stress that getting a notice like that does to someone.
These days, who even reads letters from insurance companies in the mail?! I mean, I just chuck anything with a logo in the recycling.
And, from what I can tell, the insurance company dropped my neighbor when they sent the letter... so he didn't even know he wasn't insured until he got the letter.
Anyway... these companies aren't your friends. They're all out to screw you.
USAA screwed me over bad recently, to the tune of nearly $300k... they forced me to use their contractor (or we won't cover your temp housing), said not to worry and promised me a "5 year workmanship warranty" on the work done by their contractor... but when the contractor was utter shit, they put me through their mediation, where their mediator said, "Yeah all this work done by the contractor is junk, it all has to be re-done... if they don't fix it, we'll eat their lunch!" but ultimately they didn't enforcing any of that with the contractor and let the contractor off without any consequences -- even insisted I pay the contractor. "Oh you had no right to expect the work would be professionally done..." the contractor said in court. It was all total BS. And they said, "USAA may promise you one thing, but contract we have means we aren't liable for any damages to your house, 35-foot trees we killed, foundations we cracked, garage doors we backed into, things our endless stream of disorganized day-laborers stole, etc..." USAA's mediation process was really just a play to run out the statue of limitations on the contract too, I felt. =P
Live and learn... but insurance companies are heartless bastards. You can't trust them, and even the "good" ones will screw you if they can. Tell you one thing, and do another...
If you have a flood, call your lawyer first, the insurance company second, and the water mitigation folks third. Get it all in writing, take more photos than you ever thought necessary, and hope you have an adjuster who isn't having a crappy day that day.
If you've been paying for insurance for 20 years with one company, then I'd say that is certainly a dick move to drop you right before it might pay out. What even is the point then?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driv...
My opinion is that the opt-in hardware might have afforded you some discount, maybe. I doubt the same is true for the manufacturer-insurer relationship. I think that pattern is probably more likely to establish a higher baseline for all drivers, and the presence of data can only ever (1) maintain the baseline or (2) harm you.
Insurance will jack up the renewal rates for everyone because there are increased number of accidents in your zip code or area. Cars are more expensive now. Often adjusters just declare vehicles no longer worth the repair. Some vehicles if they get dented will result in a shit ton of work to get it repaired (ie, Rivian truck).
You are paying for the insurance companies increased risk because the people around you can’t drive worth shit.
Got to love car centric transportation …
Insurance companies are supposed to be creating risk pools. If everyone in my zip code drives like shit the insurance company should be splitting them up into pools with better drivers from other areas. There's no reason at all to pool everyone geographically. If the insurance company can't manage risk pools they're fucking up.
I see an exciting new revenue stream in their future.
That may only be part of it, but it's definitely part of it.
If you don't own your house outright, the bank that owns part of it may require insurance as a prerequisite for loaning you money.
I've long said that one major threat that "regular people" would suffer from the consumer surveillance industry was going to be insurance (another being fine-grained price discrimination). It looks like both are really starting to come into swing. The best time for US privacy legislation (including something analogous to the GDPR) was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.
Sure, but neither of those are due to it being required by law.
In the first case there I don't know what's happening, I guess maybe insurance companies have figured out that people dropping insurance and then picking it back up correlates with increased claims due to stuff that happened during the interim.
In the second case there, you can definitely get liability insurance separately from homeowners. And it's wayyyy cheaper. Or, live in a country that isn't as crazy litigious as e.g. USA.
But again, neither is a legal requirement, which is all I was getting at initially given the top comment in this chain.
1. What pisses me off more than anything else, it enables fraud that otherwise wouldn't exist. People manufacturing calamities and then claiming insurance allows dishonest people to get ahead in life over people who are honest and concerned enough about the future to buy insurance. Additionally, insurance fraud is net bad relative to other types of fraud because it encourages criminals to manufacture damage that wouldn't otherwise happen.
2. There is an obvious incentive for them to chase an endgame of knowing exactly whether you will cost them money or make them money. When they attain this, insurance simply becomes a fortune teller and an instruction manual for Living Without Calamity. If you're denied coverage, you're going to experience something calamitous. If you're accepted, you have the ability to be fine and don't need insurance, unless you aren't sure how to Live Without Calamity. When you are accepted, you're only covered if you surrender your agency and follow their instructions for Living Without Calamity. Basic things like travelers insurance have clauses that void your policy if you scuba dive past 30 feet on your trip.
3. Insurance policies can create toxic incentives for people that hurt society. I filed a claim with Generali travel insurance because my host tested positive for COVID with a take home test, and I canceled my trip. Their web portal indicated that my claim had been received and was awaiting processing. I called incessantly to confirm my claim was good, and was not able to get an answer after several calls that routed through incompetent-by-design help desk employees and into a voicemailbox of a claims processor. Weeks go by and I receive a voicemail from the person I had been trying to contact telling me that I needed a doctor's note confirming that the person had COVID, and a take home test would not suffice. So, a company allegedly tasked with helping the public live safely wanted me to, at the time, ask my COVID infected host to waltz in to the doctor's office and spread around a pathogen that could kill patients. Nice. I guess they weren't medical insurance so they didn't care. And of course no doctor would retroactively go back in time and confirm that a person was positive for a sickness after they had already recovered.
I have no idea how that would play out but it seems like an interesting strategy to take.
So the price to defend against fraud--which, related to my point #1, is prevalent enough such that Generali has this policy--is to ask infected people to spread their sickness in doctors offices just so they can use doctors as tools to verify claims are legitimate.
So yes, I should have read the policy, but I would not have asked my host to go into the doctor's office and spread COVID around just so I could get my legitimate claim processed. I just wouldn't have bought the policy in the first place.
No. That is done over the phone or video chat. Not required to physically attend a doctors appointment in order to obtain a doctors note for COVID infection. It's called telemedicine or virtual consultation.
"The Sickness, Injury or death of you, your Family Member, your Traveling Companion or your Service Animal. The Sickness or Injury must first commence while your coverage is in effect under the Policy, must require the in-person treatment by a Physician, and must be so disabling in the written opinion of a Physician as to prevent you from taking your Trip (either because your condition prevents your travel, or because your Family Member, Traveling Companion or your Service Animal requires your care);"
Insurance feels like the biggest scam in the history of the world. You are legally obligated to pay us for nothing, most of the time.
That’s exactly what they do. There are people getting paid millions of dollars to create software that does this.
Do you know how much money an insurance company can print if they can undercut the competition by selling a bunch of policies to people who won’t file a claim?
People pick insurance based on price, and if someone is selling you a cheaper policy because they know your roof is better, you’re going to buy it from them.
They win because you’ll pay a premium without filing a claim, and you win because you can have a cheaper policy. That’s how it works in the real world.
The point of them trying to quantify risk as accurately as possible is to be able to extract profit while also offering competitive rates.
It's the same as with any other company. They try and operate as efficiently as possible (ie. reduce costs) to try and make more profit, while competing on price.
That’s not an option in many cases. The first homeowner featured in the article is in rural Northern California. CA’s insurance regulator has been extremely restrictive about letting insurers raise rates, especially in that area, so her insurance premium was probably a fraction of the expected cost of insurance claims.
If bargaining power is asymmetric between the insurer and the buyer, then the extra information is used for additional price discrimination (eg. Its better for you if the picture is never taken regardless who you are).
So the question is: does the insurer or the insured have the bargaining power here? Competition helps, but is only one part of it.
Seeing that insurers seem very profitable in the US, a decent proxy for bargaining power, I'd argue this is a bad thing for the consumer.
That's exactly backwards. If you have better information than a competitor, you have an effective strategy to steal their lower-risk customers and still make a ton of money.
This absolutely will happen. And the rates for the higher-risk customers they are left with will absolutely go up.
And of course it's a practical requirement for anyone whose net worth is primarily in their home.
There's a few obvious exceptions, but plenty of insurance isn't required.
You're required to get homeowner's insurance if you have a mortgage, and you're required to have car insurance if you want to drive a car on public roads.
So the majority of Americans are forced to purchase at least one of these in order to live their normal lives, which makes demand inelastic.
It’s mostly your own governments fault if you can’t find a cheap policy, there are millions of people who will probably never have to file an insurance claim in their life making up for government decisions to insure people who wouldn’t normally be able to be insured because of poor decision making skills.
But that doesn't imply what you're saying unless the supplier has monopoly power, which they, by law, do not.
Not even insurance - this was the city of Newport on a power rampage. Turns out there’s also no shortage of general corruption in the police department…
https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/footage-shows-newp...
If anything, overzealous adherence to the letter of the law, while annoying, seems the exact opposite of "corruption."
Rules are rules.
This way individuals can correct their dangerous behaviour immediately, rather than accidentally accumulating a large fine.