As How You Drive

I have been discussing Pay As You Drive (PAYD) insurance schemes on this blog for nearly ten years.

The simplest version of the concept varies your insurance premium according to the quantity of driving - Pay As How Much You Drive. But for obvious reasons, insurance companies are also interested in the quality of driving - Pay As How Well You Drive - and several companies now offer a discount for "safe" driving, based on avoiding events such as hard braking, sudden swerves, and speed violations.

Researchers at the University of Washington argue that each driver has a unique style of driving, including steering, acceleration and braking, which they call a "driver fingerprint". They claim that drivers can be quickly and reliably identified from the braking event stream alone.

Bruce Schneier posted a brief summary of this research on his blog without further comment, but a range of comments were posted by his readers. Some expressed scepticism about the reliability of the algorithm, while others pointed out that driver behaviour varies according to context - people drive differently when they have their children in the car, or when they are driving home from the pub.

"Drunk me drives really differently too. Sober me doesn't expect trees to get out of the way when I honk."

Although the algorithm produced by the researchers may not allow for this kind of complexity, there is no reason in principle why a more sophisticated algorithm couldn't allow for it. I have long argued that JOHN-SOBER and JOHN-DRUNK should be understood as two different identities, with recognizably different patterns of behaviour and risk. (See my post on Identity Differentiation.)

However, the researchers are primarily interested in the opportunities and threats created by the possibility of using the "driver fingerprint" as a reliable identification mechanism.

• Insurance companies and car rental companies could use "driver fingerprint" data to detect unauthorized drivers.
• When a driver denies being involved in an incident, "driver fingerprint" data could provide relevant evidence.
• The police could remotely identify the driver of a vehicle during an incident.
• "Driver fingerprint" data could be used to enforce safety regulations, such as the maximum number of hours driven by any driver in a given period.

While some of these use cases might be justifiable, the researchers outline various scenarios where this kind of "fingerprinting" would represent an unjustified invasion of privacy, observe how easy it is for a third party to obtain and abuse driver-related data, and call for a permission-based system for controlling data access between multiple devices and applications connected to the CAN bus within a vehicle. (CAN is a low-level protocol, and does not support any security features intrinsically.)

---

Sources

Miro Enev, Alex Takakuwa, Karl Koscher, and Tadayoshi Kohno, Automobile Driver Fingerprinting Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies; 2016 (1):34–51

Andy Greenberg, A Car’s Computer Can ‘Fingerprint’ You in Minutes Based on How You Drive (Wired, 25 May 2016)

Bruce Schneier, Identifying People from their Driving Patterns (30 May 2016)

See also John H.L. Hansen, Pinar Boyraz, Kazuya Takeda, Hüseyin Abut, Digital Signal Processing for In-Vehicle Systems and Safety. Springer Science and Business Media, 21 Dec 2011

Wikipedia: CAN bus, Vehicle bus

---

Related Posts

Identity Differentiation (May 2006)

Pay As You Drive (October 2006) (June 2008) (June 2009)

Watch Your Car

Drivers in Arizona can now declare a simple security policy for their vehicles, in a voluntary scheme known as Watch Your Car. This involves a large decal on the side of the vehicle, indicating that it is not normally used between 1am and 5am. Therefore when police see a vehicle with such a decal on the road at that time, the police will stop and question the driver. As Bruce Schneier points out, a more accurate name for this scheme would be Please Stop My Car.

Bruce also points out some of the externalities of the scheme. It is clearly possible for people to use this scheme to waste police time, or even deliberately divert police attention from other more important matters. We may also note that for many people, the only thing that would cause them to be out of bed at all, let alone driving down the road at 4am, is some kind of emergency such as taking a sick child to hospital - and the last thing you want at such a time is a policeman stopping the car for some routine check.

There are also externalities that arise from the fact that every driver has exactly the same security policy. Presumably the car thieves in Arizona will be very busy just after 5am.

What I have advocated on this blog and elsewhere is the need for differentiated policies, preferably under user control. Suppose my car had a secure chip that recorded my usage preferences - which times of day I normally drive, and in which parts of town. Suppose the police had a device that could interrogate this chip and indicate that a given car was outside its normal operating zone. Alternatively, the satellite navigation device could be coded to send a secure message to the police under certain predefined conditions, similar to a burglar alarm.

With appropriate technology, it is theoretically possible to make such a scheme better for the driver (because more closely fitted to their own individual lifestyle), simpler for the police (because the technology hides the complexity) and more difficult for the criminal (because the outcome of a given action is harder to predict). Win-win-win.

But the main difference between this scheme and the banking schemes I have advocated earlier is the cost of enforcement - involving significant consumption of police resources, as well as complications for the driver. Even with proper differentiation, I am still not convinced about the merits of the scheme. However, I thought it worth posting here as a further example of the possibilities of differentiation.

---

Related posts

Self-Service (October 2005)
Banking Services and User-Defined Policy 1 (January 2006)
Banking Services and User-Defined Policy 2 (January 2006)
Pay As You Drive (October 2006)

Pleasure Principle

In this post, I want to provide some further analysis of Jeff Schneider's useful diagram, which he produced on the first day of the SPARK workshop. (See my blog and his blog.)

Source: Jeff Schneider

 

I interpret the upper half of the diagram in terms of an ecological service design principle I identified in my book on the Component-Based Business. I call this principle the Pleasure Principle. (There is a loose link to Freud's use of the term.)

The Pleasure Principle is about the balance of attention and excitement. Some services provide value (and may experience phenomenal growth) by being exciting, while others provide value (and may experience more steady growth) by being reliable.

I read Jeff's diagram as having high excitement towards the top-left, and low excitement towards the top-right.

High excitement services have "sizzle" and are sometimes called "lean-forward". Low excitement services are "lean-back", and may be designed on the "principle of least astonishment". We may expect entirely different value pricing models for the two types of service. (Economists use a statistical pricing method called Hedonic Pricing, which appears to be a combination of QFD with the pleasure principle.)

Is it possible to have both excitement and reliability at the same time? This is a major question for Web 2.0, and part of the challenge for the supply-side (in the lower half of Jeff's diagram).

I think the answer to this question is an architectural one. We need a stratification which decouples the excitement from the reliability. This is why my view of architecture for SOA and web 2.0 is based on the business stack. See my SPARK notes.

The other big question which hung over the SPARK workshop was the division (true or false) between B2B and B2C. Must we equate the consumer side with high-excitement low-reliability and the corporate side with high-reliability low-excitement? Those (including myself) who see the potential convergence between SOA and Web 2.0 are required to find ways to deconstruct this false division.

One thing that may perpetuate this division, at least in the short term, is the difficulty of turning value into money. (This is sometimes called Monetization, presumably in honour of the painter Monet.) Many service providers differentiate between corporates who are mostly willing to pay, and consumers who mostly aren't. And the best way to get a decent revenue stream in the short term may be to provide a superior (= more reliable) service to the paying customers. But how can we think about the longer-term, without falling into the folly of the dotCom era?

The pleasure principle provides a way of integrating two important elements of service management: service design and service pricing. But the details need more working out. Anyone want to help?

---

Jeff Schneider, A View of Competing Interests and Concerns (19 March 2006)

Wikipedia: Hedonic Pricing, Monet, Pleasure_principle_(psychology), Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

Related post Heartbeat Economy (January 2005)