
Google Street View image of a house predicts car accident risk of its resident - elsewhen
https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05270
======
nabla9
This is why privacy and regulating information asymmetries is so important.

Consider ML model that picks 1,000 people for every 10,000 and 99% of those
selected are false positives. Insurance fee is $100 and average payment is
$50,000. Rejecting those 1,000 people is $100,000 less revenue and saving
$500,000 in payments. It's no brainier to reject people and let there be
statistical accidents.

Insurance companies can make profit using models that have huge number of
false positives. If your insurance company or bank is allowed to use all data
it collects to make model of you, it leads to Kafkaesque world.

"Why my insurance premium jumped 200% and I can't afford it anymore?" Nobody
knows that the reason is your dried out flower in garage widow visible to the
street.

"Why I can't get mortgage?" You have too many Facebook friends with risk of
defaulting and one has criminal record. Select your friends better.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
If you stop insurance companies assessing risk then there will be no insurance
industry.

~~~
Pigo
I don't think that sounds too bad. There's very few things in modern life that
bothers me more than insurance. Somehow humans used to get by, helping each
other out when times were tough. I guess we're too bought in now to go back,
but a healthy, single person can dream of not subsidizing teenagers
livestreaming behind the wheel & overpriced medicine and unnecessary medical
tests.

~~~
perl4ever
People used to get by without insurance because robust regulation is required
to make an insurance industry viable. Unregulated insurance is a scam by
default if there is no way to be sure anyone will pay out in the event.

~~~
Pigo
I briefly worked at a insurance company. I sat through meetings where they
actively strategized signing more people like myself up, and obfuscating the
process for mothers and the elderly. I never looked at those companies the
same way again.

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jl6
Insurers _kind of_ already take advantage of this correlation, by rating
policies according to the postcode/zipcode of the policyholder.

The usual explanation is that some areas have busier roads and busier roads
are conducive to more accidents.

But busier roads also usually correlate with urban density which often
correlates with socioeconomic status, race, crime, ...

~~~
hrktb
This is a circle that is going on for very long I think.

People with private locked garage will also have better ratings in general.
Wealthier places will also invest more in road maintenance and limiting
accident factors (for instance having a ton more protective equipment near
school zones, investing in underground parking near shopping areas etc.)

In general I feel that trying to legally screen info from insurance is a lost
proposition, as they have all the data in the world and find a proxy for that
info anyway.

~~~
leetcrew
> People with private locked garage will also have better ratings in general.

this doesn't help much in my experience. my insurance company doesn't even
have a field to tell them whether you keep your car in a garage.

~~~
hrktb
Interesting. It might depend on the plan, we have a vandalism protection
option (in-car theft, window breaking, tire damage etc.) so the insurance
company has all the incentive in the world to know where and how it would be
parked at night.

~~~
leetcrew
you're probably right that it depends on the specific coverage. I recently
moved to an apartment with an access controlled garage so I did some research
to see how this would affect my premiums. in general I found that it doesn't
do much for your overall premiums. I don't think my car insurance offers
vandalism protection specifically, although I certainly hope it falls at least
partially into some other category! I can certainly imagine that the company
would change the price of that specific coverage quite a bit depending on
where the vehicle is parked.

------
jdavis703
The authors acknowledge that house “quality” could be encoding other biases
such as race, religion or class. It would have been great if the authors
explored this a bit more. How closely did insurance risk correlate with the
demographics they mentioned?

~~~
joosters
How would they obtain this information? The car insurance company (presumably)
didn't have it, so the researchers would have to get in touch with each
individual in their dataset and have an awkward conversation along the lines
of "we're working with your car insurer, please tell us your race and
religion". That's not going to go down very well...

~~~
jdavis703
They could use census block information. That’s generally higher resolution
than zip code data.

------
akakakak
My car insurance offers a small tracking device to estimate if you're a risky
driver. It got GPS, acceleration sensors and Bluetooth to transmit the data
over your smartphone.

I registered for the beta and like it a lot. I'm paying 30% less with no
effort - just because I'm not driving as crazy as everyone else.

at least on paper, data protection is fine - is being processed by a separate
company with a very restrictive privacy agreement, storing and handing over
only a 1-10 integer for several driving skills (speeding, acceleration, hard
breaking).

~~~
bb123
Does that mean it couldn't be used to decline you coverage in the event of an
accident where the data showed that, for example, you were doing 33 in a 30?

~~~
eli
Your car already records data like your speed prior to a crash if anyone cared
enough to go retrieve it.

~~~
bb123
True, and I believe that accident investigators are very good at accurately
deducing a vehicle's speed from the accident scene. My concern here is that as
an organisation the insurance company is motivated to find ways to not pay
you. Providing this information to them is giving them another thing to turn
to, to refuse your claim.

------
jetaim
One point that confuses me a bit: The study initially used experts (no word on
the experts?) and later only selects four experts for the subsample because
their kappa is moderate. Is that a common approach?

If there are two raters in a sample of six that disagree with the four others,
I would argue that the IRR is an issue. Otherwise one could always run studies
with n experts and only select a subsample of those raters that have a high
interrater agreement, or not?

The Fleiss kappas are already relatively low..

~~~
londons_explore
It doesn't impact the validity of the results of the study as far as I can
see... If they got closer to a perfect rating system, the predictive power of
the model could only be better.

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topmonk
FYI, they didn't use AI to do this, just a team of unpaid college interns to
annotate the images.

~~~
dehrmann
LR falls under the AI umbrella.

~~~
joosters
"Team of underpaid workers" also falls under the AI umbrella in many, many
companies who over-play their 'AI' secret sauce.

------
twothamendment
Insurance will use whatever data they can get in an attempt to be more
accurate. My address is plagued by a fire risk map. Companies will insure my
neighbor, but not me. At some point a person or machine drew a live on a map
and I crossed it.

A firefighter looked this location and concluded that if either house burns
they will both likely burn. If the insurance companies believed him would they
cover me or drop my neighbor? It is a crazy industry. Vegas anyone?

------
bb123
I really don't like this trend of considering every facet of my life when
making an insurance offer. All these systems seem to lack the nuance to take
into account personal circumstances. What if I bought a "bad" condition house
as a fixer-upper? Does that mean I'm a bad driver?

~~~
Filligree
On average yes, because it doesn't consider that facet of your life. You can't
have it both ways, I suppose.

I generally agree. The whole point of insurance is to pool risk -- so cutting
the population into ever-smaller pools seems missing the point. In the
infinite limit we'd get seven billion single-person pools, each of which has
that person pay in the exact same amount of money they get back out.

This is also known as "not having insurance".

~~~
unpopular42
Quite the opposite.

The point of insurance is to replace a high variance distribution of potential
losses with a low variance distribution, but with a similar expected loss. In
other words, on average you pay a bit more, but you never pay a huge amount.

Now, in a perfect world, everyone would pay exactly what their expected loss
is, plus a small premium. Since it's impossible to measure the expected loss
exactly, in reality some people pay a bit more and some pay a bit less.
Getting a better risk estimate doesn't get you closer to "not having
insurance", but rather closer to "perfect insurance" where everyone gets a
distribution that exactly matches their risk profile.

~~~
jtbayly
How is perfect insurance different from everybody paying their own losses
directly? If I correctly understand what you said, then perfect insurance
would lead to nobody buying it, so they could avoid paying the useless
additional “small premium.”

~~~
virgilp
It's basically "no insurance, plus a credit to pay for the losses". Except
that you start paying the rate before you incur the loss itself.

I still think this form of "perfect insurance" is bad - part of what I like
about the insurance is exactly the dispersion of cost in the larger
population. Should a chronically-ill person pay a very high insurance, or
should the society cover the costs? I'm in the second camp, even though I'm
not chronically-ill. It's part of the benefits of having an actual society -
we don't need to stand alone.

~~~
unpopular42
That is indeed part of what people call insurance these days, but in fact it
isn't one. It's just a social solidarity scheme, and no one has the balls to
call it that way, so it gets mingled into insurance. Without getting into
whether it's good or bad, it's just not the true meaning of the term
"insurance."

~~~
izacus
If "everyone" uses a word for something, then that is de facto the "true
meaning" of a term.

~~~
torstenvl
No. Even for vernacular natural language, it only matters what _native_
speakers think. Wéijī will never quite mean "danger and opportunity," no
matter how many people view it that way, because native Mandarin speakers
don't view it that way.

------
riffic
crash, not accident. people make decisions that drive outcomes into occurring,
either behind the wheel or in the design of road infrastructure.

------
jl2718
They may be trolling, but it’s a pretty good example of statistical naïveté.
What I mean by that is ignoring conditional independence even when it is
obvious from common sense. Common sense tells us that living in an old house
does not ‘cause’ car accidents, but it also tells us that a poor working
elderly person may have a higher risk of both car accidents, and living in an
old house. The dependence between the effects disappears when conditioned upon
observations closer to the chain of causality.

~~~
baroffoos
This also makes me wonder if they house had any relevance at all other than a
publicly available show of approximate income. If the researchers had access
to all of the incomes of the people they researched would they have been able
to build the exact same predictions or were more factors involved like
rural/inner city drivers having different results.

~~~
jl2718
That's kind of my point. Conditioned upon the right set of variables, they
could have probably come up with the opposite 'prediction'.

------
Freak_NL
You can have Google blur your house on Street View if you are so inclined. No
idea in what kind of insurance profile bucket that will shunt you, but it's
something to consider for the privacy conscious among us.

Click on 'report a problem' in Street View and centre the viewer you will see
on your house, select 'my home' from the options, and add the address for good
measure in the comment area.

~~~
akakakak
There's far too many blurred houses on Google Maps in Germany, often because a
single tenant opted-out.

It's the 21st century equivalent of hiding under the blanket to protect from
the evil spirits.

~~~
paggle
No, it’s the 21st century reality of needing to protect yourself from
insurance companies looking to spy on your house to set your insurance rates.

~~~
zmzrr
Literally hiding under a blanket: the day blurring out houses becomes
widespread, they will just sent a human to look at your house.

~~~
paggle
That’s totally fine. They’ve been able to do that for 200 years and it hasn’t
proved worth the cost.

------
tropo
Financial situation affects both house appearance and insurance claims. Some
people won't bother to file legitimate insurance claims for small things,
while other people will file fraudulent claims.

House appearance and car crashes will be related by risk-taking behavior,
carelessness, and being too tired. For almost any two things in life, an
inability to keep one in good order will most likely predict the other.

~~~
dehrmann
Interestingly, the guy who rear ended me was in a 30-year-old pickup and had a
suspended license.

~~~
interfixus
Interestingly, I drive old, cheap, used cars, and have a professionel license
for every imaginable kind of vehicle under the sun.

Also, I live in a somewhat decrepit house from around 1890, in a postcode area
of no prestige whatsoever.

In 40 years of driving, I have not been in any collision, and have never filed
an insurance claim.

------
everybodyknows
>age, type, and condition

In US, home insurance companies already have such info in detail. Most also
sell auto coverage.

State regulators might require a "Chinese wall" between the two operations,
but effective enforcement would be another matter.

------
buboard
> could be used for price discrimination

Would it be better if the insurance agents visited the house themselves?

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jswizzy
Seems like a good way to legally discriminate against the poor and minorities.
/s

------
JoeAltmaier
Where's the app? How does my house rate?

