
An AI dashcam app designed to rate every driver - walterbell
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sensors/the-ai-dashcam-app-that-wants-to-rate-every-driver-in-the-world
======
kylec
The real purpose of this app isn't the rating system, that's just the hook to
get people to run this app and point the camera out their dashboards. The real
purpose is to crowdsource collecting data about the drivers on the road in
order to sell that data to interested parties.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Meh, all the purposes are real. It's a win-win. Get warned of idiots, collect
data that will be useful to insurers (and probably to self driving cars too, I
can imagine Google cars giving detected hotheads a wide berth).

I can see one group of people having a legit beef with this though: car rental
companies. One idiot behind the wheel, and their fleet car might as well go
straight to scrap.

~~~
ucaetano
"One idiot behind the wheel, and their fleet car might as well go straight to
scrap."

Unless, of course, they pay this nice fee to have their fleet cars whitelisted
in the app, call it "bad driver protection money"!

~~~
patcheudor
The point being, once everyone has this thing in their car and everyone is
being watched while they are driving, everyone will be marked as an idiot.
Even the safest drivers make stupid moves. Even worse, by what metric is an
idiot made? I drive aggressively, trying to find open space on the road
whenever I can. To do this I speed and otherwise make abrupt lane changes. If
I'm on a road trip and someone is following me too closely I'll speed up to
140 MPH to put some distance between us in short order. The thing is, I've
never been in an accident and have literally raced cars on the Nurburgring in
Germany without incident. I have a driving style which works for me and works
for others around me as I'm not in accidents and I don't cause accidents. My
mother-in-law on the other hand who drives five under everywhere and by most
people's metrics is a safe driver has been in two accidents in the last five
years. Neither of which were her fault of course (said with some sarcasm).

All I can see this accomplishing is adding yet one more gadget app for people
to be distracted by.

~~~
JulianMorrison
This sounds like you drive like an idiot. And so you should be marked as one,
and are grumpy about it. Well, tough.

Basically what you're doing is playing Russian roulette, and you keep
"winning", well yeah, that happens, right up until it doesn't.

Drive like a Google car. Stop being an idiot. Get a smiley face score.

~~~
patcheudor
Honestly, I bathe in idiocy because it works. One of the "tricks" I've picked
up is that if I'm being tailgated in town or someone is otherwise driving next
to me and won't stop I'll turn off traction control and "light up" the rear
end of my car. Everyone 'scatters' at that point. A lot of people don't
understand this driving style. I look like a complete idiot, but people pay
attention to the idiots. They watch them, they hang back, thus making the
idiot a lot safer. My car stops from 60 to 0 in 97 feet. It takes someone in
the average sedan nearly twice as far. The further I can keep those people
away from me the better. When I'm driving I'm engaged. I drive a low fast
sports car which requires full engagement. This makes me the safest person on
the road no matter how bad I look to other drivers. This is a key concept when
on a motorcycle as well. If you are blending in by being "good", no one is
paying attention to you. If you are driving a loud bike, speeding up and
slowing down aggressively, popping wheelies, and otherwise behaving like an
ass, you are visible. Scare those around you and those around you will give
you room and on the road and room is king.

~~~
seanp2k2
I agree to an extent. I also drive "like an idiot" and haven't been in an
accident aside from being t-boned in traffic when a very old person didn't
stop for a red light. I'm also very engaged while driving and pay lots of
attention to everything going on around me. I don't listen to music or eat or
have children or do phone calls while driving. I also consider driving a hobby
/ sport and value continual life-long improvement in it. I practice in
realistic driving games and I've been doing so since I was very young. I'm
very interested in participating in track days and auto cross events. I do
most of my own car maintenance, drive a manual, and I know how my vehicle
works in quite deep detail. I also know how it handles at and beyond the
limit, when it will break loose in the front and rear, how quickly it can stop
and accelerate, how hard it can swerve.

This app and the related one about insurance liability (posted here maybe a
week or two ago) would unfairly rate me, because I go against the risk model
and win consistently. I also agree that there are MANY "safe" drivers whose
indecision and timid driving leads to bad situations; merging at 45mph,
slowing way down for ramps, stoping at yield signs, driving under the speed of
traffic, braking unnecessarily in traffic, etc. However, since in my
situation, the insurance company gets to charge me a lot more, they're
incentivized against modeling drivers like me as less risky than someone who
is involved in more accidents than me but drives well within the limits and
doesn't understand what happens when they approach or exceed them.

~~~
patcheudor
I'm in exactly your same boat. Do all the work on my car myself, only drive a
manual, know how my tires will perform on various pavement at various
temperatures, wear driving shoes, leave the radio off, etc., because I'm an
enthusiast. A few years ago I was teaching my son to drive on slick roads so
we were spinning cookies, doing bootlegger turns, and using engine power
rather than braking to get out of situations in the county fairgrounds parking
lot. There was no one around, nothing to run into, but yet a local officer
started circling us on the perimeter lot road, at which point I had my son
back off for safety reasons since there was another car in the parking lot.
Anyway, he decided to light us up, then threatened my son and myself (because
he had a learners permit) with reckless driving charges. And so it is in the
US, land of the ignorant when it comes to actually learning how to drive or
having the ability to teach our kids how to drive in an abandoned parking lot.
I much, much, much prefer Germany in this regard. They really do get it on
this front.

------
syphilis2
I wonder how well this will scale with time. I've certainly done things while
driving that were reckless to varying degrees, I suspect most drivers have as
well. How long until 50% of cars on the road have been tagged doing something
reckless? Of course I can imagine a number of ways to handle this.

On a more broad note, I wonder how useful it really is to know that a specific
vehicle acted recklessly sometime in the past. Seeing someone behaving poorly
is good reason to avoid them on the roadway. However I also imagine a scenario
where one driver did something to warrant an alert, and some time later every
car on the roadway is trying to avoid that vehicle. Is there really any danger
from that vehicle in the current situation?

What I would like to see is a map showing where the most incidents occur, and
what type of incidents occur there. I assume most drivers genuinely set out
intending to behave well, but do not for various reasons. Identifying
locations where incidents happen would give civil engineers some valuable data
about how their designs impact behavior, and would give police valuable
information about where their presence would be useful.

~~~
Angostura
I presume that the system would simply indicate the _proportion_ of times that
a vehicle is seen driving and performing a dodgy manoeuvre. If I'm seen on the
roads 1,000 times and seen performing a dodgy lane change once (and I would
like to apologise to the Mondeo driver on the A21 yesterday), _that 's_ the
fact that should be recorded.

~~~
seanp2k2
The thing is that there's not a 1:1 relationship between a "risky" maneuver
and causing an accident. An example could be an F1 driver who takes curves at
20mph over the recommended speed in a sports car. Compare this mentally to a
Prius driver who drives under the speed limit in the left lane. The Prius
driver is "being safe" but causing a long line of tailgaters and people
passing unsafely on the right, as well as agitating people and causing them to
drive more aggressively. I doubt that the first few iterations of this system
will take psychological effects on other drivers into account (if they ever
consider that / have a profit motive to do so at all).

------
lpage
Assuming that insurance is correctly priced, buying a policy in any form is
negative expected value. The companies that write such policies would slowly
bleed dry if that wasn't the case. However, that's irrelevant unless you have
the bankroll to withstand tail risk. Given that most people don't, as a
society, you pretty much have to make things like auto liability insurance
compulsory.

If you're a "good driver," as defined by a lack of tickets and accidents, you
get discounts. There's really no way to tell if you're _actually_ a "good
driver" because "good driver" is a hidden variable, and the only observables
from an insurance standpoint are tickets or accidents. I know horrible drivers
who never have accidents and avoid tickets via luck or skill. Conversely, you
can be a good driver who's unlucky enough to have multiple accidents in a
short period of time. Outcomes = baseline truth + random noise.

Most corporate data grabs bad news, but I'm ok with it when it comes to
pricing insurance (outside of health). If I run a business that has rock
solid, well enforced policies in place to mitigate risk, I don't want the
insurance company's priors over my company's sector driving the premium. I
only want to pay for coverage on idiosyncratic risk - the risk that remains
after addressing everything that I can. Same goes for driving habits. Things
like health are almost entirely idiosyncratic risk (ergo, let's agree that
doing this for health is a bad thing), but when that's not the case pricing
policies using true states (the baseline) and not observables (baseline +
noise) puts you as the policy buyer more in control, not less.

That said, I have major concerns over the implementation. A breach is all but
inevitable, so there needs to be a means of updating models online, and rules
against data retention. It's also bad news if flawed models or corner cases
incorrectly price someone out of a policy and there's no sanity check.
Unfortunately, that's not too different from the actuarial status quo.

~~~
Lxr
> Assuming that insurance is correctly priced, buying a policy in any form is
> negative expected value

Actually it's quite rare for insurance companies to record an underwriting
profit, I believe. Their profit generally comes from investing the pool of
premiums. If you invested your premium instead of buying insurance however,
then I suppose the expected return would have to be better.

~~~
lpage
Yes that's totally correct but they're factoring the entire
reinsurance/reinvestment pipeline into how aggressively they can price the
policy in the first place.

------
sokoloff
> Nexar will face some ethical dilemmas. For example, should the app inform
> users when it spots a license plate that’s the subject of an Amber Alert?

Absolutely. I'm not one to normally fall victim to the mindless "think of the
children", but Amber Alerts are rare and specific enough that they seem
perfectly useful and legitimate usage of this tech. (I find most of the rest
of the tech between useless and invasive, but flagging Amber Alert tags I'd
support.)

~~~
noja
Absolutely _at the moment_. That stops being okay once amber alerts start to
be misused.

~~~
sokoloff
Here's where I believe "think of the children" madness works in favor of
people who think like I do. Law enforcement and the DoJ will be very reluctant
to start issuing Amber Alerts for drug dealers, bank robbers, bail skippers,
and the like. Even missing elderly get Silver Alerts (where they could have
just as easily be lumped into Amber Alerts).

Amber Alerts for my area come to my cell phone and I can't recall getting more
than one per year. Looking up stats for 2014, they ranged from 9-21 per month
(nationwide). I'm pretty comfortable that surveillance over-reaches will be a
long time coming to Amber Alerts (if ever).

~~~
FilterSweep
FWIW, Amber Alerts have already begun to include domestic custody battles, and
whether one considers bringing the general public into a domestic dispute is
an overreach or not, I guess is up to you.

In my area, until I turned them off, I received at least 2 alerts per week and
the _vast_ majority of these were domestic-related (as in, one true parent of
the child had the child when they were not legally allotted to - and the other
parent reported it).

~~~
mikestew
_FWIW, Amber Alerts have already begun to include domestic custody battles_

From my observation Amber Alerts have always been domestic squabbles. Before I
turned them off on every device in the house, I don't recall a one that wasn't
a divorce dispute. In other words, not a one was a reason to make every phone
in the office make noise. In other other words, we collectively found out that
all of these "abductions" wouldn't fit within the definition that most of us
use for the word.

------
bloaf
This strikes me as one of those great and terrible ideas. It has a tremendous
potential for good, but it is one opt-out checkbox (Share the data you collect
with the police to help catch criminals!) away from convincing the surveilled
to create their own big brother.

[http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=346](http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=346)

~~~
qmr
I highly doubt there will be such a checkbox. The "permission" to share will
be buried in a EULA no one will ever read.

~~~
seanp2k2
And every company who will sell you the compulsory insurance will have that
verbiage in their EULA, thus making the choice "agree" vs "can't drive".

------
Animats
I'd expected autonomous vehicles to do it, but not that it would be a business
targeted at drivers. Not clear what the end user benefit is. A system that
recognizes unmarked police cars would have a market, but there would probably
be objections to that.

As is typical today, it uploads all the data to a server and the service
operator keeps all the rights to the data. Sigh.

Using it to pass around hard braking info is not useful, though. That's what
radars are good for. They'll always see the car ahead, whether it's equipped
or not. The widespread use of radar-controlled auto-braking is the next big
thing in auto safety. BMW, Mercedes, etc. already have it, so it's a proven
technology. Not car to car communications, which don't solve any non-
advertising related problem.

------
dclowd9901
There seems to be a disturbing trend of Israeli developers creating software
that crosses some serious ethical lines. A few offhand: this, an iPhone
backdoor exploit they're hiding and have provided to the us government, I
believe the biggest license plate reader developer is Israeli.

Can anyone speak to this? Am I observing this on some kind of bias?

~~~
dublinben
This is probably just confirmation bias on your part. That being said, based
on the political situation in Israel and the security culture in that country,
it isn't surprising that many tech companies there would be developing tools
that perpetuate that status quo. As a contrast, you would probably never see
an app like this coming out of a hackathon in Gaza.[0]

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858963)

------
randcraw
Why won't the app report every tiny detail on the driver it knows best... You?
This seems like a sure fire way to invite yourself to higher insurance rates
and a big presence in every law enforcement database that tracks peoples'
movements.

There'd have to be a very big reward for me voluntarily becoming Big Brother,
and especially for tattling on myself.

------
aub3bhat
Great who needs debate around static ALPR (license plate readers) data
collection when we will soon have swarm of cars running with connected
dashcams. The resolution is already good enough for face recognition on
bystanders/people crossing street. Things will get even more interesting once
we get self driving cars equipped with omnidirectional video recording
capabilities.

I am very interested in what can be done, with such data. I am currently
working with long duration (>20 minutes) dashcam videos uploaded by users to
youtube.

~~~
Xeoncross
You realize that this kind of power will be banned and put under the control
of the government only right?

We can't have companies violating privacy like this. Only the government can
do that.

~~~
schiffern
>Only the government can do that.

Why would the government want to spend the money and PR capital developing and
rolling that out, when they can have a company do it for free, take the heat,
chest beat about private enterprise, and then secretly NSL subpoena or crack
it and distribute the intelligence to every interested agency, police
department, and eventually favored corporate interest (using parallel
construction as needed)?

~~~
thaumasiotes
I took it more as a comment on public opinion than on government policies.

------
readams
Man this is a really creep company. What do they imagine their business model
really is? The warning thing is not a good business. Presumably they really
want to sell this data to insurance companies.

~~~
dogma1138
Actually this isn't a bad business model iMO they sell the data to insurance
companies and you can lower your insurance costs.

And while your insurance cost might also go up if it deems you to be a
reckless driver that can also have a good impact because it can force you to
drive more safely in order to bring your insurance costs back down.

If they can incorporate the app with some instructional service like a weekly
summary of all the misstakes you make and give you say 5 tips to drive better
it can actually have quite a positive effect on road safety.

And while it's a bit "creepy" I see this to be pretty much similar to
insurance companies "paying you" to quit smoking even sending you to "free"
quitting smoking seminars/workshops or "paying you" to go to the Gym often
even with a free yearly subscription.

Those things cost pennies to the insurance companies while saving them a lot
of money in the long run, only a handful of less lung cancer cases or heart
attacks a year can cover the cost of those programs for 1000's if not 10,000's
of policies.

------
macintux
Today I pulled into a turn lane and stopped alongside the car ahead of me to
let them know their brake lights were out. Had to honk incessantly to get
their attention. Then I waited in the wrong lane (no one behind me) to pull
back into my original lane to go straight through the light.

Probably would get a demerit from an AI for that maneuver.

~~~
good_dog
Pulling into a turn lane, stopping alongside another car and honking
incessantly is dangerous and against the law. The other driver was probably
scared and trying to ignore you.

------
tedmiston
Hopefully this can seed the discussion of privacy implications for tracking a
driver's actions, especially tied to the (sort of) unique ID that is their
vehicle's license plate.

I wonder if they'll be able to tell when someone else is driving your car from
the "fingerprint" of their driving style.

~~~
btcprint
There was an article recently about obd2 scanners recording information such
as throttle application, brake pressure, etc and after recording information
for 15 minutes could determine with X% accuracy who was driving and after 60
minutes of data, could fingerprint who was driving with 97 (or maybe it was
100%?) Accuracy.

Pretty interesting stuff

~~~
tedmiston
This is neat.

My roommate in grad school developed a somewhat related idea but for
identifying someone's "typing cadence". He used it for an additional security
factor in the way that a person types their passwords in a browser.

~~~
walterbell
I read an article about search engines using autocomplete keystroke timing for
user fingerprinting, but can't find it at the moment. Wikipedia has a few
references,
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_dynamics)

------
nl
I've considered building something like this for bikes.

For those who aren't cyclists, there are already informal networks of people
who share helmet-cam videos of bad driving behaviour, with people who attempt
to read license plates etc

~~~
cgriswald
In my experience as both a cyclist and a driver in the Bay Area, I have no
interest in the opinions of other cyclists on driver behavior. Cyclists
largely disregard the rules of the road and then blame drivers.

As a driver, I have been at the receiving end of abusive gestures and language
even when following the law. In one case, I yielded to a bicyclist who was in
blatant violation of the law[0], because failure to do so would have
endangered him. He showed me his middle finger. Another was angry that I was
in the bicycle lane making a right-hand turn, as required by law and common
sense.

As a cyclist, I have given up trying to educate my fellow cyclists, and
generally won't ride with others anymore.

[0]I was already turning through the intersection after having made a stop.
The bicyclist arrived in the middle of my turn and entered the intersection
without stopping for the stop sign.

Edit: Formatting.

~~~
nl
So.. cameras == good for both, then?

~~~
cgriswald
Cameras frequently fail to capture context and released footage is often
edited. Cameras often serve to justify existing biases.

I recently watched a video compilation put together by a truck driver who
intended to show the dangerous behavior of passenger vehicles. It showed what
it intended, but it also showed dangerous truck driver behavior. When this
behavior was pointed out, the truck drivers in the comment section came up
with many excuses for why this behavior was acceptable. One actually argued
that in one of the scenarios the truck driver should not have had to yield
(despite being required to do so by law) because accelerating back up to speed
was expensive in terms of fuel.

So there was proof positive that this truck driver not only violated the law,
but created an unsafe situation in a video _specifically edited_ to show it
was not truck drivers but passenger vehicles which caused unsafe situations,
and this group of truck drivers defended the behavior.

In that case, the truck driver was ignorant and stupid. His behavior wasn't
changed. And I see that a lot in YouTube videos about drivers of vehicle X
complaining about drivers of vehicle Y. Anyone pointing out mistakes made by
the driver of vehicle X is shouted down, nonsense about what is legal is
posted (most of it wrong or incomplete), and everyone who drives a vehicle X
shares their own (possibly apocryphal) stories about people driving vehicle Y.

So no, even with camera, I don't care much about the opinions of cyclists on
drivers. Cameras can be good, but they can also be bad or indifferent, and
nine times out of ten, I've got questions even after seeing the video.

------
drdeca
An idea to address privacy problems with this:

1) Only have the information for licence plate codes of people who have opted
in be stored in a way associated with the specific licence plate code.

2) Have the system encourage opting in as part of setting up the system in
one's own car.

3) Have an id which is used for all cars which have not opted in, so that cars
which have not opted in have a collective rating. Possibly split this up by
general location, and maybe time of day.

4) Because most of the cars in a given area are there often (or, at least
something similar to this is true) , it may be worthwhile for, for the cars
that do not opt in, to still record behavior of those cars, but to not send it
to a central location, only keeping it within one's own car. Cars which have
not been seen in a long time can be automatically removed from the local
storage. This should not significantly harm privacy, because it is basically
the same as remembering that you saw that car before and that it tended to be
driven poorly.

5) Possibly (this might always be pointless/counterproductive. I'm not sure.)
, in some cases only store a hash of the license plate codes, instead of the
license plate code itself?

A) I think this variation should be sufficient to protect privacy, because it
only does widespread collection about identifiable individuals if they they
consent to it. The information it collects about individuals that did not
specifically (and presumably intentionally) express consent is only collected
in aggregate about individuals in a geographic region, which does not
personally identify anyone, or only collected by individuals and not shared,
which is not much more of a privacy violation than an individual with
excellent memory looking around.

B) So, while this variation might be less effective, I think it should be
sufficient to protect privacy.

------
tonylemesmer
In the UK a few years ago there were reports of people's license plate numbers
being duplicated and stuck onto vehicles that matched the genuine vehicle's
description and then used for various crimes, like filling up with petrol and
driving off without paying.

This tech would be susceptible in a similar manner - stolen vehicle goes out
and drives badly etc. etc. The only identifier would be the licence plate. How
about using their phone account as the identifier rather than the vehicle?

Anyway sounds like an idea ripe for misuse and "feature creep".

------
quietplatypus
I'm all for this. Especially in Bay Area traffic. It looks like about 95% of
the time I get some tailgater because I leave enough room in front of my car
to brake. If I dont' want to get tailgated, I end up tailgating. I seriously
wish these people would either shape up or stop driving cars altogether.

~~~
Qantourisc
Small issue to potentially give up privacy for. This is rather a job for the
police and sensibilisation campaigns.

Also think of this way: if you both tailgate, and you have to brake, you will
be hitting both the one in front of you, and getting hit in the back. If you
don't tailgate and only get tailgated, you will only get hit in the back. (And
have a way better defence for your insurance company.)

(PS I'm going to assume this is tailgating on the highway ?)

------
lamontcg
I should probably be horrified by the privacy implications, but I'm really
not. I'm already trying to tone down some of the headgames that I've learned
to play while driving. This would help by allowing me to just let everything
slide and upload the video tagging data later.

------
frgewut
When these types of tracking become common, government tracking will look like
a child's play.

------
AndrewKemendo
This looks like an excellent way to build the most robust car tracking eco-
system ever.

------
electriclove
This type of system will inevitably become commonplace and through abuse by
insurance companies, it will push people to adopt autonomous vehicles.

------
hmate9
In a couple of years it would just be driverless cars rating other driverless
cars.

Google sees the car in front is a Tesla: 1 star :)

------
jgalt212
Amen to this. There are so many horrendous and unsafe drivers on the road.
Their actions must be curtailed.

------
imaginenore
These kinds of apps are inevitable. We will see apps that rate drivers,
workers, and just people. I'm not as worried about the apps, but rather with
someone gaming the rankings.

Both Yelp and Travelocity turned from awesome to pretty much useless within a
few years. Reviews and ratings can be bought. Employees are forced to leave
positive reviews.

~~~
seanp2k2
Yup, they're inventing another game to play here, just like credit scores. If
you know that you're playing a game and you understand the rules, you can
usually figure out how to play better than most while investing the minimum
amount of time playing. If you don't know that you're playing a game or you
aren't aware of the rules, you'll spend a lot of time being upset and losing
money, typically.

It's also true with credit cards. If you don't understand merchant fees and
maximizing your rewards from purchases you'd otherwise make while
simultaneously bolstering your credit score, you're leaving money on the
table.

Humans will hopefully look back in a few hundred years and realize how futile
and terrible of an idea it was to attempt to gamify every aspect of our lives
so some company or another can extract a profit from the unsavvy, but since
there is so much "value" to be "created" right now, I doubt that it'll happen
any time soon under our current system of governance and beliefs about
property, taxes, "free" markets, etc.

------
tychuz
Car is a very crappy identifier. I've bought my car used, so at least one
other irrelevant person (that is NOT ME) drove it. It also gets driven by my
girlfriend and on two occasions by my two non drinking friends.

------
zump
Why would the average person get this app?

~~~
mk-61
Let's put aside possibility to get discounts for ones perfect driving.

Think about instant posts of driving achievements to Facebook, instagram,
twitter.

------
peylix
I read somewhere that the app doesn't only rate the drivers around you, but
also looks at the person running the app and rates his/her driving. Add the
inner facing camera recording they're using and why anyone would want to
actively participate in something like this is beyond me.

