
Car insurers accused of discriminating against people with Hotmail accounts - lumisota
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2018/jan/23/a-sign-that-youre-not-keeping-up-the-trouble-with-hotmail-in-2018
======
013a
Its obvious why this is happening; some form of statistical modeling or AI
correlated having a hotmail account with being higher risk.

This is a serious problem with all AI that makes decisions like this. Having a
Hotmail account is a symptom of a problem which could lead to higher risk, but
it is judging that symptom as if it is a cause which leads to risk.

Its exactly similar to the supposition that black people statistically commit
more crime, and thus should pre-emptively receive harsher bail or be profiled.
Unless you can scientifically prove that ethnicity causes crime to happen, its
disgusting. This is obvious to us.

In year's past, correlation fallacies might have meant that black people were
profiled by police more. Today, it means that we build AIs which make life-
ending decisions like determining repeat offender risk, visa status,
employment decisions, all of which predetermines an unknown outcome by
correlating your known qualities with the known outcome of people with similar
qualities to you.

We need regulation in place to stop any punitive decision making, public and
private, which can be found in court to be based on correlation instead of
causation.

~~~
discoursism
I'd say there's a one really important difference between being Black and
using Hotmail, and that difference is the same reason why one is a protected
class and one isn't.

The real concern here isn't discriminating against people with Hotmail
accounts. On the surface level, there's nothing wrong with that. This does
become an issue if the property of having a Hotmail account is used as an
avenue to discriminate against people based on their membership in a protected
class -- a sort of actuarial parallel construction, if you will. At that
point, we do have a bit of a problem.

> We need regulation in place to stop any punitive decision making, public and
> private, which can be found in court to be based on correlation instead of
> causation.

So, young men could not be charged more for insurance than young women? In
fact, young people in general would have to get the same price as everyone
else? People in New York would have to pay the same as someone in rural
Alaska? Someone who's been driving a year gets charged the same as someone who
has been driving fifteen, etc.? Even being in an accident doesn't _cause_ you
to get in another accident. It's just correlated with that outcome. Throw out
the entire actuarial aspect of insurance? These "punitive" charges are all
based on correlation. I don't see this happening.

\----

That said, as a non-statistician, I'm interested in what kinds of tests can be
run on signals to verify that they're not proxies for selecting and
discriminating against protected classes. Is there a way to modify a signal
using its correlation with membership in these classes such that you can
marginalize the attributes you're not allowed to discriminate based on?

For example, it seems reasonable to believe that hotmail use is correlated
with age, race, gender, etc. As an insurance company, I would have information
on hand to inform me as to the extent of this correlation, at least among my
customer base, and I would in turn know the correlations of those factors with
risk. Could I somehow remove the racial, gender, and age components of the
Hotmail risk signal to obtain a signal that only conveys the portion of the
risk correlation that is not based on those classes? If so, what is that
statistical technique called?

~~~
razorunreal
If you can explain why it is OK for car insurance to charge differently by
gender, but by race is not OK, I will be impressed.

~~~
dspillett
Because it has not been shown that any indicator of causation of insurance
risk due to race is anything other than a correlated symptom of other factors,
where many properly peer-reviewed studies do seem to show that women,
particularly within certain age and economic groups, _are_ slightly safer
drivers by an amount that is not small enough to be random noise in the stats.
The effect is general enough for it to be defensible to say it is at least in
part due to gender. Of course, other properties such as age, location, and
profession, are much more significant factors.

While some studies show that it is true that Mexicans/African-
Americans/insert-other-group-here are a higher insurance risk due to crime and
to a smaller extent due to accidents, this is not because of their ethnic
background but because of other _perhaps correlated but not causally linked_
factors - they are more likely to live in poor areas with higher crime rates
and not be able to afford better security measures. Being Mexican/black/other
is not a causal factor despite there being some correlation, so it is not fair
to discriminate based on that property, any discrimination should be based
upon the causal factors, rather than the lazy correlation, to avoid being
unfair to those said factors do not apply to.

(FYI: male here, with many an anecdotal tale to support us being worse drivers
generally, if only by a little bit)

 __lt;cbatr: __correlation does not imply causation. It is not fair to
discriminate based on factors that are merely correlated with the risk, but it
is fair to discriminate based on factors that can be shown to be causally
related to the insurance risk.

Of course in the UK (and the EU more generally?) it has gone the other way:
insurance companies were forced to stop discriminating by gender which means
they can no longer give women lower premiums. Did they lower male premiums at
the same time to make up the difference, or just bump female premiums up and
pocket the extra? Go on, guess...

~~~
_red
If there is no basis for being higher risk, why wouldn't an insurance company
want to make more money?

Are you suggesting that their "inherent racism" is causing them to forgo
shareholder profits?

~~~
dspillett
They need to be as cheap as possible to remain competitive. This means
identifying risky clients and either charging them more or worse refusing
their business to make sure they are not taking on too much risk while trying
to be competitive. If this were not the case then they would keep it simple
and just charge a flat rate (that covers the highest risk they are willing to
accept) to all customers.

Using discriminating factors that are simply correlated rather than causal is
unfair as it penalises some people within a given profiled group for no good
reason. This may not be due to inherent racism, but merely due to not properly
understanding the statistics. Or not due to inherent racism _now_ but because
of lazy "it has always been done this way" reasoning. It may in part be due to
racism, of course, as people are less likely to question results that agree
with their worldview.

Identifying the correct causal factors and using the as discriminators is
fair, and can be demonstrated to be better for the business too by allowing
lower prices for some groups aiding competitiveness, _but_ it can be harder
work leading to the less effective and less fair option being used - saving
effort now at the expense of being fair (and some potential longer-term
business benefits).

------
Wehrdo
I think the troubling aspect here is that these are actually statistically
sound decisions. The company does not need to have a strong implication that
Hotmail -> bad driver. They only need to know that P(bad driver | Hotmail) >
P(bad driver | Gmail). And through some correlation (many of the theories
proposed by others seem plausible), this apparently holds.

As developers of these systems, we need to be careful of how we might apply
superficial correlations like these, so that we don't cause harm and burden to
those who happen to be caught up in them through no fault of their own.

As a side note, I happen to have a 10+ year old Hotmail account that I use for
signing up to services. My Gmail address is only given out to real people.
Personally, I view it as a testament to my diligence that I have managed to
give my email out to hundreds of websites, several of which have had database
breaches, and still only see one or two unwanted emails per week.

~~~
yorwba
If insurance were a way to minimize risk by distributing it, differential
pricing would be applied only for factors you can influence, to the degree
that you can influence them. E.g. if you are a smoker, health insurance would
be more expensive, but if you are willing to go into therapy, the insurance
would pay for it to save on cancer treatments down the line.

Of course insurance companies are first and foremost trying to maximize their
profits by charging everyone just slightly more than their expected payouts
[1]. That also means that their profits go up when they get better at modeling
someone's risk profile and then charge them more. The whole business model of
insurance depends on treating people differently, even if they are different
due to no fault of their own.

[1] corollary: if you have enough money, you shouldn't buy insurance (expected
loss), but insurance companies (expected profit)

~~~
Robotbeat
The more perfectly insurance companies can model future payouts, the less it
acts like insurance.

------
danieltillett
My wife runs a online consumer facing business and her experience is hotmail
account users are significantly more of a pain than any other email account
type. They seem to be less able to understand instructions - it is a bit of a
running joke in our house whenever she complains to me about some painful
customer I ask her if they are a hotmail customer.

~~~
tobltobs
I can second this. If I get a support email from a hotmail user the first
thing I do is to refund them their upgrade payment, because most of the time
it is completely hopeless. Another pita with hotmail users is when they click
the "Report spam" button on email address confirmation emails ...

------
kinkrtyavimoodh
What would you rather have? Insurers using broad classes and heuristics about
you to put you in a bucket that may not always be fair, or a company like
Google who knows about your life to an extreme amount of detail calculating
exactly how much risk you pose and providing that to the insurers as a
service?

If you don't want to be put by insurers into buckets, well, all I can say is,
be careful what you wish for.

~~~
discoursism
Personally, I'd rather car insurance were tailored as individually as
possible. If I could get that option without my data ever leaving Google's
silo, I would do it in a heartbeat. Then again, I know I'm very low risk
compared to most people.

In general, I do think it's good that people pay insurance based on the real
risk of loss they pose. I'm fine with this in the case of umbrella insurance,
car insurance, home insurance, life insurance, etc. The only exception I have
is health insurance, because I don't think people should die of curable
illnesses, just because they can't afford treatment.

But if someone poses a high risk of causing a car accident, I _prefer_ that
they not be able to drive. If someone is likely to burn their house down
(maybe they're into basement welding), they probably _should_ have to pay more
to insure it. Insurance companies know that many people would prefer to
subject themselves to the panopticon to save money, which is why some of them
are starting to offer the option of installing a speed tracker in your car,
among other things.

I recognize that this is not everyone's preference of course, but you asked,
so I thought I might give you some perspective from someone who thinks
differently from you.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> Personally, I'd rather car insurance were tailored as individually as
> possible.

Aren't you then saying that ultimately you would prefer if insurance didn't
exist?

I mean, that would asymptotically approach a prediction of your personal
future losses, and thus your premiums would asymptotically approach your
future losses, and thus what's the point of giving your money to an insurance
company only to get it back later?

But why wait for insurance to not exist, really? For most things, you can
actually get exactly and ideally, without any approximation, what you wish
for: Just don't buy insurance, and you will only pay for exactly your
individual risk--there is no way to tailor your insurance more individually
than that, is there?

~~~
joemag
I don’t think you can predict risk well enough for that to come true. No
matter the predictive power, real life still carries probabilistic nature. We
can assign 0.0001 probability to somebody’s house burning down, but in real
life it either will, or will not.

They can then choose to skip insurance, and carry a very small risk of loosing
a lot of money. Or buy insurance, and carry a very high probability of wasting
much smaller amount of money.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> I don’t think you can predict risk well enough for that to come true.

Which doesn't change that that is the ideal goal that GP is suggesting, right?

> No matter the predictive power, real life still carries probabilistic
> nature. We can assign 0.0001 probability to somebody’s house burning down,
> but in real life it either will, or will not.

The question was not whether the goal is reachable. The question was whether
the goal is actually a good idea. And in order to evaluate that, you have to
consider the consequences of the hypothetical case that it is reachable.

> They can then choose to skip insurance, and carry a very small risk of
> loosing a lot of money. Or buy insurance, and carry a very high probability
> of wasting much smaller amount of money.

What do probabilities matter to the outcome here? If a hypothetical insurance
company managed to achieve the ideal goal with regards to fire insurance, in
that they made the insurance as individual as (logically) possible, that would
by definition mean that they would charge a premium only from exactly those
people whose houses would in fact burn down lateron, and then pay them back
when it does indeed burn down. Not insuring yourself gets you exactly the same
end result that you would get in that hypothetical world: If your house does
not burn down, you don't pay anything and you don't get anything back, and if
your house does burn down, you pay/save massive insurance premiums that you
later get paid back/have in your savings account. Or rather, you don't, in the
latter case, because you can't afford it. So, if you think that that is a goal
to strive for, why not realize it for yourself now?

~~~
lmm
> The question was not whether the goal is reachable. The question was whether
> the goal is actually a good idea. And in order to evaluate that, you have to
> consider the consequences of the hypothetical case that it is reachable.

So: yes, it would be ideal if we could predict all traffic collisions and all
home fires. And indeed if that were true, insurance wouldn't exist. But that's
not a very enlightening scenario.

> If a hypothetical insurance company managed to achieve the ideal goal with
> regards to fire insurance, in that they made the insurance as individual as
> (logically) possible, that would by definition mean that they would charge a
> premium only from exactly those people whose houses would in fact burn down
> lateron, and then pay them back when it does indeed burn down. Not insuring
> yourself gets you exactly the same end result that you would get in that
> hypothetical world: If your house does not burn down, you don't pay anything
> and you don't get anything back, and if your house does burn down, you
> pay/save massive insurance premiums that you later get paid back/have in
> your savings account.

Indeed, but that's _because_ the insurance company can accurately predict what
will cause house fires. And people could use that prediction: if taking up
welding means my insurance premium goes from 0 to 300k because I'm definitely
going to burn my house down if I take up welding, _I can use that information
to make an informed decision about whether to take up welding_.

> So, if you think that that is a goal to strive for, why not realize it for
> yourself now?

How? Where can I get a quote, now, on whether a given hobby/lifestyle change
is going to lead to me burning down my house?

------
CogitoCogito
Considering drivers are legally required to have insurance, the insurers
should at minimum be legally required to provide a readable itemized
explanation for their cost decision. I.e. this accident was factored in this
much, your email domain was factored in this much, your race was factored in
this much, etc. In other words, they should be required to explain the full
details of whatever model they are using.

Also potentially the actual variables allowed in this computation should be
white-listed by regulators. I.e. you can't use email domains because they were
never allowed in the first place.

All of this could be considered "anti-innovation" or whatever, but I see it as
the minimal consumer protection that should be provided for a service that
drivers may *not skip.

------
interfixus
I have no clue about what it takes to run a profitable insurance business, so
no opinion on the soundness of that practice.

But I certainly _do_ use metadata about people's communication in my general
assessment of their relevance, trustfulness, clue level, etc. Do you use a
Hotmail address? Well then, you really _are_ out of it. Gmail? A lot sleaker,
yes, but our conversation will be under third party scrutiny, and chances are
that you haven't thought that part of it through. Your work mail for a private
correspondance? I wouldn't do that in a million years, so yeah, your total
score just went down a notch. Is that an Outlook client I see you're using?
Fine, but sort of humdrum, and you are probably the kind of person who will
send me .docx documents to read, and make a fuss when you get them back,
formatting screwed up. And so on and so forth, most of it subconscious, but
the evaluations stick, and mostly turn out to be accurate.

And yes, I have made first sortings of job applicants on the the same kind of
criteria.

~~~
nxc18
Hotmail addresses still get modern email software - it is essentially the same
online client that office 365 uses, and it works well.

I dare say it is more powerful than gmail and just as modern. In fact, much
more modern; gmail hasn’t changed much in the last 5 years (or longer).

I have an outlook.com address primarily, but it’s tied to the same hotmail
address that I used back in 2006. Yes, Hotmail gives you multiple email
addresses for free, and gives you all sorts of options for managing them (and
yes, they work for sign in).

~~~
interfixus
Yes, I know all that. But I also know the kind of _impression_ a Hotmail-
address is likely to give. So will conclude that a hotmailer either doesn't
know or doesn't care about the impression aspect. All part of the picture.

------
zdfjkhiuj
Someone with a HotMail account has managed to keep a consistent address for
about twenty years. That is a _good_ thing. The idea that they should ditch
HotMail for the functionally equivalent GMail just because GMail is popular
is, of course, idiotic.

But this is an insurance company, so it is plausible that they crunched the
numbers and found a real effect.

~~~
Alex3917
I still log into my old Hotmail account every few months just to keep it from
getting deleted. It’s a complete piece of shit, it’s not even usable let alone
comparable in any way to gmail.

~~~
executesorder66
If it's a complete piece of shit, why do you want to prevent it from being
deleted?

~~~
0xcde4c3db
In my case, I've maintained old email addresses when:

1) A website ties accounts to email addresses and doesn't allow changing them,
and

2) the email provider recycles expired addresses, i.e. a new user could sign
up for my old address.

------
vbrendel
So what email address should I get that will most reduce my risk of crashing
my car?

~~~
hkmurakami
Probably Hotmail, since without insurance you won't be allowed to buy a car at
a dealership, thereby reducing your overall likelihood of acquiring a vehicle,
which in turn reduces the likelihood you drive, which in turn reduces the
likelihood you crash your car.

------
philipodonnell
Here's a bonus messed up way of discriminating that auto insurance companies
do.

The minimum liability coverage in many states is $10K. However, every major
insurance company insists they always recommend $100K. The average liability
claim in an auto accident is around $15K.

However, if you look at that and think, hey, I have liquid funds, $10K - $100K
isn't that big a gap for me, and if $15K is the average then $10K seems like a
pretty good economic level.

Guess what? The insurance companies have decided that having the minimum $10K
worth of coverage means that you are exhibiting high risk behavior and you get
to pay more if you ever want to increase that compared to those who already
have it, say to $25K when you get married and your wife is more nervous about
it.

Oh, you want to shop around do you? Well they also target other insurance
companies who primarily market themselves as selling those $10K policies that
the larger companies refuse to write. Your high-risk tag will hit if you are
coming from one of those (like the General) regardless of your coverage.

I'll repeat that in case its unclear. I have to pay more for my legally
required insurance because I didn't want to buy more than what I am legally
required to buy. I am being punished because I didn't buy what they preferred
to sell me from the companies they preferred me to buy it from.

But once I behave "correctly", by paying more for a policy from one of the
correct insurance companies with the arbitrary minimum the insurance companies
prefer, they will bless me by removing my high-risk tag after 6 months.
Thanks.

------
jimjimjim
rant: another weird symptom of the world rapidly turning into shit.

It seems like more knowledge only makes the world worse. For a consumer there
is very very very little benefit of corporations knowing anything about you.

The entire concept of insurance is to lessen the financial impact of an
unfortunate event by everyone contributing a smaller amount. Fighting against
this principle is insurance companies that want to keep accepting money but
really don't want to hand it out again. To do this they will disadvantage
anyone who is more likely to need their money. Some things make sense, maybe
smokers should pay more for health insurance but with more and more data
mining they will be able to find trends where people that do X might be 0.001%
more likely to claim and will therefore charge them more. If you happen to
also do X you will pay more even if you yourself arn't more likely to claim.
and when they chuck ML/AI into the mix to look for trends it will just get
worse.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
So you think it would be better if insurance companies knew exactly all the
details of your life so they could custom design your premium for you? Because
that is the _real_ outcome of making premiums specifically catered to your
life experiences as opposed to general buckets.

If everyone were charged the same premium, your premiums would actually be
much more, because now you would be deemed as posing the same amount of risk
on the road as a person who has caused 5 accidents over 10 years.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

~~~
jimjimjim
no, definitely not! god no!

that does away with the idea of insurance. what if your genes said that you
were 15% more likely to get cancer and all the insurance companies won't
accept you?

what if to keep your premiums you had to not eat bacon?

hellish!

------
isp
More worryingly, they also appear to be using first name to influence
insurance prices. Which is problematic, since first name correlates with race.
See:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16212991](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16212991)

~~~
peoplewindow
Frankly maybe they should just be allowed to charge differential prices based
on race. If race correlates with different insurance outcomes for some reason
then covering up the symptoms doesn't change anything, the same link might
just end up being discovered by an ML system via other signals. I've seen ML
repeatedly discover inconvenient truths in other (non individual related)
contexts and suppressing the feature it was using to make the connection just
caused it to find worse equivalents based on combinations of other features.

My sympathy is somewhat limited because in recent times it feels like there's
plenty of explicit racism in the world against whites, like the BBC constantly
posting internships and job ads that specifically forbid white people from
applying. If western societies have somehow concluded that it's OK to engage
in that sort of thing, then why shouldn't race be a factor in insurance
contributions? At least that has some sort of coherent argument for why it's a
good thing (more accurate premiums for everyone).

~~~
mattmanser
Firstly, it's correlation not causation though, at the moment certain names
are associated with lower economic status and poor education, purely because
immigrants take time to accrue assets and move up the ladder, and certain
races have been historically heavily discriminated against and so were forced
into lower economic statuses and worse schools.

Secondly, you seem to be against positive discrimination (which I was for a
time).

All you have to do to change your mind is look at the actual statistics. We've
been trying to not discriminate for over a generation, for over 30/40 years.

For example, how many female executives are there? How many female politicians
are there? In the UK, for example, both those numbers were terrible. No, for
politicians, we've got all-women short lists, and it's working, the numbers
are starting to approach an even balance. We've even just got our second
female Prime Minister, before the US even managed one.

It's basically a tiny percentage. People like employing people in their
"club". People just like them. For well paid people, that's the white, male
club. Maybe it's subconscious racism, maybe it's concious racism, maybe it's
simply network effects, it doesn't matter.

What matters is that we've tried the "we don't discriminate" path for over a
generation, it didn't work and therefore positive discrimination is necessary
to correct imbalances in many fields. At some point we'll be able to stop, but
simply saying that as a society we wouldn't discriminate any more didn't work.

~~~
moduspol
I think those claims are fundamentally based on the belief that in a truly
fair society, we'd see proportionate representations of all genders,
ethnicities, etc. in all places. That's just a belief, though. There's no
evidence or science supporting that. It is at least as possible (if not more
so) that cultural factors, individuals' own decisions, and other factors are
contributing more.

The reality is that you can draw lines anywhere between large groups of people
and see different outcomes. You will see different outcomes between people
born in New York or LA. People with brown eyes and people with hazel eyes.
People in Kansas and people in Arkansas. We can openly acknowledge differences
in outcomes between these groups will happen despite a lack of systemic
oppression keeping one or the other down, yet as soon as race or gender come
up, people insist we have to put blinders on and pretend we're all identical
robots all the way up into the board room / Congress.

When you outright assume that differences in outcomes are caused by
oppression, you're making an unfalsifiable claim. Nothing has been proven, and
you could just be wrong. And if you're wrong, then you're just rationalizing
racism against people you perceive are unfairly oppressive. But since it's
unfalsifiable, you can never be called out on it.

~~~
mattmanser
We have clear evidence it's not working. That was my point.

Your entire point is predicated on the assumption we don't, and so your whole
argument falls.

For example, what's unfalsifiable about "evidence shows racism and sexism is
still rampant in executive appointments". It's verifiable and falsifiable. You
can, in less than a minute with a search engine, find the percentages of women
on executive boards.

~~~
moduspol
> It's verifiable and falsifiable.

You can verify the representations are not proportionate. There is no evidence
that, if no oppression existed, the representations would be proportionate.
This is a very basic and clear difference.

The NBA has a very high representation of black men, and a very low
representation of Jewish or Hispanic men. This in no way proves racism is
rampant in the NBA. The cause is likely other factors, and if you decided to
"positively discriminate" against black men to "fix" this problem, you
wouldn't actually be "fixing" anything. You'd just be rationalizing
discriminating on a racial basis.

------
megaman22
I would not be surprised if there is a correlation between maintaining a
hotmail or yahoo account and poor decision-making impacting one's driving
record.

------
andrewaylett
I received an email from Admiral yesterday, which seems related but not
completely:

"""

You may have seen a story in the news which claims we use customers' names to
price our insurance based on race. This is 100% not the case and we do not,
and have never, used this information to provide a price to our customers. I'm
sorry if this story has caused you any concerns.

To offer our prices we use a complex rating structure and rate on many
different variables and data sources. The journalists have misunderstood our
pricing structure and the insurance quotes in the story are not like for like.

This email is to offer you an explanation of the press story and to offer my
apologies for any concern caused. There is no need for you to take any action.

"""

Not sure which story that's referring to; seems somewhat different to (and
much worse than) this one.

On a slightly different note: that old "trick" of adding an experienced driver
to one's insurance has always seemed a bit odd to me. And as a 36-year-old, I
have to say I'd assumed I was already past the point of its applicability. But
I had cause to add my mother to an Admiral policy this week, and was very
surprised to discover that adding her would give me a refund.

~~~
tialaramex
There's loads of crazy stuff like that.

The quote system asks if your car has anything added to it, like roof racks,
spoilers, tow bar, body kit. You go "Oh yeah, a tow bar" thinking crap this
will cost extra and their backend correlation engine figures "tow bar,
probably caravan trailer, old boring safe driver, low risk" and you get a
discount.

The UK government gave insurers direct electronic access to driving license
records. If you tell them your details they can instantly check if you've got
points, or have been disqualified from driving. Insurers ask for your license
details. To use the government database right? Nope, that's a bunch of
expensive R&D, if you make it optional, people with bad records just say they
don't know their license number, charge them more. Simple, no extra R&D
needed.

------
mxuribe
So, I wonder what fees they charge for @aol email accounts?

------
mrow84
Please correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I can tell there is no
advantage to the insurers, with respect only to the returns on policies, in
producing accurate assessments of individual risk levels, as compared with
only accurately assessing the aggregate risk level - the expected return is
the same either way (and I would imagine that the individualised assessment is
much more challenging).

Assuming I am correct about that, then the advantage to them of providing
individualised premiums is to appear competitive in the market place, by being
able to confidently match their premiums to individual risk levels, and thus
being able to advertise (the possibility of) lower premiums.

Again assuming all of that is true, then there really isn't any net benefit -
in fact presumably we have to pay for this whole individualised risk
assessment exercise, which will actually raise the total costs.

More speculatively, I imagine that their job is made somewhat easier by
cognitive biases that cause people to think, on average, that they are better
than average at (for example) driving.

------
beagle3
Related: Capital One was giving different loans based on browser used[0].

[0] [https://consumerist.com/2010/11/01/capital-one-made-me-
diffe...](https://consumerist.com/2010/11/01/capital-one-made-me-different-
loan-offers-depending-on-which-browser-i-used/)

~~~
mnw21cam
Kind of wondering what would happen if you applied for a loan using w3m or
lynx.

~~~
beagle3
Just invent a time machine and go back to 2010 to check with Capital One. (or
... just wait, I'm sure this practice is still around and we'll here about
other cases)

------
tjpaudio
I've actually modeled email domain as a feature in a regression model of
customer spending habits. We were all surprised to find it is a very
predictive signal!

Of course insurance companies want to use every signal available to them to
price discriminate on rates. If you are a good driver, the insurance company
wants you because you are unlikely to file claims. Likewise, you are happy to
receive a discount for being a good driver. A simple signal of being a good
driver is your driving record, but we all know this isn't very reliable by
itself. So you end up with other signals being used. Literally any signal that
is not protected (like race/gender) will get used in any insurance model. None
of this is new. The color of your car is used surely, so why is it so shocking
that your email domain is used as well?

~~~
lazerpants
And now we have to know, what did the regression show for popular email
services?

~~~
tjpaudio
I didn't get paid to say.

------
lunulata
rightfully so, i use my hotmail for junk too. its a crummy service compared to
like gmail. hotmail pretty much lets most spam through to the inbox

~~~
ModernMech
If Hotmail uses the same backend as Outlook, I cannot agree; I've never felt
like I've gotten spam of any kind.

Today, e-mail spam seems to bee a solved problem from my own user perspective.
The next big thing to tackle is telemarketer phone spam.

~~~
akira2501
> Today, e-mail spam seems to bee a solved problem from my own user
> perspective.

Honest question.. how long have you had the email addresses you're using for
comparison?

I've had the same email for the past 12 years, corporate, and now moved into
O365. It's _average_ for spam filtering as far as my subjective experience
goes.

~~~
ReverseCold
Same email for past 8 years, all (100%) of the spam goes directly into the
spam folder where it belongs.

Marketing emails go into "promotions" \- but I could probably unsubscribe from
those if I wanted.

The only messages in my inbox are either from real people or are otherwise
notifications I want to get.

------
CornishPasty
Why am I not surprised that it's Admiral, one of the worst car insurers I've
ever had the misfortune to deal with.

~~~
DoubleGlazing
The same company that wanted to force people to give them access to their
social media to help determine their premiums.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/02/admiral-t...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/02/admiral-
to-price-car-insurance-based-on-facebook-posts)

Thankfully, facebook put a stop to it. But if they hadn't I'm certain it would
have become a common practice.

------
magoon
I do use Gmail. But I give my hotmail address to companies (like insurers),
which ultimately forwards to my gmail.

------
searealist
I wonder if a computer noticed that a hotmail account was correlated with more
payouts.

[https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/29/a-i-bias-doesnt-mean-
what...](https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/29/a-i-bias-doesnt-mean-what-
journalists-want-you-to-think-it-means/)

~~~
to3m
I don't know about Mahapatra, but Stuccio is a denizen of this very site:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yummyfajitas](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yummyfajitas)

~~~
searealist
He was either banned or left after being threatened with a ban. Check his last
post time.

------
jagger27
I think the real correlation here is with age. People who still use a Hotmail
address are likely from carryovers of the MSN era, i.e. millenials.

~~~
knz
Millennials?!

My experience has always been that customers with email addresses at older
services (Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink, AOL etc) are usually boomers that are
using an account set up for them by their millennial aged grandchildren back
in the 90's or early 2000's...

~~~
zebraflask
Exactly the demographic that will be more likely to exhibit impaired driving.

This makes perfect sense.

~~~
FabHK
Except that age is almost certainly already a variable in the rating system,
and its effect should be taken in account already.

~~~
zebraflask
My comment was a little tongue-in-cheek, but you make a good a point. As other
posts have mentioned, the email would be a proxy for other factors associated
with age that age by itself can't capture.

If it's age at all. I'd bet it might be more closely associated with something
harder to articulate or measure, along the lines of "a proclivity for clinging
to subpar solutions." Someone who uses a subpar email service might also have
ingrained poor driving habits.

