"We determined your sleeping schedule based on your computer and mobile usage. Since you are below the recommended hours suggested and may be tired behind the wheel, we are raising your rate 40% effective immediately."
People seem to be speculating well beyond what's in this article. It looks much more like they're just going to have a site for selling insurance, not becoming an insurance company.
Wow, thanks for the link to that credit card comparison! I've never seen it before, but that's really cool. Why do they provide this as a service/how does it help them?
Money is a driver. Google can either take 1 USD) per click or 5 dollar from the credit card companies. They're cutting out the middle man, other comparison websites. I wouldn't think they do it for the benefit of users or because users asked for the service.
) I don't know that the current adsense price for query term on credit cards is
more like $60 - $180 per credit card signup + $$ for just getting people to apply.
Given the high volume of traffic Google can drive, I'm sure they'll get the best commissions from banks.
It looks like the commission is all they're after too, since it's not possible to sort by things like 'Sign Up Bonus', which would be useful to consumers.
Google's tool is new to me as well, but it doesn't seem to be very good for comparing card rewards programs. I like the nerdwallet site for that: http://www.nerdwallet.com/
This could be a touchy subject for Google. Larry Page always joked that they could start a successful hedge fund with the knowledge people hand them every day.
If Google starts aggregating their data to sell insurance I can see people moving away from some of their services.
Imagine if your health insurance provider had access to your emails, search history and web queries before deciding if they wanted to provide you with insurance or not......
If they just aggregate quotes from brokers to show to people then I can't see a problem with it. The people who loose out on the adwords revenue, however, might disagree:)
Much of the conversation in this thread seems to be quite unmoored from the content of the article. Everyone here seems to think that Google is interested in becoming an insurer. But all Google is going today is creating a portal to resell insurance from existing providers.
Sure, Google could eventually decide to become an insurer itself, but that strikes me as quite a leap from offering vertical search for auto insurance policies, and one they have shown no interest in taking.
> Imagine if your health insurance provider had access to your emails, search history and web queries before deciding if they wanted to provide you with insurance or not......
I'm fine with this. With the Affordable Care Act, insurers aren't able to decline you due to preexisting conditions. And previously, they would be able to cancel your policy for medical issues you hid from them. Its already illegal for insurers to discriminate against you based on your genetic profile.
Google (probably) knows my sexual orientation, number and frequency of partners, if I'm trying to get pregnant, if I'm self-treating anything, if I'm hiding anything, if I drive recklessly, if I've settled car accidents under the table, etc. Some of these are not protected even under the ACA or other regulations, which may not survive in their current form for very long.
There's a lot more to discriminate against when you have total information awareness of a person. Most of it surprisingly legal. As a google search engine user, chrome user, android user, and web dev - I imagine google's picture of me is and highly invasive and creepily accurate. This is bothersome privacy violation and a major competitive advantage against other potential insurers.
Keep in mind the whole point of insurance is shared, proportional risk.
Is it both simultaneously the Wrong Thing for an insurance company to use all available information to make an informed decision, and the Right Thing for a person to put on airs to appear less statistically risky than they actually are?
Bluntly, this quacks like an argument for deception for personal gain (via lower premiums).
Granted we can talk about insurance companies being shady, but even a completely honest one would, say, rightly raise your rates after an accident.
> Keep in mind the whole point of insurance is shared, proportional risk.
The fundamental problem is that the more information is brought to bear on the idea of "risk", the less shared it is. This is especially stark in health insurance: do you have family history of serious diseases? Do you carry a particular gene? Do you engage in risky behavior like smoking, adventure sports, promiscuous sex? It can price some people out of the insurance market altogether, and make it less of a "shared" pool. This is precisely the problem the ACA is trying (with debatable success) to tackle.
Auto insurance is arguably more directly tied to statistically risky behavior rather than factors beyond your control (like genetics), but the potential is still there. We as a society are not ready for total information awareness on the part of our insurer. If Google offered insurance directly, could they deny a claim based on an email you sent before or after an accident? Raise your rates if you search for fast cars online? What's the difference between actually risky behaviors, and behaviors that are merely correlated with higher risk? The insurance markets are opaque enough without adding black box algorithms working on nearly limitless data inputs.
The opaqueness is a feature, not a bug. With full transparent knowledge of what goes into the risk calculation, people will absolutely game the system and ruin it for everyone else.
Are you actually fine with that or you just don't see how it can be used to negatively impact you?
And I'm not sure this info is harmless anyhow. It's a giant piece of legislation with probable loopholes. Plus it's not a static piece of law/regulation. And all of these companies share data.
In my opinion insurance companies should not be profit centers like they have become. They have a real social function to spread out risk across large population. With the information Google could leverage, my hunch is they could run a very tight ship where the insurance company could (theoretically) consistently remain a healthy company at zero profit margin.
Not to say that would be their goal if they started an insurance company, but once technology catches up and perfects what insurance companies do, the only differentiator at that point is monthly premiums.
Or even take it a step further and just make it an "a posteriori" public service. Instead of auto insurance, tally up the costs of all auto-related damages at the end of each year and everyone pays their demographically-/driving-history-weighted portion through their tax return. You're right, there's really no reason for anyone to profit from distributing risk.
The most successful participants in the car insurance leads marketplace (and any leads marketplace TBH) do things that are inherently consumer-unfriendly to achieve as high margins as they do. Will Google do those things? No.
So will Google see as much to gain from cutting out these players as they would from allowing these players to pay for AdWords? Eh, we’ll see.
Self-driving cars are far, far off, leaving billions of retail dollars on the table between now and then.
Yes, it's only a matter of time before Google moves into mortgages, attorneys, and hosting. Which in some ways could be ok if done right. There was some dissent when they moved into flights, but I'm starting to like their flight search as much as Kayak's if not more.
It could be beneficial to the user if Google helps to use it's ranking and review algorithm to help choose the best items for complicated products with tons of variables. They have the algorithm brains, why not apply it to other markets?
Would I rather choose from the 3 attorneys who paid the most to be at the top of the paid search ads, or have Google show me 10 based on their ranking?
The idea of you driving your car is essentially dead. Vehicle miles driven per year is already stagnent due to boomers retiring and millennials not having the same inclination for cars as generations past have.
Passenger cars sit idle 95% of the time. Its not going to take many autonomous vehicles to replace the current fleet with existing utilization so low.
Many people want to be without the company of strangers in their commute => a self-driving car will, on average, not carry more passengers than cars do now.
Most people want/have to arrive at work in a relatively short timeframe (7-9 or thereabouts)
Combining that with a 30 minute commute, the average autonomous car will be able to drive 2-3 people to and from work each day. It also will have to drive 1.5-2.5 times the distance per passenger (into town, back to pick up the second passenger, into town again for two passengers, another round trip for the third)
I think that will be a net win, but it will be less than that 95% idle figure hints at.
That net win will decrease traffic jams tremendously, though. It is anybody's guess what that will mean. On the one hand, ride times could go down, and automated cars could be able to make another round trip during peak hours.
On the other hand, people could move farther out into the suburbs, offsetting that. That is a serious possibility, as you could start working/shaving/brushing your teeth/reading/playing on your Xbox during your commute. If that happens, chances are that those who can afford it will want to own their own self-driving car, so that they can stock it with things they may want to use during their commute.
I think the latter is a serious possibility. Because of that, I am not sure we will see a decrease in the number of cars.
Although slightly off topic, you are missing a key point when you bring up the idle time of passenger cars. Passenger travel is not uniformly distributed throughout the day. There are peak times where extremely high bandwidth (everyone gets in their car in the morning to go to work and then again to go home at ~8am and ~5pm respectively) is needed. While ride shares will be easier with autonomous cars, we still cannot reduce current fleets by the amount you are hinting at with your '95%' estimate.
Personal car insurance services will be a multi-billion dollar marketplace beyond 7 years from now.
On the face of it, it sounds like you are steering the conversation towards what you'd rather talk about, which is fine. Just be forthright about it. There are bigger threats to the profitability of car insurance lead gen in the short and long term.
I would expect it to go like electric cars. Maybe in 5-10 years you will be able to buy a high-end one, but the time to a majority having one will be double that, at least.
As Google continues to develop vertical search engines they are naturally flirting with anti-trust issues. We already saw a pre-cursor to this with Google Flights, even though the Justice Department cleared Google's acquisition there were significant conditions Google had to concede [1].
Here Google's insurance product will go far beyond Google Flights in terms of anti-trust issues. Moreover, it would be like Google Flights if Google: 1.) directly sold airline tickets on behalf of airlines (instead of linking you to where you can buy tickets); and 2.) if Google owned its own airline.
The other issue, which many have touched on, down the road is the potential conflict of interest, if simultaneously a driver owns a Google self-driving car and Google is the insurer. That said health insurance companies are acquiring hospitals and physician owned practices in record numbers, and while I see an inherit conflict of interest there is apparently no regulations in place prohibiting this practice. Do consumers really want the manufacturer of a self-driving car to be the same company who might be determining liability on an insurance claim?
Google UK has been providing comparison services [1] for car insurance, travel insurance, credit cards, mortgages and bank accounts, for years now.
Comparison sites are pretty big in the UK [2,3,4], more so than I have noticed since I've been here in the US. They are generally give the same sort of price; and all take the same sort of inputs. But I personally always found Google's lack of clutter, in-your-face branding and simplicity to make it my favorite.
Though it's not really advertised, and almost everybody I have mentioned it to has never heard of it.
In fact, I would expect them to offer own insurance directly in the near future, for several reasons. First, insurance is one of the big practical hurdles facing their self-driving cars – in an accident, who is at fault? By offering their own product they can potentially circumvent this hurdle. Second, if they begin to offer homeowners insurance, they can tie their rates directly to Nest data, which should allow them to offer more competitive rates and more accurate pricing, similar to what Progressive has done with Snapshot [0]. And lastly, this obviously gives Google access to more, and potentially better, personal data.
"Carney says Google may also face resistance from insurance companies that are reluctant to share information that could help Google compete with them someday."
Dear insurance companies. Don't flatter yourselves. Google is already light years ahead of you.
The context of the quote from the article has to do with speculation that Google will one day want to start their own insurance company to become a direct competitor in the insurance business.
- Adwords for insurance are among the most expensive. Makes total sense for them to take a cut of that market.
- There's a huge difference between quote aggregation / marketing / sales, and the actual underwriting / pricing. The prior is far less regulated than the latter.
There will probably be a lot of resistance towards self-driving cars from insurance companies as the issue of responsibility becomes much more complicated, so It's probably a good idea for Google to get some influence in this business.
I'm amazed at the attitude towards insurance companies in this thread... that they shouldn't be able to charge you based on what they consider risk... People act as if insurance companies exist to just give you free money.
