Beware of Apps That Track Your Driving Habits For Insurance Companies Utah

Have you ever signed up with Progressive car insurance? They start you out with a little monitor they call the Snapshot. Our family didn't do so well with the Snapshot and we found when we were finished the progressive offer was higher than the insurance company we already had.

Despite our experience with the Snapshot tracker, I appreciate that Progressive is transparent about gathering data on driving habits to assess driver risk. However, there are other apps that track driving habits with the same intent, often without users’ awareness.

Apps like Life360, MyRadar, and GasBuddy, according to a New York Times report, share user driving data with Arity, an analytics firm owned by Allstate. Arity uses this data to create a "driving score" based on behaviors such as speeding, sudden braking, and phone use while driving.

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Not all aspects of these apps involve data collection. For example, GasBuddy only activates data sharing when a user enables a feature called Drives, which rates fuel efficiency. If users read the fine print, they would notice that the terms include information about data sharing policies.

So be aware of the apps you have running as you drive, they might be tracking your driving habits which is surely the tip of an overarching iceberg. We carry a data gathering device around us all the time. Most of the time we think of it as serving us, but remember what a tech guru once taught me, that every time there is a free service offered there must be some benefit to the program developer.