Insurance companies across the board have started offering lower premiums to customers willing to share personal tracking data and customers don’t even need a special GPS tracking device.The companies can use data from either a driver’s smartphone, GPS technology already installed, or third party GPS units in the vehicle. Information provided can help insurance companies evaluate whether a driver engages in high-risk behavior on the road and offer better discounts to those who don’t.
According to Jeff Blecher, senior vice president of Agero, a roadside assistance company that works with insurance companies nationwide, “The raw data comes to one of our data centers where we do the processing. We then have direct connections into insurance companies. They see the processed data and can make the evaluation on risky behavior to calculate risk premiums.”