Consumers Unaware Allstate Is Tracking Their Driving Behaviors

In our modern age of camera-equipped cellphones and laptops, ubiquitous social media websites, and constant GPS tracking that everyone seems to use to go anywhere, you are not paranoid if you worry that Big Brother—the government—along with companies like Google and Facebook, are recording your every move. If the allegations made by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton are true, you can add automobile insurance companies and a host of third-party app developers to that list.

That is according to a lawsuit filed by Paxton that brings up shades of George Orwell’s book “1984” and the constant surveillance of citizens he describes in the mythical country of Oceania. The lawsuit he filed in Texas state court is against Allstate Insurance and several of its subsidiaries. It claims that the insurer has violated the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act as well as other provisions of the Texas business and insurance code.

Paxton alleges that Allstate has secretly amassed a massive database of the detailed “driving behaviors” of 45 million Americans, which it is using for its own underwriting of automobile insurance and selling to other insurance carriers for the same purpose. 

According to the complaint, Allstate “covertly collected much of their ‘trillions of miles’ of data by maintaining active connections with consumers’ mobile devices and harvesting the data directly from their phone.” It paid third-party app developers “millions of dollars” to secretly integrate Allstate’s tracking software into their apps so that when a “consumer downloaded the third-party app onto their phone, they also unwittingly downloaded” the 1984-esque software.

Allstate, says Paxton, “directly pulled a litany of valuable data directly from consumers’ mobile phones,” including “geolocation data, accelerometer data, magnetometer data, and gyroscopic data.” This gave Allstate the ability to record your “phone’s altitude, longitude, latitude, bearing, GPS time, speed, and accuracy,” as well as “derived events” such as your “acceleration, speeding, distracted driving, crash detection,” and multiple other factors.

In essence, Allstate knows the driving habits of 45 million unwitting American drivers.

This system is so widespread that the Texas attorney general says Allstate is capturing data “every 15 seconds or less” from “40 [million] active mobile connections.”

Although they have not been named as defendants in the lawsuit, the third-party app developers listed in the complaint include Routely (which monitors your trips and tells you where you have been and how often you have been driving), Life360 (which shows you the location of friends and family members who join the app), and GasBuddy and Fuel Rewards (two apps that help you find the cheapest gas and offer price reductions at certain gas stations).

On top of this secret data collection from your apps, Allstate has more recently started “purchasing data about vehicles’ operations directly from car manufacturers,” including Toyota, Lexus, Mazda, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati, and Ram. Allstate claims it “did this to better account for their inability to distinguish whether a person was actually driving based on the location and movements of their phone.”

This brings up one of the major problems with Allstate’s data collection, apart from its secrecy and failure to get consent from consumers. If you ride as a passenger in a bus, a friend’s car, or an Uber, Lyft, or taxi, you will be recorded as having the driving habits of those drivers. Some of my wildest rides in an automobile have been with New York and Chicago cab drivers. So, according to Allstate, I may have the bad driving habits of those taxi charioteers.

How this data is being used, according to Paxton, is exactly how consumers would expect it to be used:

If a consumer requested a car insurance quote or had to renew their coverage, insurers would access that consumer’s driving behavior in [Allstate’s] database … [and use] that consumer’s data to justify increasing their car insurance premiums, denying them coverage, or dropping them from coverage.

Consumers, say Paxton, “did not consent to, nor were aware of,” the “collection and sale of immeasurable amounts of their sensitive data.” Paxton alleges that this conduct violates not only the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act but also the prohibition in the state’s insurance code against “unfair and deceptive acts and practices in the business of insurance.”

Paxton is asking for a very large amount of money in civil penalties against Allstate; destruction of all driving data collected; restitution to consumers throughout the country who may have suffered a loss due to this database; and a permanent injunction stopping this type of behavior. 

While these are all merely allegations at this point, the claims alone are a good reason to always say “no” when any app you are using asks for location data. And while these claims may be unproven so far, I certainly will not be downloading or using any of the apps named in Paxton’s complaint, and I have no intention of placing my car insurance in the “good hands of Allstate.” 

Finally, car manufacturers should be required, in all sales agreements, to get the explicit consent of consumers to the sale of their location data when they are using the GPS units built into their cars. Congress could do this, but so could state governments through legislation covering any automobiles sold in their states.

So, the next time you are driving down an empty, wide-open country road with a ridiculously low speed limit, remember that while it may seem like no one is watching you add a little more thrill to your ride, Big Brother—and even big companies—may, in fact, be watching you put the pedal to the metal.

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