A panel discussion on usage based insurance agreed that educating the consumer is crucial to expanding telematics throughout Canada – and that can only be built through transparency and trust.
“It comes down to trust,” says Fred Carter, senior policy and technology advisor to the Commissioner, with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. “Time and time again, it is all about ‘saying what you do and doing what you say.’ When individuals feel that isn’t happening, trust erodes very quickly.”
Privacy concerns can speed up very quickly when clients lose trust, Carter told those gathered at the recent Insurance Telematics Canada conference in Toronto. For fellow panelist Gil Zvulony, a barrister and solicitor with Zvulony & Co. in Toronto, that element of trust needs to be built on communication.
“In terms of the privacy issue, I think we are talking about communicating that to the customer,” says Zvulony. “This is the information that is going to be collected from you; this is how the program works. This is all very important to the customer.”
Beyond the customer, the privacy concerns of those drivers borrowing the cars of telematics subscribers need to be addressed as well.
“Sometimes the customer is not always the driver,” says Gil Zvulony, a barrister and solicitor with Zvulony & Co. “The driver has to be aware that the device is in there, and that may be a violation of privacy.”
Zvulony gave an example of his car that is equipped with GPS, that asks him each time he starts the car if he wants to turn the location device on. (continued.)
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“It is the same idea. You have a driver who doesn’t know anything about this (telematics), how do you get that information to them?” he says. “It could be something as simple as a sticker, a little bar code or something that can direct you to a website – the point is: the driver is the one who gets this information.”
The collection of data, and exactly who owns it and what is collected, needs to be defined, says Zvulony.
“How is this going to be used?” ask Zvulony. “If I want to change to another insurance company, can I take that data with me? What if I want to upload it to Facebook or some other app to analyze or compare with my friends? People upload just about everything else.”
“Your point is very valid,” says Alex Veilleux, chief product manager UBI with
Desjardins. “What we’ve tried to do with our customers is be as transparent as we could. The dashboard is explicit in what they are doing and what data we are capturing. For example, our support engines – per our terms and conditions – cannot see the consumer data.”
Only in specific cases where customers grant permission can they “drill down” to that particular data, says Veilleux.
“We’re taking the approach of transparency,” he says.
Carter points to a U.S. study on telematics released in December that in every case there was a disclosure of information to third parties without the knowledge of individuals – indicating that clients are placing trust in the brokers and insurers, and not bothering to read the fine print.
“People don’t read these long, complicated privacy policies; they don’t read them,” says Carter. “They stopped reading them a long time ago. People look for other communicators of trust – that you are doing what you say you are doing.”
