Your Smartphone and the Mafia - EPautos - Libertarian Car Talk (2024)

A convergence is coming. It is already here.

It is no mere coincidence that EVs have so much in common with smartphones in that both are excellent devices for controlling your driving by monitoring it – and charging you for it. (Double entendre intended.)

No “dongle” required.

The “dongle’ being as old-fashioned as an eight track tape player. The insurance mafia no longer needs you to plug its device into your device. All it needs is for you to carry around your device – while you drive your device.

The mob uses your phone to monitor how you drive your device. And makes adjustments to what it demands you pay the mob for the harms you’ve not caused on the pretext that the way you drive suggests an “increased” risk that you might cause harm. Never mind whether you never do.

The object is to make sure you pay – as much as possible.

In the past, it was possible to minimize what the mob made you pay by not giving the mob the pretext it needed to make you pay more. If you were a good driver – not in the legalistic sense; rather, in the sense that you never filed claims nor had them filed against you – and avoided getting caught not obeying traffic laws that generally have nothing to do with good driving – then you were reluctantly considered to be a “good driver” by the mob and paid less rather than more.

Well, why do you suppose the mob has been so eager to get people to plug one of those dongle things into their vehicles – dangling as a putative reward the possibility of “good driver” discounts?

It is because the mob knows there will be no discounts. It is because the mob knows practically everyone is a “bad driver” – in a legalistic sense; in the sense that practically everyone drives faster than the almost-always absurdly low (and arbitrarily set) speed limit, makes safe rights-on-reds, U-turns and accelerates/brakes appropriately to merge with/pass traffic and avoid accidents. The law – and the dongle – regard the latter as aggressive (and so “bad”) driving – and each “incident” is immediately conveyed to the mob via the dongle.

There goes your “discount.” Here comes your surcharge.

The smart set knows all about this scam and for that smart reason has eschewed the dongle. Enter the device. Not the one you’re driving.

The one you’re probably carrying.

Geico – one of the Five Families (there are actually more) – has figured out how to use your smartphone to monitor your driving. No need to plug in. Just download their app – which the mob presents as a convenience, just as smartphones were sold to people as more convenient than corded wall phones.

And indeed they are very convenient – just in a different way than most people who carry them around all the time think.

One driver who just got “adjusted” by Geico posted a video on TikTok explaining what happened to her. She had signed up for what Geico hilariously calls its DriveEasy program – which is all about making it easy for Geico to filch your pockets based on how it characterizes your driving. That, of course, is not how the shill-press describes it – just the same as the shill-press didn’t describe the mRNA drugs pushed on people truthfully, either.

“Using sensors in your phone,” the shill-press explains, “DriveEasy automatically logs your driving behaviors – like how fast and far you drive, how hard you brake and how often you use your phone – and calculates a safe driving score. GEICO then factors your score into your insurance rate (either with a discount or a price hike) upon renewal.”

Italics added.

“Safe driving” having nothing to do with good driving – unless the latter is not equated with avoiding accidents and not filing claims, nor having claims filed against you. And the former is equated with complying to the letter with every traffic law, no matter how arbitrary or unnecessary – and never accelerating/braking appropriately, as to merge without gimpily pulling in front of faster-moving traffic and expecting the other cars to slow down for you.

She signed up – and downloaded the app.

In short order the mob “adjusted” her premium from $129 to $202 – an increase of nearly 60 percent. With more “adjustments” like to follow.

That’s the cost of downloading the app – which enables the device. No wonder the Five Families are so eager to get the people who’re forced to “do business” with them to download the app.

This just almost happened to me, too.

One of the Five Families tried to get me to download their app – for the sake of convenience. Not mine. Theirs. I declined. But how long will it be before you can’t? How long before they won’t “do business” with you unless you download their app? How many jobs already require that you have (and carry) the device? The same device they plan to force you to use in lieu of cash – via another app. Without which it’ll be very hard to buy anything, including food.

And then consider the other device – the thing that looks like a car that has much in common with the device in your pocket. EVs being the ultimate expression of the transition of vehicles into devices. But even if you don’t drive one of those devices, you probably do have one of the other devices – and it can and will be used to “adjust” what the mob is legally empowered to make you pay. Especially if what you drive isn’t a device – and for that reason otherwise impossible for the mob to keep track of.

Just one more reason to keep the device you have gotten used to keeping in your pocket in a drawer, at home.

Wrapped in tinfoil, ideally.

. . .

If you like what you’ve found here please consider supporting EPautos.