Half of youngsters would swap PRIVACY for... cheaper insurance

Half of youngsters would swap PRIVACY for... cheaper insurance

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More than half of UK youngsters think being tracked is a small price to pay for cheaper car insurance, and 26 per cent will be actively seeking a pay-by-the-mile policy in the hope  of saving a few quid.

The numbers come from by YouGov and O2, who asked 2,000 drivers how they felt about being spied on every day - only to establish that the yoof simply loved the idea.

 

O2 has something of an interest of course - it's hoping to drag all that telematic data back over the 2G network that it has committed to maintain for at least the next decade - but the numbers show that far from worrying about the privacy implications the British public can't wait to get GPS-tracking installed.

Parents seem to care more about their kids' privacy than the kids themselves. Only 16 per cent of grown-ups said they would be seeking to track their offspring in exchange for a few quid off the bill, compared to the 55 per cent of 18-to-24-year-olds who said they'd be happy to be tracked in exchange for some money off, perhaps demonstrating again that privacy is only a problem for the last generation.

But across the generations, more than half think drivers need a bit of Big Brother's attention, reporting that the quality of driving would improve if drivers (other drivers, we assume) had a computer monitoring, and reporting, their every move.

The fact is that telematic tracking is going to happen, within a few years it will be economically impossible to insure anyone under 25 without spying on them too, and the traditional rite of passage - rolling the family car into a ditch and lying about it - will be consigned to the history books, and that's probably not a bad thing.

Source: The Register