AI-Driven Drone Surveillance Is Leading to Home Insurance Cancellations (opens in new tab)

Ironically, it seems the article itself was written by AI

The article says it's an industry-wide practice... but nearly all the examples in these articles relate to Travelers.

> to trigger a human to go out to the home and investigate?

But, how can this be outsourced overseas ?

Cahn's article is really dumb.

The entire story: His insurance broker said his policy was cancelled because of AI. His policy was never actually cancelled.

Everything else is complete speculation.

The irony is that the most likely culprit in all of this was simple human error with his insurance broker.

Moss and mold is extremely damaging to roofs - even in dry climates. And roofs are expensive.

If the insurance company convinced you to go up and "remediate" the moss problem it sounds like the system worked and they spared you (and them) from an expensive roof replacement.

> ... creates an opportunity for the insurance company and roofers to share value extracted in various ways ...

This opportunity is naturally enlarged in jurisdictions that drive down the population of business competitors with aggressive misregulation -- California.

Unless the insurance company mandates that you use a particular roofing company to address the problem, I can't see how that would constitute illegal tying.

I would expect the insurance company would say something like, "We noticed this problem with your roof. Please correct it or we'll cancel your policy." And then the homeowner is free to choose any roofing company they want to remediate.

Heck, the insurance company could even say, "Here are some reputable roofing companies in your area, but you're still free to select any company you want," and I doubt that would constitute tying.

And anyway, even if you could make the argument that roofing companies in the aggregate will benefit from these sorts of policies, it's not as if keeping one's roof in good condition is forcing consumers to make unreasonable purchases.

>The real beneficiary is roofing companies, raising the question of illegal tying. Insurance is required by mortgages, so homeowners have no choice but abate with roofing services, which creates an opportunity for the insurance company and roofers to share value extracted in various ways.

How is the insurance company going to get a share of the "value extracted"?

If you think about it, the logical conclusion here is that insurance companies could end up with no customers at all. The ideal customer for them is someone with almost zero risk. But if their algorithms get advanced enough to accurately assess who’s a safe bet, anyone they do insure might as well take it as a sign that they don’t actually need insurance in the first place.

It's a self-defeating cycle. As the models improve, they'll start excluding anyone who might ever need to file a claim. The more they optimize, the less relevant they become. In the end, insurance might evolve into something entirely different or become obsolete altogether. It's the ultimate paradox of trying to reduce risk to zero: You end up with no business at all.

There's every reason to assume that these applications are the ones actually backing Open AI and co's insane valuations. They want to use these products to lock consumers down even harder. Actively rewrite contracts that already favor them, to favor them even harder. Cancel contracts that look to need payouts soon. Determine risk assessment for insurance policies, mortgage holders, and screw every last customer out of every last nickel they can. And the privacy destruction will be smuggled in under the notion that "well no HUMAN is looking at these photos, only these machiiiiiines!" with the added side benefit of laundering the responsibility of awful decisions onto those machines, and assigning them the credibility of them too. "The decision is perfect, impartial and unbiased. A computer made it, after all!"

And these applications, crucially, are not pie-in-the-sky, someday-this-will-work type situations as is comprehension of knowledge by an LLM, or a video generator that can remember what a character looks like, no. This is exactly what ML is already used for: aggregate analysis of massive amounts of statistical data. This is it's bread and butter.

That's worth $80 billion. Not shitty melty royalty-free images.

An elder care insurance provider definitely sent private investigators after the parents of someone I knew. Their way of getting out of the plan was that he was lifting cardboard boxes: something that his condition should not have permitted.

Your car insurance isn’t high value enough but yes they already do this otherwise.

Expanding on this idea - "Data driven decisions are leading to significant change."

No matter the source of the data, all data available is being used for any and all purposes regardless of morals or ethics. As such in business profits are the goal however in war it is to win.

As a multiple fintech founder from the 1990s I have experience with the earliest payment breaches, some known, some not. The banks were buying this data from crims to offset losses by proactively changing the impacted account numbers before they could be used. Few complained when the bank changed their account number unless of course one had a unique sequential card number. ;)

There is an ever increasing amount of public data being produced daily from countless sensors and devices now covering our entire world and to some degree space. Given this evolution one is to believe they can still hide? Just because data comes from a certain sensor or source does not limit the data use in any specific way and if you believe otherwise I have ocean front property in Kansas to deed you. Now consider the number of known breaches today since the internet went public and multiply that value by some large number N to postulate a total breaches number ever. Point being is there is a lot of data available if one knows where to look and HOW to apply that information for "profit" and/or to "win".

Just as banks were paying crims for data to proactively offset losses this mindset works in other business' today as well however it is certainly not being received openly given the impact to consumers during these increasingly challenging economic times which only greatly compounds that impact. Do recall that one can just change their financial account information but one cannot change their health records so why does that matter? Let us propose the hypothetical that health insurance companies are now buying up health records that have been leaked. We all know why they are doing this because these health insurance companies are looking to aggressively target the healthy to sign up with them correct?

Interesting times ahead as "change" continues.

Stay Healthy!

It depends on the policy you signed. For most insurance, you are entering into a private contract with someone to pay for your stuff if it breaks. How they enforce their policy is mostly between them, you, and how much you want to pay a month.

For the most part though, insurers don't actually have too much incentive to create false positives. Increasing your rates for life insurance or cancelling your policy because you ate a burger when they already have your cholesterol information is really dumb and bad for business.

I would assume they've already purchased your "anonymized" credit card transactions, no need to figure out your diet with anything that complicated.

The answer is absolutely "yes". Your car will snitch on you, your house will snitch on you, your phone will snitch on you, your credit card will snitch on you, on an on.

This nation is built to support corporations, not personal freedom. This is the result of that architecture.

Do the drones need to be directly over the property to capture images? It can easily be done from the streets/sidewalk, which won't infringe on anyone's property rights.

The article says they’re also using low flying planes and balloons to do the surveys.

Normally homeowners do have an information advantage: they know more about what's going on with their property than the insurance company, or could find out. I don't think the occasional drone oversight is going to change that much, other than for the most obvious problems.

It seems like whoever pays for an inspection (such as using drone surveillance), it should be shared with the other party?

The tech you're thinking of is the tools that now make it easier than ever to compare insurance rates and choose an insurer that best fits your risk profile.

Insurance companies thrive in the margins of customers being overly-conservative, and as the information asymmetry drops, their margins go down.

I think a defining aspect of our time is that we've passed a threshold where technology will no longer help us more than be used against us.

In Florida that would be especially concerning as home insurance is very pricy and hard to get

Same as a “fix-it” ticket for having a busted tail light. You prove to the court that you got it repaired and you don’t have to pay a fine.

Compared to the EU, the ostensibly relies more on litigation and less on regulation to keep things in check. This has, in turn, led to a more permissive attitude where, in general, anything goes unless and until people can successfully sue over it. Which, in turn, doesn't happen because we have a thing called forced arbitration that prevents most consumers from suing over most things - instead they have to go to an "arbitrator" who is chosen and paid for by the corporation in question, and therefore extremely highly motivated to not decide cases in a way that might cause their client to take their business elsewhere.

And, thanks to our darn near unrestricted version of free speech and a Supreme Court ruling that tore down most restrictions on political lobbying by ruling that spending money also counts as a form of speech, corporations spend an obscene amount of money on getting buddy-buddy with legislators. So the legislatures also tend to be incredibly slow to act on these kinds of things because they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them, either.

I think the details around this vary a lot from country to country. I work for a Norwegian insurer, and I’m pretty sure that we couldn’t cancel a contract like this short of something like fraud. OTOH, contracts are renewed annually, and I think declining to renew would be an option. But damages due to lack of maintenance are not covered anyways, so I’m not sure if there’s much incentive for this kind of thing in our market.