And to preserve the privacy of their customers, many insurance companies do not collect location data but only time-stamped driving speeds instead. The idea is that the speed and accelerations that occur when you drive give a good indication of your driving technique but without revealing your routes.
Today, Bernhard Firner and pals at Rutgers University in New Jersey say that this method may not be as privacy preserving as first thought. Indeed, these guys have created an algorithm that can predict the final location of a journey given only the starting point and the time-stamped driving speeds. “We show that with knowledge of the user’s home location, as the insurance companies have, speed data is sufficient to discover driving routes and destinations when trip data is collected over a period of weeks,” they say.
Embedded Link
How To Track Vehicles Using Speed Data Alone | MIT Technology Review
Computer scientists have developed an algorithm that works out a vehicle’s destination using only its starting location and speed throughout its journey.
Google+: Reshared 1 times
Google+: View post on Google+
And frankly I have better uses for the OBD port on my car anyway.