Sensors in vehicles (aka telematics) track everything from a drivers behaviour to the vehicle’s diagnostic information, and are growing in use. Europe and North America are expected to reach 84.5 Million telematic insurance policies by year end 2025. For businesses, many jurisdictions are requiring commercial vehicles to use telematic systems.
Despite the cost and time savings, telematic systems collect large amounts of personal information, such as where people go, and when. This creates legal and ethical challenges that must be navigated carefully.
Blockchain can allow service providers or regulators to access only the insights they need to make decisions, without accessing the data itself. For this to work, a solution like Gora filters the sensor data before it is stored on chain. This makes the data accurate, while preserving the privacy of the vehicle’s owner.
Vehicle Insurance
Telematics based insurance uses information such as rapid acceleration or hard braking to come up with a price the driver pays for insurance. Safe driving habits and shorter distances travelled result in lower prices.
While 62% of drivers think pricing insurance based on how they drive is fair, only 25% would share the personal information needed to do so. Once an insurance company collects the data, they can use it for various other purposes such as machine learning models or marketing campaigns.
But with software like Gora, a person can choose to have only the insights written to the blockchain privately. Insights such as whether or not they are a good driver, or the amount of time and distance they drove. Customers will be more likely to use telematics insurance to save fees if they can protect their privacy while still showing they follow the rules. Companies that offer this service will see a competitive advantage.
Regulatory And Compliance
In North America and Europe, businesses are increasingly required to comply with various legal requirements and industry standards. To ensure businesses comply, they are increasingly being required to report, sometime verifiably (e.g. through the use of electronic data loggers) their adherence to the rules. Some examples of areas where business need to comply include:
- fuel tax reporting,
- monitoring emissions, or
- hours of service.
Using software like Gora, businesses can clean the data from sensors and generate tamper-resistant reports. It can help reduce costs, by having less people working on the related admin tasks. It also helps protect against competitors, as information about a company’s activities can be valuable to the competition.
Conclusion
The ability to own the data your vehicle produces, and share the insights it provides, is one of the exciting prospects of blockchain. But for smart contracts to be useful for the ownership and sharing of real world data, software like Gora that has the same properties as a blockchain (i.e. decentralized and tamper-resistant) is important. To learn more, visit telematics.gora.io.
