This article is more than 1 year old

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

Only old fogies care who knows where they were last summer

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. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like