People named Mohammed apparently pay more for car insurance

[dowie]

https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/5393978/insurance-race-row-john-mohammed/

MOTORISTS are being stung for almost £1,000 more to insure cars if their name is Mohammed.

Top firms Admiral, Marks & Spencer, Bell, Elephant and Diamond all give far lower quotes when the driver has the English name John, a Sun investigation reveals.

The most shocking example we found was an Admiral quote via GoCompare. We put in identical details apart from the name.

When it was “John Smith” wanting fully comprehensive insurance for a 2007 Ford Focus in Leicester the quote was £1,333.

Obviously this needs some further details as I'm not sure how much I'd trust the sun to investigate something like this well but ostensible this is rather dubious and awkward for the firms to say the least! If someone's name is affecting a pricing model then they probably have got some rather awkward questions to answer going forwards, especially if regulators take an interest in this. It is a bit surprising if true as I'd previously assumed the insurance industry was quite conservative and rather old school with their models and I'm surprised someone's name is even looked at for this purpose*.

If true then this perhaps is one of the downsides of the whole "big data" thing, you can end up with potentially quite discriminatory results (also a current research topic in machine learning - assessing the "fairness" of algorithms) - for example google classifying black people as gorillas, or the dubious differences in search results when searching for pictures of white people vs pictures of black people etc...

(*partly why I'm still wondering if there is some other explanation for the sun's results)

 

[dowie]

What if people named Mohammed are more likely to crash?

Well I'd assume it would be a similar situation to men vs women etc.. where religion is a protected category and so you probably can't discriminate on that basis.

Also it is of course nothing to do with their name but rather (supposing it were found that people called Mohammed were a bigger risk) it would be other factors which might well be able to be inferred from things like their address, occupation etc..etc.. some random person called Mohammed who perhaps drives very carefully, lives in a low crime rate area (leafy suburbs/villages near Birmingham say), perhaps works as a Dr etc.. shouldn't be tarnished because a significant enough portion of Mohammeds a few miles away in central Birmingham like to turn the city centre into an amateur race track.

 

[dowie]

What if people named Mohammed are more likely to crash for cash?

that might well be the case, it might well be the case that they're more likely to lend their driving license + taxi/mini cab license to a cousin etc.. it is still a protected category and shouldn't negatively affect others simply because they share the name

 

[dowie]

That's the same with any stat though. Just because my car is a high insurance class doesn't mean as an individual I'm more likely to have it stolen or crash it but on a whole that probability is there. That's how stats work. Unfortunately, if true, men named Mohammed are more likely to have a crash.
Names aren't a protected category.

I'm not sure that is the case, if a name is strongly associated with a particular religion then it might well be... (obviously there probably exist a small number apostates who are called mohammed too)... I'd also suspect that if this is genuinely data driven and is jacking up prices for mohammed then it probably has a similar effect on other muslim names. I'm not a lawyer but I suspect that if someone were to take a further look at this and with all other things being equal found that selecting muslim names jacked up prices then I'm not sure that you could rely on the idea of a name not being a protected category.

I mean they're not supposed to discriminate between men and women but if they claimed to ignore sex and instead inferred the same thing from people's names then I doubt that would be valid either... (I guess people called Leslie would get some mid way quote).

AFAIK they actually kind of get into the male/female thing indirectly still by inferences from people's jobs, but that isn't quite so blatant.

 

[dowie]

All of the males in my family have biblical names. Are you saying we should therefore get preferential treatment? Religion is a choice. Gender...kinda...isnt

Eh, where have I said that?



Religion is a protected category... also it is [current year], gender is a choice for some (I realise you were alluding to that with "kinda"). But the main point is that religion is protected and so quite blatantly using a name as a proxy could easily be dodgy.

 

[dowie]

Interesting one, obviously insurance companies are not allowed to discriminate based on race / religion, and those named Mohammed are far more likely to be Muslim than others. But by the same token insurance companies regularly discriminate based upon post code, and some postcodes have a much higher proportion of certain races / religions living there than others, so where do you stop to say that's not OK? What if certain cars are more likely to be purchased by a certain race / religion?

I suspect discriminating based upon name is probably the right side of the line but perhaps not good PR if this makes it's way to the Twitter SJWs

Well I guess that is potentially for a court to decide, I'd say similarly with female and male dominated jobs they probably can get away with differences in pricing, whereas if they were to use names as a proxy for discrimination between men and women then they'd perhaps be in hot water. I'd also guess that post code is fine whereas names inferring religion is not fine to use as a category.

The sorts of things you can perhaps infer from a name are gender, religion, race and social class, three of those are protected and for the other you have plenty of other data to use.

 

[dowie]

You're saying that names with religious connotations shouldn't be subject to statistical analysis though. Those names, like following a religion are choices. A Muslim doesn't have to call their sons Mohammed, they choose to. None of my Muslim friends are called Mohammed nor do they have kids with that same. It's purely a choice.

No I think names in general probably shouldn't be used as per the post above.

 

[dowie]

Name. Address. Registration. Shouldn't need anything more...

well that isn't right at all, you'd have rather dubious models, additional unknown risk on the books and therefore higher premiums

 

[dowie]

That was my point. There's a reason so much information is required.

ah sorry, had skimmed read through and didn't realise

 

[dowie]

Every company has to make a prophet some how....

(I think someone else made that joke already though)

Labour on repairs is cheaper I would have thought.

Yup, presumably.

I'd guess that another factor is how much they value life too - what does it cost if you kill someone or leave them permanently disabled...

plus perhaps Mexican actuaries are lazy