Dealing with an insurance company is usually an expensive hassle.
The rise of innovative technologies is making it even worse.
And a Florida man lost his insurance after this scary surveillance scheme.
Drones being used by insurance companies to spy on homeowners
Florida is dealing with a crisis from rising home insurance premiums because of weather-related events in the state.
Daytona Beach, Florida resident Mike Arma had never filed an insurance claim on his home in 52 years.
But his broker said his insurance company was dropping him out of the blue.
The insurance company had taken a picture of his roof and determined it “looked deteriorated.”
Arma thought the low-quality picture looked like it was from the Depression.
“The photo looked like it was taken in 1936,” Arma said.
His roof was only six years old and in Florida, they typically can last 20 to 30 years.
He asked the insurance company to send someone out to get another look and was told they did not make “house calls.”
Arma hired a home inspector who said his roof was in good shape.
So, he tried again with a new insurance company.
When his policy came up for renewal, he was given a picture of his roof taken by a drone.
The new insurance company wanted to increase his premium by 25%.
Homeowners are being spied on by their insurance companies
Home insurance companies are increasingly relying on satellite images and drones to track the properties they insure.
Farmers Insurance agent Nichole Brink quit her job because of the aerial surveillance the company was doing on its customers.
She said that Farmers was surveilling every property on its books.
“It’s like they’re using anything as an excuse to get people off their books,” Brink said.
Brink quit after her home was flagged for having a branch over her barn.
United Policyholders executive director Amy Bach told the Wall Street Journal that aerial surveillance is being used to drop homeowners everywhere.
“We’ve seen a dramatic increase across the country in reports from consumers who’ve been dropped by their insurers on the basis of an aerial image,” Bach said.
Insurers claim that aerial surveillance is more efficient and less intrusive.
And there is little a customer can do to stop them.
“Insurers say that customers agree to home inspections when they buy a policy and that photographing properties from the sky is less intrusive than the home visits used in the past. They say deploying fleets of surveillance planes lets them respond more quickly to disasters and charge rates that better reflect a property’s risk,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Surveillance Technology Oversight Project founder Albert Fox Cahn said that technology has moved faster than the law.
“There’s a need for updated insurance regulations,” Cahn said. “State law hasn’t caught up with the technology.”
Cahn was nearly dropped by his home insurance company after it was flagged for having moss on his roof that he had fixed months earlier.
Technology is making life easier in some ways, but also creating a whole new set of problems.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story.
