#progressive snapshot

[hipsterzombiesquad]

so... I drive my car less than three times a month, I'm a safe driver, I have a flawless record and I thought "hey I could save with progressive snapshot" yeah, I could save I saved $26 a policy period thanks progressive. that was totally worth the headache

[planetzuda]

Progressive Insurance Snapshot Manufacturer Hacked

Progressive Insurance sells a device called Snapshot that is advertised as “This little device turns your safe driving into savings“, which sounds great at first glance. What most don’t know is that the company who makes snapshot is called Xirgo Technologies and they are hacked. We’ve tried calling Xirgo Technologies several times and emailed them about xirgotech dot com being hacked since June 22nd, 2015 but have yet to hear back from them nor have they cleaned up the hack. When we called Xirgo Technologies we always went to a voicemail and never spoke to a person. Does Xirgo Technologies believe that their site being hacked is supposed to make  Progressive customers and their other customers feel confident about this manufacturers ability to make  devices that are put into  cars?  Unfortunately, the only response we got from Xirgo Technologies was on June 22nd and it was an automated email from their sales account that said  “Dear Ryan Satterfield, Thank you for your note! We will get back to you as soon as possible.”

Earlier this year researcher Corey Thuen exposed some #security issues in the #SnapShot dongle by Progressive Insurance that connects into your OBD2 in your car. We contacted   Mr. Thuen on Twitter who said he hasn’t done any research on Xirgo Technologies Snapshot dongle since around February. We noticed a tweet by Mr. Thuen referencing the Xirgo Technology website hack that he posted on May 5th, 2015, which is before we discovered the hack and contacted the the company.  https://twitter.com/CoreyThuen/status/595716845438631936 

It’s puzzling why the company that makes devices for Progressive #insurance  that claims to turn “safe driving into savings” won’t even clean up a hack in their site let alone fix the security holes in the device they make for Progressive.   What makes this even more interesting to us is that Xirgo Technologies website is running an out of date version of a #WordPress plugin called w3 Total Cache when there is a security release for W3 total cache that we helped with. Xirgo Technologies is also running WordPress 3.5 when the latest version of WordPress is  Wordpress 4.2.2 which is the latest  security release for WordPress. Of course there are a lot of other security releases since WordPress 3.5, so as always it is  important to keep your software up-to-date. What we don’t know is if  Xirgo Technologies website communicates at all with their products like snapshot or if any of their source code has been leaked by any hack due to their  out of date software that is insecure.  What we can see is a “pharma hack”, which is meant to manipulate search engine results so the company who is selling the pharmaceuticals will come up higher in the search rankings. 

[unkamatt]

How the Progressive Snapshot actually makes you a worse driver.

Most of you have seen the commercials about a discounted rate with the Progressive Snapshot device. It stops rate suckers by monitoring your driving, and you get a discount. Here's the REAL way it works, though. You get this device and plug it into your car. It monitors your braking activity. More than 7 mph in under a second, and it beeps at you. While you may think that's generous, it's not. It's actually pretty insulting. You see, it doesn't adjust to how fast you're going, just how hard you brake. It doesn't have any way to check surrounding traffic either. Progressive thinks that if you brake hard, you're a bad driver. If it's a long hard brake... it'll beep at you twice, which is utter bullshit. One solid hard brake is still just one solid hard brake. That damn thing beeps on me more often than not. In some instances, people in my car will even say "Really?" when it beeps. Why this specifically insults me, is that I recently had my brake pads changed. At 75,000 miles, on the ORIGINAL pads from when I bought the car (only had 6 miles on it, 4 of which I put on), my pads still had 4mm left. Which apparently is quite a bit for brake pads. So for this device to tell me I'm a hard braker... it has no idea what it's beeping about. Hard braking is also usually the result of most idiots driving on the road. So the beeps are punishment for you NOT rear-ending them with THEIR shitty driving. These three little beeps will enrage you, however. You start to cuss at the thing, you begin to roll through stop signs to prevent a full "too hard stop" (according to the device). See that green that just turned yellow? You bet you stomped the gas instead of the brake... anything to avoid those beeps. Rolling through stop signs and blasting through yellow lights, all to earn (maybe) a discount, is all conditioning to make you a more dangerous, wildly unpredictable driver. Slow down on a tight turn? No way. This damn thing will beep at me. You bet I'm taking this 10 mph turn at my current speed of 50 mph. No beeps for me! Even worse is within 30 days they send you an initial report. Inevitably it tells you that you're not eligible for a discount. That really bums you out, and now you're even MORE irate at that damn thing. The only people who get this discount is people with 2 cars... plug it into one and solely drive the other around instead.