Cindy Picos was dropped by her home insurer last month. The reason: aerial photos of her roof, which her insurer refused to let her see.
"I thought they had the wrong house," said Picos, who lives in northern California. "Our roof is in fine shape."
Her insurer said its images showed her roof had "lived its life expectancy." Picos paid for an independent inspection that found the roof had another 10 years of life. Her insurer declined to reconsider its decision.
Across the U.S., insurance companies are using aerial images of homes as a tool to ditch properties seen as higher risk.
Nearly every building in the country is being photographed, often without the owner's knowledge. Companies are deploying drones, manned airplanes and high-altitude balloons to take images of properties. No place is shielded: The industry-funded Geospatial Insurance Consortium has an airplane imagery program it says covers 99% of the U.S. population.
Okay which Hexbear is going to start a mutual aid project to paint PPB murals on people’s rooftops? It’s the only solution I can see here.
Someone painted a cock on a nearby highschool's futbol field and it happened to get snapped by satellites feeding Google's map view. Now it's ~~blurred lol~~ actually now it's been rolled back to an old one or something.
I feel like this happens all the time in everyone's neighbourhood, no matter the country (if they have grass football fields of course), it happened in mine.