Telematics still makes a lot of drivers nervous. You hear phrases like “black box”, “driver score” and “tracking”, and it’s easy to imagine a little device quietly watching everything you do and reporting back to your insurer.
One of the most common questions is very simple:
“Does my telematics device really know everything I do?”
The honest answer is no, not even close. Telematics only knows the things that help an insurer understand how risky you are when you’re driving. It doesn’t know who you’re with, what you’re talking about, or what you do when you get where you’re going. If you want a bigger-picture explainer of where this all sits, it’s worth reading our guide to black box vs telematics as well.
What a telematics device actually does
Under the bonnet, a telematics system is basically GPS and motion sensors turned into a picture of driving behaviour. It looks at how the vehicle moves, and then uses a set of rules to translate that movement into a score or rating.
That’s what happens with Zego Sense telematics insurance. The app focuses on trips, not your entire day. When you’re on the sofa, walking round Tesco or sitting at work, there is nothing to measure from a driving point of view – so nothing is recorded. Sense is designed around journeys in a vehicle, and around how you drive during those journeys.
Does telematics track you 24/7?
This is the big fear: that the device is always “on”, watching everything. In reality, telematics is only interested in driving. It cares about when the car is moving, how quickly it’s moving, and how smoothly it’s being driven. Outside of that, the data isn’t useful, so it’s not part of the scoring.
App-based products like Zego Sense are explicitly built around detecting when a journey starts and ends. If you’re not travelling in a vehicle, there isn’t a meaningful trip to score, and the system treats it that way.
What Zego Sense looks at when scoring driving
Driving behaviour | What Sense looks for | What doesn’t matter |
|---|---|---|
Speed | Repeated speeding relative to the road and conditions | A brief or isolated speed slip |
Acceleration | Regular harsh acceleration patterns | Normal pull-away from junctions |
Braking | Frequent late or heavy braking | One emergency stop |
Cornering | Consistently sharp or unstable cornering | A single tight turn |
Driving consistency | Habits repeated across many trips | One unusual journey |
Time of driving | How driving style changes at different times | Simply driving at night |
Trips | How the car is driven during journeys | What you do outside the car |
Can it see where you go, and does that matter?
Yes, a telematics system can see your route, but it doesn’t care whether that route leads to the gym, a friend’s house or a late-night drive-thru. The route is there to give context to your driving, not to judge your lifestyle.
What matters is how you behave on that route. Did you brake hard because the traffic ahead stopped suddenly? Did you approach a roundabout smoothly or stamp on the brake at the last second? Do you consistently speed up on long, empty stretches, or do you keep a steady pace? The destination doesn’t change the score; the driving style does.
Telematics isn’t secretly building a profile of your routine. It’s just trying to understand road risk.
What about speed, are you marked down for every slip?
Speed is one of the things telematics can see, but not in the “1 mph over and your score is ruined” way people often imagine. What matters is the pattern. If you’re constantly driving well above the limit or combining high speed with harsh braking and sharp cornering, that’s very different to a single, short-lived moment where you crept over during an overtake.
Because telematics can separate those two patterns, telematics insurance is generally cheaper if you demonstrate good driving. The system can see the difference between someone who drives sensibly 99% of the time and someone who pushes their luck on every journey.
Do they know if you’re the driver or just a passenger?
This is a very fair concern with app-based telematics. To your phone’s sensors, being on a moving bus can look a lot like being in a moving car. Good systems are built to filter that out as much as possible and, when they’re not sure, to ask you.
Zego Sense is designed to avoid scoring journeys that clearly aren’t you driving, and to give you a way to correct things that don’t look right. The aim isn’t to catch you out; it’s to build an accurate picture of how you drive when you’re actually behind the wheel.
Can telematics listen to you or read your messages?
No. There is no microphone recording your conversations and no “secret” access to your messages or apps. Telematics doesn’t know who you called, what you texted or what playlist you put on. It only sees the movement of the vehicle.
If your driving looks erratic – drifting around the lane, reacting late, braking hard over and over again – the system can recognise that pattern as higher risk, but it doesn’t know whether the cause was your phone, a row with a passenger, tiredness or something else entirely. It only ever sees the outcome on the road.
Does night driving automatically hurt your score?
Some older black-box-style products did take a very hard line on late-night driving, and that reputation has stuck. Modern telematics, especially app-based approaches, tend to be more nuanced.
Night-time is one risk factor among many, not an automatic penalty. What really matters is whether your driving changes at those times. If you’re still smooth, predictable and calm at 11pm, that’s very different to someone who only drives late at night and spends most of it speeding or reacting late.
For shift workers, students and people who simply have unusual schedules, this can actually make telematics fairer than traditional insurance, because you’re judged on how you drive at night, not just the fact that you’re out at night at all.
Do they know when you brake or accelerate?
Yes, and this is where telematics really earns its place. By looking at how you accelerate, how you brake and how you handle corners, the system can tell a lot about your level of risk.
Someone who eases up to junctions, brakes progressively and steers smoothly through bends is statistically less likely to be involved in a crash than someone who regularly slams the brakes, floors the accelerator and throws the car into corners. That doesn’t mean an emergency stop will wreck your score. Products like Zego Sense are designed to pay more attention to your long-term habits than to a single moment where a pedestrian stepped out or the car in front braked suddenly.
Do they know how you feel – stressed, angry, tired?
Telematics can’t read your emotions. It can’t see your face, hear your voice or measure stress directly. What it can see is the driving pattern that sometimes comes with those states: erratic speeds, slower reactions, sudden lane corrections.
If that pattern shows up again and again, the system will treat it as higher risk, but it still doesn’t know whether the cause was a bad day at work, a crying baby in the back or something else entirely. It doesn’t need to know the story behind it; it only needs to understand the safety implications.
So what do telematics devices really know about you?
Once you strip out all the myths, it’s surprisingly simple. A telematics setup knows how the car moves when you drive it. It knows whether you generally accelerate gently or aggressively, whether you brake early and smoothly or suddenly and late, whether your speed is usually appropriate for the road, and whether you handle corners with control or throw the car around. Most importantly, it knows how consistent those behaviours are over time.
It doesn’t know who you met, what you talked about, what you bought or what you listened to. It knows driving, not your entire life. And because of that, telematics insurance is generally cheaper if you demonstrate good driving across your journeys, regardless of your age, job title or postcode.
Where Zego Sense fits in
At Zego, we’ve tried to build a telematics experience that feels fair and transparent, rather than mysterious or intrusive. Zego Sense telematics insurance is our way of doing that: a product that focuses on real driving behaviour and gives safer drivers a clearer path to better outcomes over time.
If you’re still trying to work out how the old-school “black box” image compares to modern, app-led approaches, our article on black box vs telematics walks through the key differences and helps you decide which model makes more sense for you.
The bottom line is simple: telematics doesn’t know everything you do. It knows how you drive. If that’s one of your strengths, it’s finally something that can start working in your favour.
