When tracking apps don't want to track you, does it mean you're officially not a threat?

I’ll give it up for Allstate, at least they were up front about it: They had a deal for me — for a discount on my auto insurance they would be able to track, through an app or telepathy or something, my every move behind the wheel.

They would know my speed, my rate of acceleration and deceleration, where I went and how long it took me to get there. Quite a passel of information in exchange for what amounted to a Milk-Bone.

I could see how this discount would wind up costing me money if Allstate were to determine I was a menace on the highway and inflate my overall policy.

General Motors in particular is notorious, says tech writer Kashmir Hill, for hiding a clause in a million pages of fine print that allows it to sell your driving habits to insurance companies.

“Especially troubling is that some drivers with vehicles made by GM say they were tracked even when they did not turn on the feature — called OnStar Smart Driver — and that their insurance rates went up as a result,” Hill  wrote in The New York Times.

Among the problems, no one seems to know the parameters for “hard braking” or “hard acceleration.” And of course there is no context, which is a common downfall of data and analytics. In the long run it might be cheaper to just go ahead and hit the deer instead of slamming on the brakes.

Not to mention that all car companies brag about how fast their vehicles go from 0 to 60. They fail to mention that if you go 0 to 60 in 5.5 seconds your insurance rates will accelerate at the same speed. (One Corvette driver took his sports car to “track day” at a professional course, unaware GM was sending his every move to his insurer — with predictable results.)

I need to stop here and confess this is exactly the sort of story that would have sent me around the moon 30 years ago in the days when I stood tall for personal privacy and fiercely defended my God-given American right to wind out my Chevy 350 V8, Acura V-TECH or BMW straight six to the extreme.

But today? Meh. And I find my indifference to be thoroughly depressing. It’s all part of the pickleball-ification of America. You want to record my driving habits? Fine, knock yourself out. There’s nothing to see here. The car I have settled into — my in-laws’ cloth interior 2002 4-cylinder Toyota Camry (aka the Silver Flash) is never pressed to its modest limits. In the words of Charlie Ryan, the brakes are good, tires are fair.

I have nowhere to get to with any urgency. Everything the Camry does is good enough — I’m pretty sure I’ve never had it over 70.

This is to explain why I willingly signed up for the Allstate discount in exchange for my driving record, or tried to. I downloaded an app and thought I did everything right, but screwed up somewhere along the line and failed to be fully registered. My agent bugged me about it once, then dropped it.

Allstate must assume that if you’re too old to navigate a smartphone app, you’re probably not going to be a high-risk driver to begin with. They’re probably right.

It brought to mind the James McMurtry song about the aging man who lands in Paris and is waved right through the security line without so much as a glance at his passport or luggage. Wondering why, he checks his look in a storefront window and fails to understand the obvious. “It’s nothing you can see, it’s nothing you can smell; but you pose no danger, and man they can tell.”

Rats. Old  age is many things, but perhaps the most discouraging is when the TSA and Allstate no longer see you as a threat.

Why do people hang on to Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch? Is it affection or ambition?

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: When does an insurance tracking app to too far? Am I too old to care?