iPhone app tells you if you drive like a jerk

Is your idea of driving hell someone sitting in the passenger seat telling you how to drive?

Well, here's something even more fun: an iPhone app that grades your driving and tells you if you if you're a danger to society.

State Farm, the fine upstanding insurance company, has launched a Driver Feedback app that acts as your driving schoolteacher.

According to State Farm, the three parts of your driving that need to be measured are, wait for it: acceleration, braking, and cornering.

Strangely, this omits staring at people out of the window, nodding off at the wheel, and talking on your iPhone while on the road.

This little demon of an app needs only to be activated before it gives you a score at the end of every journey you take. Which, for some, would surely rank alongside having your eyebrows being bitten away by a rabid centipede.

It is entirely understandable that companies are creating apps for everything they can think of to somehow inveigle their way into people's increasingly smartphoned lives.

However, if you are a parent, are you really going to demand that your rosy-cheeked youth comes home and immediately shows you his iPhone to tell you how State Farm's app graded his driving back from his, um, friend's house? "You come home at 3 in the morning and you only scored a 36? What's wrong with you, Algernon?"

As Algy stares blankly, his dad clutches the iPhone and continues: "You took four bends dangerously? You braked with too much aggression? What have your mother and I done to deserve this?"

I am worried that State Farm might have accelerated a little too quickly in releasing this dangerous little app. What if kids start playing around, throwing their cars this way and that, just to see how low they can score? A low score to a gamer would surely earn him high standing among his peers.

And what if adults do everything they can to reach the perfect score? Surely, they'll merely clog up the roads with their politically correct driving, especially with all that sticking-to-the-speed-limit stuff. All that law abiding could also incite road rage among other, less careful drivers, potentially causing assaults, fender benders, and other mishaps.

This is America, people. We fight for our freedoms.