There Are Some Big Caveats

Phone use before a crash does not automatically make the phone user responsible for the crash.

The researchers didn’t have fault determinations. Someone could be sitting at a red light on a hands-free call and get rammed by a pickup from behind. Activity 29 seconds before impact also tells us a lot less than somebody actively tapping the screen one second before impact.

CMT additionally uses machine learning to estimate whether its user was driving or riding as a passenger. That classification has reportedly exceeded 96 percent accuracy, which is impressive, but leaves some room for error.

So I would not take these numbers and proclaim that 751 crashes were “caused by phones.” The study doesn’t support that. What the study does support, very strongly, is that active phone use immediately before crashes happens a hell of a lot more often than police reports manage to capture.

What a creepy Orwellian system we've built, to have this kind of information down to seconds. In the next study they'll be including what direction the driver's eyes were pointed in at the time of the crash.

I could’ve sworn there was a study that showed phones are less of a problem than gigantic cars, but that may have been damage/death toll instead of crash rate.

It always makes me curious how they even obtained this data

From the study

The data — which come from safe-driving apps that drivers voluntarily enroll in — show that cellphone use prior to crashes is undercounted in police reports by a factor of at least 7.

Since police reports do not always record crash times and locations with perfect precision, crashes that occurred within the same 15-minute window and within the same one-mile radius were determined to be a match.

This whole study is worthless. There's also a whole ton of assertions with zero source.