4 ms·
No, no one cares about your lunch today. But if I have your history of eating sandwiches every day, and sell it to your insurance company, who now increases you
by calgoo 7y ago
No, no one cares about your lunch today. But if I have your history of eating sandwiches every day, and sell it to your insurance company, who now increases your quote because an algorithm says that you have a higher risk for heart attacks or colon cancer; then it might matter.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoThey can effectively do the same thing by offering discounts for those who submit their lunch data. Like they already do with excercise data from wearable devices. Insurance is in a funny spot, because the whole premise of insurance is to protect against the unknown, but better and better data is making things known that weren’t before, requiring a change in pricing (lest their competitors beat them to it).
- crankylinuxuser 7y agoBut the sick part is the asymmetry: the company(ies) know, and the individuals don't. Would an individual change their practices if they were told that something they were doing was harmful? But, they were never given that choice. Instead, the data is collected, categorized, and sold. Insurance companies can collaborate all the data and extrapolate trends at scale. Now, these insurance companies also have a fiduciary responsibility to lower costs and raise profits to their shareholders. What that amounts is that every insurance company will have to do the same, with slight variations. But we the populace will be worse off with unknown black boxes saying worse things about us (mortality, health, safety) and for us few ways to change things aside gross generalizations our doctors give us.
- jolfdb 7y ago> fiduciary responsibility to lower costs and raise profits to their shareholders. This is a thoroughly debunked lie
- ta34729384 7y agoBy definition. Practically, this is precisely what happens in almost all cases.
- addicted 7y agoIn other words, they ask you to opt in.
- cm2012 7y agoGood thing none of the major advertisers would even consider selling the actual data connected to you to anyone else. They will happily sell the ability to advertise to you, but that is a very different thing.
- throwawaymath 7y agoThat's not really correct. Yodlee almost certainly has a record of the vast majority of your credit/debit transactions. It doesn't sell the ability to advertise to you as a specific demographic, it sells that data directly. If you log into the free public wireless network available in most areas, your presence at that location will be logged, correlated to your identity and sold. Again, Foursquare sells this data directly, not the ability to advertise to you. Thasos sells your location history based on mobile data. Slice sells your location data based on mobile SDKs it provides developers in return for your data. I can go on and on. Is there at least an attempt to anonymize this data? Usually, yes. Does that work in practice? Sometimes, often even. But frequently it does not. You need fewer than 33 bits of independent data to uniquely identify anyone on Earth. There are only so many other people in your area and age demographic who share similar waking hours, interests, habits and location data. It is a myth that companies don't sell user data directly because it's their golden goose. Facebook and Google don't, but most of the data they have can be reconstructed independently from a variety of other sources that freely advertise it.