Last week there was some debate spurred by some of the larger insurers of the Netherlands who want to use tracking data to personalize insurance coverage. A piece in the Reformatorisch Dagblad of all places and Rob Wijnberg talking about it at DWDD.
The problem is that insurance by definition is not personalized and we should be protected from each other’s best interests. I tweetstormed about it and have recorded it below.
1/ Recent developments in NL have sparked the debate about the changing role of insurance in an age of personal tracking and big data.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
2/ Tempting as it may be for insurers to know more about us, it is in their and our best interests that they do not.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
3/ Insurers' job from a user perspective is to hedge us for the consequences of the unforeseen.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
4/ Data science may claim that it can see the future. Big data actually does not remove the unforeseen for the (n=1) individual case.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
5/ Insurers have proposed two general ways they would like to use data: to penalize wrong behavior and to help people improve.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
6/ The first of these tasks is better left to the government and the second we are better suited to do ourselves.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
7/ We wouldn't want government to track us so they can automatically punish us. Why would we allow a company to do this?
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
8/ Big data can improve lives by informing research and democratic policy. This would help everybody and also bind insurers.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
9/ Conflating government and insurance is not that weird in NL where both are heavily intertwined, but maybe they shouldn't be.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 5, 2015
This is particularly salient from a design perspective if you see the tweets below. What this comes down to is a policy design problem of a vast scale, a level of abstraction up again from service design. People aren’t well equipped to make these decisions for themselves and they probably shouldn’t have to be. They should be aware of which expertise they are lacking and they should know who they can trust. Creating those two competencies are the two hardest problems of our time.
@pieninja People's idea of how they behave is often not consistent with how they actually behave. That's one risk.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 6, 2015
@pieninja The second risk: people have no idea (and have no idea that they have no idea) of how their behaviour is measured and modelled.
— Alper Çuğun (@alper) October 6, 2015