"In the near future you will have to submit to personal surveillance to get insurance..."

[HiPointDem]

One of my buddies...could not get over his disbelief that people shopped online. He was not technologically unsophisticated...He thought it was crazy to give up that much personal information to anyone unless absolutely unavoidable, and certainly not a mere retailer. Cheaper online prices weren’t enough of an inducement...

Like it or not, you in the not too distant future are going to have to submit to personal surveillance to get many types of insurance and financial products. And that future is closer than you probably realize.

Matt Stoller wrote in the spring about how the info tech industry is pushing the idea hard and finding a receptive audience:

Profit-driven surveillance does not starts and stop with young adults. It is, in fact, becoming pervasive. The main theme of a recent IBM consulting document on the future of the insurance industry is how much more money an insurance company can make if it tracks and tags its customers. This is particularly true for auto insurance companies, some of whom like Allstate and Progressive are experimenting on new technologies. For instance, IBM suggests that “A “pay-as-you-live” product would trade some location and time-of-day privacy data for lower insurance bills overall....”

It’s not just sensors in your car – insurance companies are modeling tighter and tighter risk chunks. IBM goes on, saying that new products “will facilitate “just-in-time insurance” as a person moves through a set of “spaces.” Each step of the journey represents a different risk such as car-to-train-station, train-to-city-station, station-to- office, and so on. Each leg of the trip truly represents a varying amount of risk.” Tracking these movements could require nothing more than downloading an app on a smart phone, or some other device. But it is literally the application of financial engineering to your very liberty, or the toll-boothing of your life... It could be nothing less than a new form of authoritarianism, a soft version in which there are political choices and a measure of openness, but a jello-like network of corporate cartels holding power. In this society, you’ll get whatever zone of freedom you can pay for, and if you can’t afford any freedom, you won’t get any.

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/11/the-expanding-surveillance-society-getting-you-to-buy-into-being-monitored.html#pVQ9PYZ1PTfrAzHF.99

[TexasBushwhacker]

1. I have a sensor from Progressive but it was voluntary

My premiums went down $15 after driving just a month. After 4 months I send it back, so it's not like I have big brother watching me forever. They're just logging what times of day I drive (late nights are highest risk), how often I slam on my brakes, my speed, and how many miles I'm putting on my car.

[HiPointDem]

3. read the article. it's a trojan horse, and your lower rates will mean people

who don't want to be spied on 24/7 will pay more. at some point, you won't be able to get insurance without submitting to being spied on.

yes, eventually it will be big brother watching you forever. because the same principles can be applied to grocery purchases & health insurance (now mandatory) & multiple other venues.

The information will be available to police and other agencies as well, just as your computer activity is, just as security camera information is. Marketeers, lots of profit opportunities too.

As another commenter said:

The present case is disturbing precisely because it is so ungrounded in need. The social purpose of insurance is to spread risk throughout the population. Segmenting the target population is a means of reconcentrating that risk. But when this risk is individualized and monitored, the social purpose is lost because risk is not spread. And this is done at great cost to personal privacy. Worse, for a fictive assessment of risk. Driving is a complex activity. No matter how much data is collected there is a level of randomness and imponderable effects, noise as it were, that negates further precision.

The result is a system that does not fulfill its stated purpose (risk assessment), is completely at odds with its social purpose (spreading risk), and produces mountains of personal data about you which can be exploited and abused by both the private sector and government.

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/11/the-expanding-surveillance-society-getting-you-to-buy-into-being-monitored.html#pVQ9PYZ1PTfrAzHF.99

But, as the bottom 90% of the population is being systematically impoverished, no doubt many will stand in line to be monitored to save some money, in the same way that many stand in line for walmart's low, low prices.

We are building our own prison, imo.

[msongs]

2. no person/entity should be allowed take out insurance on you without your permission and knowledge n

[HiPointDem]

4. it's not about that. it's about making surveillance mandatory or else no insurance

for you.

[Politicalboi]

5. Along with DNA

For licenses. It's coming.

[KT2000]

6. people complain about government

but i have found insurance companies more obtrusive than the government. They also raise rates more often than the gov. does on taxes.
Insuance companies are practicing extortion IMHO.

[OnyxCollie]

7. K&R. nt

[smirkymonkey]

8. K&R!

[Odin2005]

9. This stuff is terrifying!

Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon is here.

[HiPointDem]

10. panopticon was my thought as well.