"In the near future you will have to submit to personal surveillance to get insurance..." [View all]
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
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