privacy

It’s a new day not very far in the future. You wake up; your wristwatch has recorded how long you’ve slept, and monitored your heartbeat and breathing. You drive to work; car sensors track your speed and braking. You pick up some breakfast on your way, paying electronically; the transaction and the calorie content of your meal are recorded.

Customers can withhold their fitness data, but that will result in higher premiums, which may put life insurance out of reach for low-income earners. This in turn could have an impact on whether would-be homeowners can take out mortgages, some of which can require a life insurance policy on the principle borrower.

A company using what seems like a fun smartphone game to get you to walk more might be a slippery slope. With access to all that data, what will a big corporation ultimately do with it? This is still new, so the implications are murky.

Insurers are today capable of and are, in fact, gathering ever-more-detailed information about us, using publicly available and purchasable information like shopping records, household details, and social-media profiles to inform decisions.

Congress may have forced Mark Zuckerberg to reveal more about personal data gathered on Facebook (FB). But consider this: Your insurance company likely knows a lot more about you. 

Richard Keating investigates how big data and new technologies are changing the face of the insurance industry, and examines the resulting threats and opportunities.

Jennifer Golbeck, Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland speaks with LIMRA’s Eric Sondergeld about “Big Social Data” and how to balance the need by industry for insight with the desire for privacy by consumers.

The growing use of smartphone apps and wearable devices to generate personal health and lifestyle data poses a dilemma for privacy. While individuals have much to gain using apps to help them manage ongoing health concerns, including better understanding of their health, the privacy of the data itself may be at risk.

Big Data is scary. That's the one thing that four people from very different professions agreed on during a panel at a Kenyon College political-science conference about technology's impact on privacy in the 21st century.

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/privacy-security-big-data-insurance-con...