
NY Insurers Can Evaluate Social Media Use If They Can Prove Why It’s Needed - TuringNYC
https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-insurers-can-evaluate-your-social-media-useif-they-can-prove-why-its-needed-11548856802
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erentz
I would like to see the increasing granulization of insurance put to an end,
because otherwise it won’t stop. There should be one pool, everyone’s in it,
we spread risk, and the whole damn thing is simpler and easier to regulate.
Sure, Mr Base Jumper is going to raise your premiums when he breaks his leg,
so what. Maybe he doesn’t drink and so has less health affects than you. Or
you’ll raise his premiums when it turns out you carried a gene for disease-X
and got it at 45.

What we have now is an ad-hoc nonsensible set of what you can and can’t risk
profile on, and every time we learn some new way to risk profile then we’ll
have to decide again if we want to regulate it. On top of that this just
increases the risk of insurance companies getting it wrong and needing to be
bailed out. I’d rather we had a conservative, boring and simple insurance
industry and just get off the treadmill.

~~~
PavlovsCat
> There should be one pool, everyone’s in it, we spread risk, and the whole
> damn thing is simpler and easier to regulate.

Call me naive, but I also always thought that's kind of the point of it:
spreading the risk, or solidarity to use a less fashionable term. People can
be very sick through no fault of their own, and those who are healthier should
look out for them. If you calculate that "fair share" according to exactly how
sick people are, then what's the point, wouldn't that just be a needless
middleman that gets paid upfront?

~~~
closeparen
The idea is correctly price the consequences of lifestyle choices.

Cautious Prius owners probably wouldn’t be happy sharing equally in a risk
pool with enthusiastic drivers of sports coupes. If insurance rates were
standardized, there’d be a lot more sports cars out there, until the Prius
constituency got them banned altogether. Charging different insurance rates
gives all parties what they want at a cost that creates appropriate
incentives.

You might be able to say something similar about health insurance and
sedentary smokers vs. runners. If an extra hour of work is less economically
valuable than a gym visit, the incentive structure should reflect that.

I agree that insurance rates should not be affected by luck. One of the
reasons the preexisting condition part of the ACA is important.

~~~
JamesBarney
1\. It's hard to disentangle lifestyle choices from genetic ones. If someone
is born with an insatiable appetite that means it's 10x harder for them to
stay at a healthy weight compared to someone else is that a lifestyle choice
of genetics?

2\. Being healthy already has quality of life consequences. And the extra cost
to insure those lifestyle choices are probably pretty low, and most of that
cost is just shifting it from primary insurance to medicare. Because everyone
dies of something, and a lot of times it's really expensive. Insurers care a
lot about whether that happens at 64 or 66. But as a society it doesn't really
matter, and the insured bears most of the impact.

~~~
MRD85
In support of your comment, when talking about weight it's common to talk
about "fast metabolisms" keeping people skinny. Studies have shown that
metabolisms don't vary much at all. What does vary is how hunger signals work
with different people. The people who complain about being too skinny and
can't gain weight simply find it difficult to eat enough to gain weight. Their
body tells them they're not hungry. If you force feed them they'll still gain
weight.

I'm one of those people who gain weight easily due to always wanting to eat. I
was morbidly obese at 19 despite coming from a household of healthy eating.
I'm now 33 and have maintained a healthy weight for years but it isn't fun.
For me to maintain a constant, healthy weight I need to be hungry. Despite 5+
years of maintenance, I am still hungry constantly.

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gruez
The only reason this works now is that people behave naturally (or at least
natural enough) when posting on social media. If social media profiling
becomes more prevalent (like this article suggests), everyone is going to be
much more careful when it comes to what they're posting. All their real
activity is going to be driven into pseudonymous (or at least private
channels) that can't be easily monitored, and their "real" accounts is going
to be so carefully curated that the signal to noise ratio is abysmally low. Or
at least, this is my hope. I could be overly optimistic, and people will
continue posting their true selves against their own interest.

~~~
Spooky23
People are pretty dumb.

There’s another side to this though, why should a low risk person be in the
same risk tranche as somebody who has lots of guns in plain sight, is out
drinking 3 nights a week or has high-risk hobbies?

Life insurers have pretty transparent interests. A middle aged guy with guns
and heavy alcohol use is a more expensive risk for death. Right now they only
use age, occupation, specific medical and smoking status.

~~~
mikeash
Insurance is weird.

It operates by taking events that are unpredictable individually and grouping
them together such that they are predictable in aggregate. The larger the
groups are, the better this works.

At the same time, there’s a competitive advantage to using smaller groups, if
you can reliably discriminate. Except that once you take it too far, you
approach the individual case again and insurance ceases to have a point.

A life insurance company that buckets everyone together will lose out to one
that divides people up into groups based on their risk. That one in turn would
lose out to a company that has an accurate death clock they can use on every
customer to provide perfectly individualized coverage. And yet the death clock
company won’t be able to sell any insurance at all, unless they can keep it a
total secret, because people could accomplish the same thing on their own.

~~~
robkop
I think you're missing something important in this.

If you make the fundamental assumption that what happens to people has a level
of randomness to it (don't think we'll ever be able to escape this assumption)
then insurance always will have a point even if your bucket size is the size
of the individual.

This is because insurers provide a hedge against a certain amount of negative
randomness over a time peroid. They calculate the risk on a policy as if they
provided it to you a million times and then base their pricing on that. Since
they do this across a body of customers the pooling system still functions, it
just is more accurately priced.

So as long as there is a risk instability over time they eill have the ability
to provide a service worth paying for.

~~~
mikeash
You're right that there's always some utility as long as there's randomness,
but that utility decreases the more accurate your predictions get.

Rather than a magical death clock, let's say that actuarial science gets to
the point where it can figure out an individual's life expectancy ±5 years
with a 90% hit rate. The possibility of being hit by a bus or having some
unknown wild-card disease means you could die much younger, and you might beat
the odds and die much older, but 90% of people die within their predicted
range.

Now, Bob goes to sign up for life insurance and he's predicted to die at age
50. He really wants this insurance to ensure his family can survive without
him, but the premiums are completely outrageous, so he passes. Alice is
predicted to die at age 100 so her premiums are cheap, but she sees little
point in it, so doesn't sign up.

In this world, I see a lot of accidental death insurance being sold, but
almost no general life insurance. Some people would buy it, as it would have
some utility, but not a whole lot.

~~~
Spooky23
Bob needs to participate in a group policy.

------
Analemma_
A bunch of people have pointed out that, for all the criticism we’re leveling
at China’s nightmarish social credit system, we’re well on our way to building
the exact same thing but with corporations in charge. And while you can talk
about how this is _totally_ different because the corporations can’t put you
in jail, that really doesn’t matter at all if I have to constantly self-censor
all my words and thoughts or lose my health insurance. That’s an equally
shitty outcome.

~~~
FiveSquared
True, I never show my real name in any public platform unless it's my
"official" one, which is whitewashed. I go through pseudonymous accounts every
2 years for my privacy. We already do have social credit, it's called your
credit score. Self-deception is a powerful force. Everybody rise up to the
polls! Oh wait, it's both sides that are abetting this crap. Just vote with
the closest to freedom (including a social safety net) and don't worry, cause
you can't control it.

~~~
abapologist
Unless I’m mistaken, your credit score is your financial credit rating, not
your social. It isn’t affected if you get a ticket jaywalking, or acting like
a jerk.

There are interconnections between the two, but there are pretty clear
distinctions.

~~~
TeMPOraL
A matter of time, I guess. Your "insurance score", as seen by insurance
companies, provides information on how likely you're to be able to pay back a
long-term loan, or even to be alive long enough to pay it back. And "insurance
score" is based on increasingly deep insight into your lifestyle. It's only a
matter of time before someone will have the bright idea to use "insurance
score" as an input to credit score - and then, suddenly, you have social
credit (sans the politics part).

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kozikow
It's quite hard to avoid "disguised and illegal race-based underwriting", so
expect some lawsuits soon. Even something as simple as a zip code is too
biased, so an attorney shut it down in a project I was working on.

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mc32
NY has some odd laws. On the one hand they are progressive (energy, human
health), on the other hand they allow some very neo-liberal things to happen
like where debt collectors can continue suing you, if your bank has one branch
in NY, and now this nonsense.

~~~
dajohnson89
It's almost as if NY has a huge financial industry that lobbies an otherwise
liberal government.

~~~
mc32
Yet they overcome the auto industry lobby’s efforts and many others’...

~~~
bluGill
The financial industry being in NY means actual voters. While a company cannot
force their employees to vote in any particular way, they can make their
employees aware that some politician did something... They can't actually say
raises and bonuses were affected but if you read between the lines you can see
the relation.

The auto industry isn't large in NY. When enough voters in NY decide the auto
industry is doing something bad, no amount of lobbing from the industry will
prevent the laws they don't like.

Politicians need votes. Money is not nearly as powerful as a voter who is
informed.

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Rebelgecko
Not particularly surprising after the recent NY bill which will require gun
owners to share their social media logins and search engine history with the
state. Sometimes the slope really is slippery.

~~~
FiveSquared
Then spying, tracking, censorship of "offensive" or "unpatriotic" words
depending on your political side for little gain of the little people. Of
course, the state won't do anything to actually reduce mass shooting, they
profit of fear and hate. History doesn't repeat, it is remixed.

~~~
Zecar
Mass shootings are vanishingly rare. Your odds of being in one are
microscopic.

~~~
Spooky23
Risk assessment fundamentally about probability and impact.

We took measures to get serious about drunk driving because it increased the
probability of car accidents, especially at night,and was killing people.

On the flip side, we mandate tamper evident seals in medicine because the rare
event of tampering hurt a small number of people, but undermined the citizens
faith in the institutions they depend on.

The mass shooting issue is like the pill bottle problem. It’s a serious matter
with an obvious solution. At the end of the day, it’s a problem unleashed by
marketing — as hunting and shooting sport participation evaporated, gunmakers
were left with a problem. Now we have batshit crazy people with political
power, which is a genie that will be difficult to put back in the bottle.

~~~
Zecar
> It’s a serious matter with an obvious solution.

This is a bold statement. Why do you think the solutions are obvious? Do you
believe this is a subject without nuance?

~~~
Spooky23
No gun, no bullet, no shooting.

Look at the gun death rates in the northeast compared to the south.

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dsfyu404ed
"Hey, why did my rate go up?"

"I'm sorry, we cannot offer you a CleanSocial(TM) discount because your social
media footprint is insufficient to properly inform us of your risk profile"

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elektor
I don't imagine this will go over very well with most people.

However, headlines like this are a good reminder to practice good social media
hygiene; I've been careful about what I post and have a habit of deleting old
Facebook posts from my teenage days.

~~~
taurath
That reminds me I’d like to erase my HN comments over a few years old.. oh
wait.

(Seriously, can we please make it easier to remove comments/accounts from non-
archive sites? There’s not a single person on earth that can survive a Willie
Horton style campaign where everything you say is examined without context -
it’s an abdication of responsibility on those running a community)

~~~
darpa_escapee
I wonder how compliant HN is with Article 17 of the GDPR[1]. It's the "right
to erasure".

[1] [https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/)

~~~
taurath
Personal data is not the same as comments posted on a public forum, but its
not to deter the most determined actors - its more to indicate that I no
longer want to have any association with the comments.

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neonate
[https://outline.com/c82rJ3](https://outline.com/c82rJ3)

~~~
shishy
Hadn't heard of outline before -- very cool. Thanks for sharing this link.

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arcaster
Looks like it's time to either fudge all my social media with unicorns and
rainbows or start operating purely behind pseudonyms?

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nabla9
When social media use and friends you have there affects the price of the
services, it's already a type of social credit.

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Dirlewanger
Ah, yes, this is when the _real_ dystopia begins

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no_love
Joke’s on them. They’ll be lucky to uncover a handful of uncorroberated shadow
profiles and spam catcher email dead ends that flout “real name” policies.

Meanwhile, I scarcely have a need for insurance. Come up and get me.

~~~
maccard
> Meanwhile, I scarcely have a need for insurance. Come up and get me.

I don't live in the US but I have 5 insurance policies - home insurance
(mandated by my bank for my mortgage), car insurance (mandated by having a
car), health insurance (optional but less so if you live in the US), Travel
insurance (traveling for work mandates I'm covered by a policy) and life
assurance (the only actual optional one) - should I have to provide all of
these groups my social media details even though I don't "want" to have them?

Further, whos to say they decide that by me not participating in "normal"
activities online, that they won't decline or offer me a substantially worse
policy?

