
Smartphone Location Data Is Worth Big Money to Wall Street - SREinSF
https://www.wsj.com/articles/your-smartphones-location-data-is-worth-big-money-to-wall-street-1541131260
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gleenn
This is such a dark use of tech. Involuntary using people's phones and fta it
says data goes mostly to hedge funds. Then the kicker was at the bottom:

"In September, as Hurricane Florence churned toward the Carolina coast Thasos
watched evacuation zones and found that in well-to-do census blocks, 65% of
the people fled, while only 39% left poor areas. Such information could inform
disaster response or infrastructure spending, yet it might also have
commercial value. “You might look at that and say, ‘Gosh, I could price
insurance differently,’ ” Mr. Pentland said."

So they're not even interested in savings lives so much as pricing insurance.
Fantastic.

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mcrae
Err isn't there social benefit to having better priced insurance? I don't
understand your position here.

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clickok
Assuming that insurance is already priced as accurately as it can be according
to the available data, then discovering that wealthy people tend to evacuate
disaster areas while the poorer residents remain would suggest that you charge
greater premiums for the impoverished and give a price break to the rich. As
it stands, the poor are effectively getting subsidized by otherwise similar
individuals with more wealth.

Insofar as the utility associated with money is roughly logarithmic, then the
net utility from a pricing change will likely decrease. For example, a wealthy
person will be pleased with a $500 reduction in premiums (that's a new pair of
shoes or some decent concert tickets); a $500 increase might induce a poor
person to forgo renewing their life insurance (with disastrous effects for
their dependents should they die) or if they pay it, then other worthy
expenses might get cut to make up the difference (home repairs, sending your
kids to summer camp, retirement savings).

Even assuming that everyone values money equivalently despite their net worth,
it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Here's one wealthy elite technocrat,
already invading people's privacy on an Orwellian scale, and he's using that
access to explicitly prey on poor people to make money for other people who
are already rich.

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RhysU
Or, maybe you can charge both less because now you can replace the flees-
disasters-rate conservative guess with less conservative data. And make a more
competitive product. And reduce costs to end consumers. Not everything has to
be sinister when someone breaks out that different groups of people behave
differently.

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losteric
Bypass paywall:

* DDG: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Your+Smartphone%E2%80%99s+Location...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Your+Smartphone%E2%80%99s+Location+Data+Is+Worth+Big+Money+to+Wall+Street)

* Google: [https://www.google.com/search?q=Your+Smartphone%27s+Location...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Your+Smartphone%27s+Location+Data+Is+Worth+Big+Money+to+Wall+Street)

~~~
justboxing
If Google link fails...
[https://outline.com/yPWTZR](https://outline.com/yPWTZR)

