Behavioral risk models make constant tracking structurally necessary for insurers

Evidence

The Shared Value group of insurers, which includes the South African company Discovery and its product VitalityDrive, claims to change “individual behaviour through incentives for fitness and healthy eating.” Beneath the inspiring words is a clear-eyed focus on what Discovery calls “the behavioral nature of risk.” Once insurers’ risk becomes defined as principally about the insured’s ongoing behavior (not occasional accidents), the relationship of insurer to insured becomes one that requires tracking. But do insurers’ commercial interests really make them good life trainers? There are signs—even in the United States, which leads this development—that many now find this particular type of trade-off unacceptable. Unacceptable or not, data relations are already becoming for many a compulsory dimension of both labor and life. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 421

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the attention/surveillance canonical framing: the shift from event-based to continuous-behavior risk parallels platform surveillance capitalism’s move from discrete clicks to ambient behavioral surplus. — connects to: Insurance shifts from mitigating risk to eliminating it via continuous monitoring — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 668; Behavioral-prediction markets recruit merchants and insurers into the surveillance economy. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1083; Auto insurance is being reorganized around real-time driver behavior surveillance — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 666 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: empirical evidence on consumer backlash to telematics — the passage asserts ‘many now find this trade-off unacceptable’ without citing data.

Broader Connections

• Auto insurance is being reorganized around real-time driver behavior surveillance #exemplifies (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 666
• Insurance shifts from mitigating risk to eliminating it via continuous monitoring #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 668
• Behavioral surplus flows back to shape driver behavior and feed prediction futures markets #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 679
• Behavioral-prediction markets recruit merchants and insurers into the surveillance economy. #corroborates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1083
• Low-probability high-consequence risks inflate fear and enable extreme policies #expands (0.70) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2115