Remember a while back when Walgreen moves their employees over to a private insurance exchange?  Well there’s more to imagethis exchange that what meets the eye here.  Aon has hundreds of data scientists as an insurance broker so these folks from Walgreens, well you can bet there’s a huge file of data on hand about them who now buy their insurance from the Aon exchange. 

Walgreens Plans to Move 180,000 Employees Over to Insurance Exchange Managed By AON Consultants, Risk Management, Re-Insurance, Kidnap and Ransom Coverage…And So On

I talk a lot about privacy and the food chain here with insurance will eventually work it’s way down and up to broker levels too so how much of your private data will your local insurance broker who sells you a policy have at their fingertips?  The internet of things also comes into play with our privacy too.  Insurers are gathering more and more information and you wonder why your policies are so expensive, well a lot of it comes from their data expenses with assessing risk.  In health insurance we do see the carriers doing what I call “driving themselves off a cliff” with data as all of it will or is not relevant but they feel they need every spec they can get.  As a matter of fact you keep seeing things related to Wellness and apps that sometimes use gamification and a lot of it is there to collect data and there’s no proof that it’s creating better health for us but it certainly is creating more wealth for insurers as they sell it too.

Health Insurance Business Is Driving Itself Off a Cliff & Doesn’t Know When to Stop With Collecting, Analyzing and Processing Non Relevant Data With Little Or No Impact On Giving Good Care..

As a matter of fact the data distraction level is so high with insurers and with frequent model changes, they can’t even produce a semi accurate listing of who’s in or out of network anymore and this becomes a problem for consumers when shopping for policies and we’ll see it again with open enrollment.  Actually too we have a “Battle of the Quants” occurring now in health insurance as hospitals are working hard to hire more quants to keep up with the armies hired by health insurance companies and who would have ever thought that analytics would go that far to mirror what goes on with Wall Street in many ways. 

Here Come the Dead Doctors Again Located In Flawed Directories–Now It’s From Insurance Companies Who Can’t Produce Semi Accurate Listings And They Pay These People…

Ok so here’s a short listing of data brokers and links to where you can opt out below.  This is just the tip of the iceberg of the number of them. 

Here’s a short listing of the Top Ten Opt out data brokers out there from the World Privacy Forum and this is only a tiny portion.  If you go here to their website, you’ll find pages of additional data brokers with their opt in or opt out information, and of course this does not include private companies that buy and sell your data at all. 

This is why we need to license and index ALL data sellers so we know who they are

You can visit my campaign here and find out more about what I’m doing at this end and I have embedded a Congressional Testimony from the World Privacy Forum from earlier this year at the campaign site, so open you ears and listen and also there are suggestions to make changes with HIPAA. 

Acxiom
Website | Privacy Policy | Opt Out Page | Offers Data Opt Out: Yes

Datalogix
Website | Privacy Policy | Opt Out Page | Offers Data Opt Out: Yes

DMAChoice (opt out site)
Website | Privacy Policy | Opt Out Page | Offers Data Opt Out: Yes

ebureau
Website | Privacy Policy | Opt Out Page | Offers Data Opt Out: Yes

Epsilon Data Management
Website | Privacy Policy | Opt Out Page | Offers Data Opt Out: Yes

Experian (Audience IQ, Direct Mail, Telemarketing, Email, Preapproved Offers)
Website | Privacy Policy | Opt Out Page | Offers Data Opt Out: Yes and FCRA

Intelius, Inc.
Website | Privacy Policy | Opt Out Page | Offers Data Opt Out: Yes

Lexis Nexis Accurint
Website | Privacy Policy | Opt Out Page | Offers Data Opt Out: Partial

People Finders
Website | Privacy Policy | Opt Out Page | Offers Data Opt Out: Yes

Spokeo Inc. (Spokeo)
Website | Privacy Policy | Opt Out Page | Offers Data Opt Out: Yes

The models are flawed as you can read below and this has a lot to do with the correlations performed by Quants and Data Scientists. 

Data Brokers Are Now Diagnosing Consumers With Diabetes And Other Chronic Conditions–”Over Rated And Broken Predictive Behavioral Math Models” Providing a Diagnosis That Should Always Be Documented From Your Doctor, Not From The Web

Again I call for an indexing and licensing system which is pretty close to what is being said here as again we don’t know who ALL the data sellers are.  With licensing we would have an index on who they are and what of data they sell, HIPAA, profiles, personal data and to who.  We need this as when as a consumer you need to go back and fix all the flawed data that is being used to score you, where do you go sometimes when you have been repackaged and resold a number of times?  I’ve encountered that myself and some of it keep re-appearing as the flawed data gets sold again. 

Drop a few dollars if you can in the campaign here. 

I’ve been working on it for 3 years with my correspondence to the FTC and members of Congress as well.  Below is a little information on Verizon and their data selling efforts.  BD

Verizon Wireless Packaging and Selling Subscriber Information - Acting As One Big Data Broker–Super Cookie Header Explanation

But insurance carriers aren’t the only players reaping the benefits of the big data revolution. According to Mark Breading, SMA partner and chief research officer, global brokers and reinsurers are in some cases more sophisticated with analytics and big data than insurance carriers. Intermediaries are using big data to benefit both their clients and themselves.

“If you look the Marshes and Aons of the world, they have staffs of hundreds of data scientists and analytics professionals building models,” said Breading. “When you think about it, the larger brokers actually need to understand risk better than the carriers; it gives them an edge in negotiations and gives them value to bring to those relationships.”

http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2014/11/05/346015.htm

0 comments :

Post a Comment

 
Top
Google Analytics Alternative