Tag: Car insurance

Public availability of house images using a Google Street View raises legal concerns.

21. May 2019

In recent years, the science of data analytics has dramatically improved the ability to analyse raw data and to make conclusions about that information. Data analytics techniques can reveal trends and patterns that can be used to optimize processes to increase the overall efficiency of a business or system. However, there is an obvious contradiction between the security and privacy of big data and the widespread use of big data.
Google Street View is a quite popular Google service used by millions of people every day to plan trips, explore touristic destinations and more.
In 2017, two university researchers Łukasz Kidziński, Stanford University in California, and Kinga Kita-Wojciechowska,University of Warsaw in Poland, have used Street View images of people’s houses to determine how likely they are to be involved in a car accident.
The researchers worked with an unknown insurance company and analysed 20.000 random addresses of the insurance company clients who had taken out car insurance. They collected information from the insurance company’s database, like age, sex, zip code, claim history and linked that information with Street View images correlated with the policyholder’s residential area. It turned out that a policyholder’s residence is a surprisingly good predictor of the likelihood that he/she will get involved in a car accident.
Subsequently, researchers put those results into a data analytics algorithm, which improved its predictive power by 2%. They also noted that the accuracy of the algorithm could be further improved using larger data sets and data analysis.
The insurance companies rely on data to predict risk and the results of the research are from this perspective impressive, but they are also disturbing. The new utilization of the technology is an important step towards improving risk prediction models. However, having in mind the results of the research, some interesting questions regarding data protection come up: Did the policyholders give their consent to this activity? Could the insurance company use individuals’ data this way given Europe’s strict privacy legislation? “The consent given by the clients to the company to store their addresses does not necessarily mean a consent to store information about the appearance of their houses,” said by Kidziński and Kita-Wojciechowska.”
Studies such as these raise datat protection questions about thepower of data analysis and how the information is collected and shared.