They describe the data as being sourced from a 'data co-op' of over 1k companies which share data. It wasn't clear whether that means that those companies are collaborating and pooling data, or whether it's a roundabout/wordy way of saying that they scrape public personal information from thousands of sites.
They also claim that they're GDPR and CCPA compliant; I'm no expert but I do find one or two references that seem to suggest that scraping EU citizens' personal data without consent hasn't been GDPR-compliant for some time.
It does also raise another question: even if PDL themselves aren't GDPR-compliant, would any resulting fines against them reclaim a significant portion of the utility captured from the distribution of that data? As per comments on this thread, PDL API keys seem to be free to create.
Hypothetically speaking it could be within the interests of a group of businesses to provide a small amount of funding towards operation(s) that harvest and redistribute personal data: if the revenue base is low, the operation(s) can eventually fail (once legal proceedings catch up with them) and the group as a whole incurs little cost.
The speaker also takes a question from the audience regarding potential use-cases for this kind of personal data, and answers that knowing about an individual's life events (such as marriage) can be an opportunity to sell products to them, as can differentiating pricing if they'd just started smoking cigarettes.
Although I'm no expert, my understanding of insurance has been that risk is spread across a large pool of customers, allowing them each to pay similar premiums despite potentially slightly different backgrounds, with the understanding that they mutually benefit by paying into a shared fund so that the (random, potentially high-cost) risk of loss to each member is greatly softened.
We're seeing a situation here where more precise, per-individual data is being collected across large populations and could potentially be used for price differentiation.
If the insurance industry doesn't defend itself, this could lead to premiums which are essentially calculations based on 'pre-existing data' -- information which the consumer may not have consented to sharing, and which an insurance company might not be able to collect from application forms.
We don't seem to be particularly good, collectively, at escaping from cycles which seem to introduce or further wealth disparity at the moment and I worry that this kind of tech-driven attempt to optimize revenue efficiency of the insurance industry would only lead to further inequality.
They describe the data as being sourced from a 'data co-op' of over 1k companies which share data. It wasn't clear whether that means that those companies are collaborating and pooling data, or whether it's a roundabout/wordy way of saying that they scrape public personal information from thousands of sites.
They also claim that they're GDPR and CCPA compliant; I'm no expert but I do find one or two references that seem to suggest that scraping EU citizens' personal data without consent hasn't been GDPR-compliant for some time.
It does also raise another question: even if PDL themselves aren't GDPR-compliant, would any resulting fines against them reclaim a significant portion of the utility captured from the distribution of that data? As per comments on this thread, PDL API keys seem to be free to create.
Hypothetically speaking it could be within the interests of a group of businesses to provide a small amount of funding towards operation(s) that harvest and redistribute personal data: if the revenue base is low, the operation(s) can eventually fail (once legal proceedings catch up with them) and the group as a whole incurs little cost.
The speaker also takes a question from the audience regarding potential use-cases for this kind of personal data, and answers that knowing about an individual's life events (such as marriage) can be an opportunity to sell products to them, as can differentiating pricing if they'd just started smoking cigarettes.
Although I'm no expert, my understanding of insurance has been that risk is spread across a large pool of customers, allowing them each to pay similar premiums despite potentially slightly different backgrounds, with the understanding that they mutually benefit by paying into a shared fund so that the (random, potentially high-cost) risk of loss to each member is greatly softened.
We're seeing a situation here where more precise, per-individual data is being collected across large populations and could potentially be used for price differentiation.
If the insurance industry doesn't defend itself, this could lead to premiums which are essentially calculations based on 'pre-existing data' -- information which the consumer may not have consented to sharing, and which an insurance company might not be able to collect from application forms.
We don't seem to be particularly good, collectively, at escaping from cycles which seem to introduce or further wealth disparity at the moment and I worry that this kind of tech-driven attempt to optimize revenue efficiency of the insurance industry would only lead to further inequality.