No Safe Zone — Getting Insurance

No Safe Zone, Getting Insurance is Chapter 9of Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. This section of the book details how insurance software impacts people’s ability to own a car, get a job, and qualify for health insurance. It is in our best interest, as a society, to scrutinize the grand narratives that dictate everyone’s lives. We must challenge the status quo, we ought to force the powers that be to prove their legitimacy.

Over the course of this book, Cathy O’Neil has demonstrated how Weapons of Math Destruction collectively build upon each other. Redlining and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 are connected, both trying to establish a power structure between private companies and the people. Algorithms employed by for-profit insurance companies determine your eligibility based upon arbitrary demographic details.

An issue arises when people are forced into these algorithms. Auto insurance is mandatory for anyone who wants to own a car. Credit scores, along with e-scores should hold no weight in determining your rate for car insurance. There are few alternatives if you don’t wish to own a vehicle. Public transportation in bustling cities is underfunded and not prioritized. The individual living in a capitalistic society is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Public products are second to private products because there is no profit incentive.

“The resulting pricing is unfair. This abuse could not occur if insurance pricing were transparent and customers could easily comparison-shop.” Fixing the problem of individual auto insurance appears to be a double-edged sword. Drivers must relinquish their privacy while driving so insurance corporations can measure your speed, how your break, and how fast you accelerate.

WMD are creating alternative forms of reality in the cloud, conflating variable forms of data with real life behavior. These models abstract our lives and turn them into dotted tribes. These tools are not open to the public and there is no democracy in how they are being created and used. Tools are not bad, they are non-binary and hold no form of good or evil until a human machine binds with it and collapses the superposition between 1 or 0.