Suchergebnisse

AbstractInsurance companies use personal data to price personal insurance risks. Innovative data‐collection and processing strategies, including big data, offer the potential for better analysis of traditional risks and for markets in new types of insurance. This paper examines the potential for EU data protection and anti‐discrimination legislation – both existing and proposed – to threaten not only this potential but also the traditional personal insurance business. It offers a strategy based upon codes of practice and technological innovation that would allow insurers to protect their business and to innovate while meeting the concerns of legislators about discrimination and data protection.

The Equal Treatment Directive, which will come into force on 21 December 2007, aims to outlaw'discrimination' between men and women in the calculation of insurance premiums, is founded upon a fallacious understanding of the nature of actuarial calculations and the morality of'discriminatory' calculations where state provision of insurance has traditionally been 'non‐discriminatory'. The Equal Treatment Directive will have perverse consequences contrary to the aims of its creators ‐ benefiting the better‐off at the expense of the poor and, in some circumstances, men at the expense of women ‐ and will also threaten the private provision of pensions and healthcare essential to solving the looming pensions and healthcare funding crisis among EU member states.