Re:The New Gold Rush? Wall Street Wants Your Data
by digler999 on Friday January 20, 2017 @06:17PM
(#13447736)
I could see them passing "insider consumer info" on black markets just like they pass insider information. How handy would it be for a life insurance company to know which of its customers is googling for "chest pain" or "$CANCER_TYPE symptoms". A car insurance company would love to know which drivers go to bars on saturday night, or which ones make it from point A to point B in suspiciously low amounts of time.
Wall street could creep into this by saying to either industry: "let our guys crunch the numbers and let us make book on what these rates should be...because market efficiency". It'll seem like a great idea at first, the data will be "anonymized" (except for when it's not, like when that guy pays a $5k to an analyst at the insurance company for the table mapping "anonymized" customer idns to ssns.
Suddenly hedge funds get really good at guessing which pools should be invested in, or which drivers should be packaged into the high-risk tier. A few years later there's a moderate scandal, a fine is levied equal to ~5% of the illicit gains made, meanwhile the funds have moved on to perpetuate their next round of fraud.
Wall street could creep into this by saying to either industry: "let our guys crunch the numbers and let us make book on what these rates should be...because market efficiency". It'll seem like a great idea at first, the data will be "anonymized" (except for when it's not, like when that guy pays a $5k to an analyst at the insurance company for the table mapping "anonymized" customer idns to ssns.
Suddenly hedge funds get really good at guessing which pools should be invested in, or which drivers should be packaged into the high-risk tier. A few years later there's a moderate scandal, a fine is levied equal to ~5% of the illicit gains made, meanwhile the funds have moved on to perpetuate their next round of fraud.