How Insurance Might Just Save Us All

I’m not going to lie to you, Internets: I kind of hate insurance.

My first job out of law school was in insurance defense. We were the lawyers the insurance company calls when you sue them for refusing to cover your claims despite the years of cash you’ve tossed down their gaping maws just in case something catastrophic actually happened. My job was to explain, over and over again in increasingly tedious terms, why You No Can Has Payments No I Don’t Care If Your House No Longer Exists and Neither Does Your Leg.

Some of the cases I defended were legitimately nonsense, like the couple that wanted a brand-new guest house build entirely up to code even though they freely admitted they did not live in their guest house and their insurance policy said in bold all caps on every single page “THIS POLICY COVERS ONLY YOUR PRIMARY DWELLING.”

Others were absolutely heartbreaking, like the patient whose insurance was rescinded after they were diagnosed with terminal cancer, leaving their family on the hook for $500,000 in medical bills because the insurer claimed the patient had never told them about certain test results, which it turns out the doctor never even ordered.

As a consumer, I kind of hate it too. I only pay for it because I know what happens if I don’t have it. Like the case in which a drunk driver hit a teenager, lacerating the teen’s brain stem and causing them to burn through $1.5 million in medical bills in the first six weeks, none of which they’ll ever even remember because they spent all six of them in a coma.

(PS: The ACA has decimated the number of cases like those last two, in case you’re wondering whether ordinary Americans really need government-supported health insurance.)

It’s important, but I still kinda think it’s crap.

…Maybe. Today may have changed my mind.

I don’t practice insurance law anymore, but I do still write content for insurance publications and, increasingly, for insurtech companies. Today I wrote an article that as near as I can tell is the first of its kind: A how-to guide for insurance companies that want to encourage smart home device use, but that also don’t want to blow off their own legs in the privacy and security minefield those devices pose.

And fam? I think insurance companies might save us all. I really do.

Check out this creepy 150-page report from the Internet of Things Privacy Forum, arguing that smart devices are going to change the concept of privacy as we know it. The report argues that not only will we lose our sense of “private” and “public” spaces, we’ll even start losing the privacy of our own emotions, as devices get better at inferring emotional states from available data.

You didn’t want to sleep tonight, right?

The combination of artificial intelligence and omnipresent devices networked into a collection of information that expands exponentially and that only machines can currently parse presents risks. Huge risks. Risks that, like the size of the problem itself, we can’t comprehend.

You know who absolutely loves contemplating risk? Insurance companies. And they’re good at it. Like, really, really good.

Governments have been slow to address data security concerns with smart devices, even though it’s increasingly common knowledge that any smart device is a giant open hole in your network security with a neon sign on it that screams “Free Mayhem Here!” California passed a bill that won’t take effect until next year. Worse, the UK’s standards for smart device security are voluntary.

But if insurance companies decide to protect their own behinds while still accessing that sweet, sweet customer data, we’ll see much higher demand for smart device security, and we’ll see it in a hurry. Sure, that security will probably only go one way, which is toward insurers’ interests. But that’s still better than what we have now.

Okay, insurance. I guess I’ll hate you slightly less now.