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The book looks at how big data and predictive analytics are being used by insurers to profile risk and monitor insured behaviours in real time. Big data is causing fundamental changes in the way insurance is provided and those changes in turn give rise to a range of important legal questions, in the realms of insurance law and beyond. Insurance law – and its reciprocal duty of good faith disclosure – historically arose in response to the information asymmetry between insured and insurers: the Insured ordinarily held most knowledge of the risk to be insured. Big data not only removes that asymmetry but may in fact put insurers in a stronger position given the variety of data sources being parsed by new technology to enable them to build complex profiles of individual insureds. This potentially breathes new life into the insurers’ duty of good faith and does so by examining how other areas of the law – most obviously data law and the GDPR – might inform the evolution of insurers’ common law duty of disclosure. A central theme of the book is access to insurance, insofar as the use of these technologies raises equality and human rights issues (for insureds refused cover) as we all as competition law issues (where new entrants may not be able to access necessary data). The book considers the adequacy of remedies in equality, consumer, financial services, competition and data law and how they might address some of the problems arising out of the use of these technologies. The book is therefore of relevance to practitioners in a variety of areas and is the first of its kind to tackle the legal issues arising from the use of big data in the insurance market.
The book by Brendan McGurk can be purchased from Hart publishing here.