But doesn't this cut both ways? If you don't hang around questionable people, you'd qualify for better rate for loans. Or if your credit score is not very high, but the fact you don't hang around questionable people brings your credit file up a notch and make you qualify.
"Questionable people" is hardly a concrete descriptor, nor is it something immediately obvious.
Let's say I meet a guy at a party. Facial scanners detect me with him. He seems like a nice guy, but he is currently on trial for a number of white collar offenses -- I know none of this. "The machine" does and will now assume I hang around questionable people.
The chances are just as good - not necessarily 50/50, but close to population baseline - that the person you met actually was a nice guy and "the machine" assumes you hang around with good people.
If your chances are actually higher than population average to hang around with bad people, the machine is probably correct for assigning you a higher risk.
Which all misses the point that as soon as he walked into the party, your own ocular implants would have performed the same recognition and you would have known to stay away from him.
> If you don't hang around questionable people ...
Who is questionable and who defines it? Gay people were "questionable" for most of history; they would lose their jobs if discovered (that was still true in the US military until very recently). What about Muslims, overtly discriminated against in many places? Poor people? Latinos (someone might suspect they are illegal immigrants)? etc.
It might not be a person making the call. Whatever the state of the art machine learning algorithm decides. Not to suggest that a learning algorithm won't be able to learn racism.
Yeah, in my mind, this completely negates the argument. If I don't engage in a given statistically risky behavior today, I'm paying more for insurance because some people do and the insurance company doesn't know who should be paying for that risky behavior so we all pay a little more.
To me, the more compelling angle to attack surveillance has to appeal to people's desire to keep some portion of their lives from being made public (rather than appealing to their wallet).
But the whole point of insurance is to collectively spread the risk, so that when things do go bad, you are not on your own. By definition, people in aggregate pay more for insurance than what the insurance pays them back (otherwise the company would go bankrupt!).
Insurance is paying for peace of mind. Most people are paying more premiums than insurance is paying them back.
