Insurance systems represent one of the most insidious soft power mechanisms I've ever had to wrap my mind around. Honestly, it's interesting in how most people don't recognize them as the control via indirection mechanism that they actually are. I

It's one of the reasons I try to teach kids the stark difference between what people say a thing is vs. What a thing actually is. Helps prime them against viewpoint manipulation down the road.

Interviewed once for an automotive insurance platform. I'll be the first to admit, my experience with auto insurance has not been stellar, but the types of things that are starting get done with automotive related data are getting quite on the scary side, and going pretty far beyond mere "actuarial sciences" to downright population scale social engineering through market forces. It's coercion without having the appearance thereof. I know it'll likely get me tagged as more fringe than I like, but after seeing how much of a growth in data collection is becoming possible by industry groups (auto, medical, or otherwise) I'm having difficulty understanding how anyone can believe we don't live in a surveillance state. Auto in particular is quite draconian in capability because it's one of tge few parts of modern life where for whatever reason, everyone is a-ok with tracking absolutely bloody everything without giving a second thought about who is actually using it or whether it really makes sense to track at all.

Given the amount of information stored by third parties, if voluntarily dispersed, there is little or nothing to keep one from being able to build up a picture of what was actually going on for people.

Take an accident for example. Why not look up telco records for texts/calls around the time for contextual clues for mindstate? Look at telemetry from the car for performance data, or a/v from internal mics/cameras for every little mistake's worth of evidence. Combine with medical records or financials to get a complete rendering of activity around that time.

Nothing keeps any of this from being done except in the particular case of PHI and PII, with only the regulatioon around PHI having any teeth by which a consumer can a third party accountable for what they do with what information.

It's just surreal nowadays to someone who within living memory recalls a time where entire businesses' datasets were by and large harmless clerical recordkeeping. Papertrail was just that. A byproduct. Nowadays, your data footprint is an additional extension of your personhood into a completely invisible realm. An aspect of yourself hardly any other human is likely to lay eyes on in a substantial way, but nevertheless, some automaton will use to facilitate decisions that can be life altering in their magnitude. At some point, I feel like we can't just hide behind the assumption that this is all hunky dory a priori okay just because it's the invisible hand at work. I feel like our computing and systems are beginning to overdrive our capabilities as human beings to act in a fully informed intentional manner that reasonably allows us to know ahead of time what the immediate consequences will be.

But who am I kidding? I'm probably iteration 95744774 of people who have come to the same conclusion, and yet, still, we press on, ever forward. Automating that whose outcomes we don't fully understand the impact of. It scares me. I'm not sure we're 10% smarter than the piece of equipment we're implementing. Hell, I'm starting to question if we ever were; or if an aswer either way really means anything at all in the long run. This show turns, turned, will keep turning, regardless.

I really wish I could ignore this type of thing. That I hadthe capability to filter this type of thought, but as I get older, it's just more and more omnipresent. Fun to delve into the depths and mechanics of, but terrifying to take in all at once.

I just wanted to leave a world with a few less problems than otherwise to the mext generation... I wake up every morning to find the problems growing faster and wider than the population. This is the worst case of perspective I've had in a while.