Following on from my earlier post …

If you ring an insurance company, there is every chance that at some point you will be reminded that data is liberally shared between insurance companies and other authorities in order to prevent fraud. The following scenario now suggests itself …

You opted out from having your data shared in the care.data program. In the end, despite newspaper front pages and assorted expressions of worry about privacy and accountability, you are in a tiny minority of people to have done so. Now you apply for life insurance, or maybe health insurance (in the post-NHS era we may all need to do this!) A week later you receive a letter from the insurance company: “We don’t have access to your medical data from the NHS. Unfortunately in our experience this indicates a high likelihood that you have medical circumstances that you would wish to hide from us. Because of this, we will not be able to provide you with insurance.”

You decide whether this is a likely scenario or not. In today’s Guardian piece, insurance companies were mentioned as potential buyers of the data. (Aside: doesn’t the financial dimension erode the “it’s all for our benefit” story somewhat?) The piece also reminded us that de-pseudonymisation is not only a risk in general, but very likely no problem at all for organisations who already have lots of our data – such as the insurance industry.

I’ll leave it to the game theorists to decide whether this post is arguing for- or against opting out. Only at the end of writing this it comes back to me that I actually watched “The Rainmaker” last night 😉