As certainty replaces uncertainty, premiums that once reflected the necessary unknowns of everyday life can now rise and fall from millisecond to millisecond, informed by the precise knowledge of how fast you drive to work after an unexpectedly hectic early morning caring for a sick child or if you perform wheelies in the parking lot behind the supermarket. “We know that 16-year old drivers have a whole lot of accidents… but not every 16-year old is a lousy driver,” observes one insurance industry telematics expert. Rates based on actual behavior are “a big advantage in being able to price appropriately.” This kind of certainty means that insurance contracts designed to mitigate risk now give way to machine processes that respond “almost immediately” to nuanced infractions of prescribed behavioral parameters and thus substantially decrease risk or eliminate it entirely.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 668