Insurance

In 2017, Britain's' two biggest supermarkets, Tesco and Sainsbury's, which jointly cover 45% of the UK's grocery market, announced they would offer discounts on car and home insurance based on customers' shopping habits. For example, based on data from its Nectar card loyalty scheme, Sainsbury's

In September 2018, the 156-year-old US life insurance company John Hancock announced it would stop underwriting traditional life insurance policies, instead selling only interactive policies that track health and fitness through the data collected by wearable devices and smartphones. Interactive

Car companies have long collected data about the consumers who buy their cars. Now, they hope to aggregate and sell customer preferences to outside vendors for marketing purposes much as online tech giants like Google and Facebook already do. The companies say that exploiting this data will help

Many people fail to recognise the sensitivity of the data collected by fitness tracking devices, focusing instead on the messages and photographs collected by mobile phone apps and social media. Increasingly, however, researchers are finding that the data collected by these trackers - seemingly

In 2016, Spanish Jose Carlos Norte, the chief technology officer at Telefonica subsidiary EyeOS, used the scanning software Shodan to find thousands of publicly exposed telematics gateway units. TGUs are small radio-enabled devices that are attached to industrial vehicles so their owners can track

In the past, car insurers relied on drivers to report their annual mileage when renewing their policies. Increasingly, however, insurers are turning to other methods. In 2016, State Farm, a US insurance company, acknowledged that the company verifies the mileage driven by the cars it insures in a

In 2016, the US's third-largest property and casualty insurer, Liberty Mutual, announced it would partner with Subaru to enable drivers who have bought Subaru's Starlink infotainment system to download a car app that will notify them if they are accelerating too aggressively or braking too hard. The

In 2017, the New York Times discovered that Uber had a secret internal programme known as "Greyball", which used data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and bar regulators and officials from using its service. As the company expanded into new areas, its standard practice