Insurance Edge

Father of the Web warns insurers against data profligacy

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has urged insurers to avoid the temptation of using increasing amounts of publicly available data about consumers on the web to price their products.

The inventor of the World Wide Web made a plea to the industry at the British Insurance Brokers’s Association conference in Manchester yesterday, requesting that information we share about ourselves on line – particularly by young people through social networks – should not be gathered for the purposes of pricing risk.