Before we venture into whether it&#x27;s good or bad, here&#x27;s a couple of observations.<p>1) The point of insuring is to reduce tail risk. If you have a 1&#x2F;1000 years chance of your house getting flattened in an earthquake, you want to spread that bill over 1000 years. If you don&#x27;t you might get away with it most years, but you&#x27;ll have a new house to buy if you&#x27;re unlucky.<p>To contrast, if your house is flooded every other year, someone insuring you will ask you for roughly half the likely damages each year. That&#x27;s not smoothing it out by much, and you might as well save up for the inevitable.<p>2) If you&#x27;re going to smooth out risk, you need to know what the risk is. For that, you&#x27;ll need information. For instance if women are less likely than men to get themselves hurt while driving sports cars, you will want to know whether someone is a man or a woman. If old people are more likely to get cancer, you want to know how old someone is.<p>3) If you do not heed the above observation, there&#x27;s something called adverse selection that will get you. Suppose you have a bunch of high risk people mixed with low risk people. You&#x27;ll calculate a premium that&#x27;s somewhere in between the two pools. The problem is the low risk people will look at it and conclude it&#x27;s expensive for them, and they&#x27;ll be less likely than you&#x27;d realised to sign up. So you then get a bunch of high risk people who think it&#x27;s a great deal signing up, getting killed in accidents, and costing you more than you thought likely. It also means if you as a low risk person got into an accident anyway, you&#x27;d be without insurance.<p>So is it good that insurance companies want more and more info? For the most part, yes. It lets them price the premium more precisely, which helps everyone get insured. We&#x27;ll be able to pay for unlikely events at a cost that reflects the likely average. And you wouldn&#x27;t be paying for people who are more risky, and you wouldn&#x27;t be receiving anything from people in lower risk groups.<p>One thing to look out for is how we treat expensive-to-insure people. Even if there&#x27;s going to be a more accurate price for them, they may be very small groups whom the insurance companies decide aren&#x27;t worth the effort. For instance if we know that 80% of people with the BRCA2 gene will get cancer by age 50, you&#x27;re going to calculate a huge cost for them. You&#x27;d be collecting money from 5 people to hand it out to 4 of them, plus the expense of handling a claim.<p>One interesting thing about this new information fountain is you can lose money by having tests done. Say you have a parent with BRCA2, and people who aren&#x27;t tested have a 40% chance. WTF do you do then? You will either pay a huge premium or barely anything.