Cultivated Compendium

Earlier this year, I wrote about how many homeowners still waiting for insurance payouts after Superstorm Sandy will soon run out of time to take their cases to court if that is necessary. In Connecticut, it is industry practice to include in homeowners' insurance policies a time limitation on lawsuits. The law lets insurers limit lawsuits by property owners to 18 months after a disaster hits.

Now the Connecticut General Assembly has taken up a bill that would extend the time period to sue to two years after a disaster hits. Another bill would allow property owners to recoup attorney fees and court costs after a disaster.

An excerpt on my piece about the legislation for the Connecticut Law Tribune: 

Lawmakers are considering several pieces of legislation that would change state laws governing homeowners' insurance policies, including a bill that would award reasonable attorney fees and lawsuit costs to plaintiffs who win their cases against insurers.

The legislation is supported by trial attorneys, but opposed by the insurance industry.

State Rep. Robert W. Megna, D-New Haven, and co-chair of the Insurance and Real Estate Committee, said there's merit in authorizing plaintiffs who win their cases to be able to obtain attorney fees and lawsuits costs.

When policyholders report damage claims to their insurers and when those claims have been denied to some extent, the policyholders have the burden of hiring an attorney and paying for that attorney out of any recovery they obtain, Megna said. The proposed legislation would remove that burden.

As it stands, attorney fees are "going to come off the property damage settlement," Megna said. "Even if the homeowner prevails, they're at a disadvantage when it comes to fixing their home."

The committee will decide this week whether the bills, including the attorney fees measure, will be voted out of committee, Megna said.

Ryan Suerth, a Hartford-based solo practitioner who represents policyholders in insurance disputes, testified in support of the legislation. "The intent of it is to ensure that the policyholder gets the benefit of the policy they purchased… You get taken care of 100 percent," Suerth said in an interview.

If the legislation is passed, there may be a decrease in litigation alleging bad faith by insurers or alleging that insurers violated the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act and the Connecticut Unfair Insurance Practices Act, Suerth said. Attorney fees can be obtained in those types of lawsuits but not in breach of contract actions prosecuted against insurers.

The Insurance Association of Connecticut said in submitted testimony that, at times, it can be unclear when policyholders "prevail" in legal action against an insurer, and thus it would be confusing just who is entitled to attorney fees and costs.

"The proposal is contrary to the traditions of the American judicial system," the association said in its prepared testimony. "Insurers should be able to challenge questionable claims when there is a good-faith basis for such a challenge … Examining the validity of claims helps insurers maintain rates for all policyholders by weeding out the frivolous or meritless claims."

If the policy behind the legislation is to deter insurers from unnecessarily denying or delaying claims, the threat of bad-faith claims or penalties from the Insurance Department already does that, the association said.

Consent does not protect privacy in the era of big data because it is not meaningful in an era of giving permission through clicks on a screen, said Kate Crawford, a researcher at Microsoft Research and MIT, at the Social, Cultural & Ethical Dimensions of 'Big Data' held last night.

Big data analytics are being sliced and diced to create personalization and segmentation, Crawford said. But predictive analytics can create "predictive privacy harms" under the "rubric of personalization," Crawford said.

Instead of using consent to cure potential harms, there should be a data due process framework "placing accountability at the very end of the chain," Crawford argues. When data about a person is being used to make a decision that would affect their lives, disclosure should be mandated so that he or she can have the opportunity to respond, she further argues.

There should be more protection when the decisions involve important matters like health and employment, and there could be weaker protection when the decisions involve less weighty matters like advertising, Crawford said.

Even the most sophisticated systems can leak privacy information, Crawford said. The combination of private signals with public signals can be combined so that people's privacy is deeply violated, Crawford said.

"We need to be a little bit more skeptical when people tell us data is going to be secure," Crawford said. 

Steven Hodas, a consultant who has worked on data projects for educational systems, said that the backlash against the InBloom, the company trying to collect, store and share student data with the support of the Gates Foundation, was because parents felt that their kids were being reduced to algorithms and they did not want teaching reimagined as educating a cohort.

Personalization does not mean more human interaction, but better data configuration, he said. We are "headed for dissonance with dissidence not too far behind," he said.

Parents want teachers to be "analog craftsmen, not maker bots," Hodas said.

The blowback against InBloom might have been averted if there had been portals for parents to access parent-oriented data, Hodas added.

Columbia University scholar Alondra Nelson said that data about genetics is a disproportionate issue for minorities because more minorities are arrested or convicted and have their DNA uploaded into criminal justice system databases. Blacks make up 13 percent of the American population, but they are 40 percent of felony convictions, she said. Even innocent people who are not ultimately convicted have their DNA included in the databases, she added.

In another example of how genetic data implicates privacy, sequencing the genome of the HeLa cell line and uploading it on-line meant that personal information about Henrietta Lacks, the woman from whose cervical cancer cells the cell line was developed, and her family could be identified, Nelson said. That included genetic markers for physical appearance and disposition for diseases.

The event was cohosted by the Data & Society Research Institute, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and New York University's Information Law Institute. 

Nicole Wong, a former legal director at Twitter and now a deputy U.S. chief technology offer working in the White House' big data workgroup, said we need to "lean into those hard questions" about the issues of technology, privacy and individual liberties.

I wrote a story for Hearst about one of many prayer vigils held around the country to commemorate the people lost to gun violence. Here is an excerpt: 

Each pair represented the absence of people killed by guns.

Dale Ferguson's father was one of those people.

Edward Ferguson was a school custodian shot dead outside of the Elizabeth S. Shelton elementary school in Shelton in August 1988. Ferguson was 8 years old.

His daughter, now grown, said that new tragedies of gun violence bring back a "flash-flood of memories."

"I could see the place where the bullet went above his right eye," Ferguson said. "I can see it so clearly after 25 years."

Ferguson, of Stratford, spoke at an interfaith vigil held Sunday at the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford as part of the national "Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath" weekend.

Ferguson said she didn't just lose her father. People don't realize, she said in an interview after speaking at the vigil, that the cost of murders by guns is not just losing the person killed. It's also the ripple effect of that death.

She also lost touch with her father's family, and her mother was never quite the same after losing her best friend and love of her life, Ferguson says.

"We could never 100 percent prevent ... events from happening, but we can do our part to make sure we did everything we could for it not to happen again," Ferguson said.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said constituents have asked him since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, " `Hasn't America moved on? Hasn't America forgotten about this issue?' "

But he says that is not so. Other issues are higher priority than gun control for many voters, but he thinks that a majority still want reform.

Nearly a year ago a gun-control bill drawn up after the Sandy Hook mass shooting was defeated in the Senate.

There was a majority in support of the legislation, but not enough senators to stop a filibuster, Blumenthal said.