This book adopts an international perspective to examine how the online sale of insurance
challenges the insurance regulation and the insurance contract with a focus on insurance sales
consumer protection cyber risks and privacy as well as dispute resolution. Today insurers
policyholders intermediaries and regulators interact in an increasingly online world with
profound implications for what has up to now been a traditionally operating industry. While the
growing threats to consumer and business data from cyber attacks constitute major sources of
risk for insurers at the same time cyber insurance has become the fastest growing commercial
insurance product in many jurisdictions.Scholars and practitioners from Europe the United
States and Asia review these topics from the viewpoints of insurers policyholders and
insurance intermediaries. In some cases existing insurance regulations appear readily
adaptable to the online world such as prohibitions on deceptive marketing of insurance
products and unfair commercial practices which can be applied to advertising through social
media such as Facebook and Twitter as well as to traditional written material. In other areas
current regulatory and business practices are proving to be inadequate to the task and new ones
are emerging. For example the insurance industry and insurance supervisors are exploring how
to review utilize profit from and regulate the explosive growth of data mining and predictive
analytics (big data) which threaten long-standing privacy protection and insurance risk
classification laws.This book's ambitious international scope matches its topics. The online
insurance market is cross-territorial and cross-jurisdictional with insurers often operating
internationally and as part of larger financial-services holding companies. The authors'
exploration of these issues from the vantage points of some of the world's largest insurance
markets - the U.S. Europe and Japan - provides a comparative framework which is necessary for
the understanding of online insurance.
