Insurance companies do not really need direct access to city cameras, they have enough archival data, Vice-President of the All-Russian Union of Insurers Sergey Efremov told Izvestia on Friday, November 27.
Earlier that day, the Kommersant newspaper, citing a source, reported that large insurance companies, together with the Central Bank, are negotiating with the Moscow Department of Information Technologies (DIT) on access to an intelligent video surveillance system.
The article noted that the Central Bank was the initiator, and the goal of the project is to give insurers direct access to Moscow cameras to combat fraud and reduce the time it takes to settle claims.
“We are not talking about direct access of insurers to cameras. Insurance companies need access to archived data, which they can receive upon request. For example, to watch the recordings of cameras in the place where the accident happened, at the time when it happened, ”said Sergei Efremov.
If it turns out that this data is useful in settling insurance events and detecting fraud, the president of ARIA did not rule out that insurance companies would be willing to pay for such data.
According to the Moscow Department of Information Technologies, now “authorized employees of government and law enforcement agencies” have access to the cameras, Kommersant writes. The system has more than 200 thousand cameras, and according to the Moscow budget for 2021, its provision and modernization will cost 9.1 billion rubles.
Insurers can still receive a recording from cameras under the control of DIT by making a request to the mayor’s office describing the scene of the incident, the process takes about three days, explained Sarkis Darbinyan, partner of Digital Rights Center.
At the same time, Aleksandra Orekhovich, Director of Legal Initiatives of the Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF), believes that the legitimacy of insurers’ access to cameras is questionable.
“The legal basis on which such access is supposed to be provided is not entirely clear: judging by the context, it is not supposed to ask the citizen’s consent to provide access from cameras with his video image to insurers,” the expert emphasized.
Antonina Levashenko, head of the Russian Center for Competence and Analysis of OECD Standards, RANEPA under the President of the Russian Federation, agrees with her.
“In view of the rule on targeted data processing, i.e. legal requirement that the data can only be legally processed for the purposes for which they were collected, the data collected from the cameras cannot be transferred to third parties for other purposes. Thus, in Russia there are no legislative grounds for providing insurance companies with access to these databases, ”the expert concluded.
Earlier, on November 23, it was reported that the mobile application “MTPL Assistant” began to work throughout Russia.
On November 10, it was reported that in Russia there was an increase in the activity of fraudsters in the car insurance market in the OSAGO segment during the pandemic.