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Well, this just sounds like a privacy nightmare waiting to happen.
Could you imagine your health insurance premiums fluctuating based on how often you change your relationship status? Or perhaps your renter’s insurance or homeowner’s insurance going up after you posted pics of a particularly wild party at your crib? Perhaps it wouldn’t go down exactly in that way, but if one company’s prediction is correct, Facebook and its ilk could be the next market for products like insurance.
In a recent report, Gartner analyst Juergen Weiss observes that the broad swath of data left open by users of services like Facebook make it a natural choice to shill services like insurance. Weiss notes:
“Offering insurance products to their communities would be a natural extension of social media providers’ financial services strategies and would allow them to capitalize on their extensive set of information they constantly collect about their users… There are a wide range of options for social media providers that are considering how to actually offer insurance products to their users. These options range from alliances with traditional insurers white-labeling their products to the formation of their own intermediary business units.”
What do you think- a natural extension or a kind-of-creepy way to market? Should insurance data be culled from services like Facebook?
