Facebook chokes off car insurance slurp because – get this – it has privacy concerns Facebook has shut down efforts by a car insurance company to use posts on the social network to decide discounts – over privacy concerns. No, honestly. The "firstcarquote" service was launched by UK-based Admiral on Wednesday and is intended to offer new drivers the ability to save money on their insurance by downloading an …
... they just stopped someone to exploit a "good idea" someone at FB should have thought about before... expect some private meetings where "someone" will yell at his executive for having not thought of it before... the "privacy" here means your data become FB "private" ones, no other should be allowed to make money from them.
With other insurance companies already purchasing full fat slurp from fb asking why they should pay when admiral do not have to.
In my opinion insurance companies should be required to release the data and scoring they used to make the quote. That way incorrect data effecting customers premiums can be identified and corrected. My personal opinion is that everyone's premium is as high as possible dependant upon how likely you are to go elsewhere
" My personal opinion is that everyone's premium is as high as possible dependant upon how likely you are to go elsewhere"
Insurance is an incredibly competitive market. If you don't bother to shop around, you're an idiot. If you do, you'll get the best possible price.
Or the premiums have only gone up a little bit and you hate answering the same bloody questions over and over again.
Money Saving Experts know that to properly search the market you need to use at least 2 brokers and contact a number of other major insurers who aren't on the broker sites. For some of us overpaid IT workers the potential saving isn't worth the cost in time.
"If you don't bother to shop around, you're an idiot."
Or, y'know, unable, due to being infirm, etc ...
Erm, in what case would you not be infirm enough to be in control of a ton+ of plastic and metal capable of dangerous speeds yet too infirm to compare different insurance companies??
Shopping around
Mine is not too high, pay monthly, sorted by brokers. I cannot be bothered to do all of the legwork to find a better quote on the off chance of saving £10, then all the forms, I just let the brokers sort it, more time for me and it is worth more than the savings.
Would cost me more than I would save.
I doubt it. Facebook's data is most valuable when it best reflects the real behaviour of the people behind it. If you're suddenly a lot less inclined to post about all the drinking and partying you do because you know your car insurer is watching your posts, you become a lot less valuable to everyone selling booze and parties.
Insurers are going to buy the data for advertising in any case. The risk to both reputation and data are beyond any price that it'd be worth for any insurers to make up.
Absolutely in no way could anyone ever engineer a social account to make it look like it belonged to a potentially safer driver.
No way in hell.
No sir!
Admiral will just have to look at YouTube accounts to see if drivers are behaving themselves. (Hint: No, they're not.)
> The self-discipline required to maintain a facade like that would, itself, be a pretty good indicator.
It probably already exists, but I'm quite surprised there isn't more of a market for services which will "curate" fictitiously perfect social media profiles for people to give them a better shot at jobs/dating/insurance and other casual observers that are pissed off that the telescreen isn't reality yet. If using social media profiles for insurance becomes commonplace, expect that sort of thing to become mainstream very quickly and there'll be no need for self-discipline any more, not when you can just buy "legitimacy".
(Are we living in a sci-fi dystopia yet?)
That's... actually a good idea. If I could stomach slogging through the inane drivel of the kind of people who would benefit from "curation" it could be a decent little money spinner. - One that AI won't be any good at for several years. Once AI is good enough (When/If) I expect to see it as a Facebook Premium option.
I ran into a similar issue with the posting controls on Facebook. You can't post automatically to a user's pages any more, which means a client can't 1-click publish to Facebook from the press release platform I work on now. WE'RE the villains in the client's eyes of course. Facebook justifies the restriction because of all the dodgey games and apps that users play that spam 'help me build/collect' nosense to people's feeds.
In reality it penalises legitimate businesses like ours and we get the flak from clients because we lose features.
think anyone without social meeja accounts must be a bit weird and therefore a high risk?
I'll tell you in a couple of years when my children - who have never ever had any kind of social media presence out side of education walled-gardens - start driving...
Some people already think we're a bit "odd" for not having accounts, and it's been a battle getting schools to continue sending paper letters home, but it's definitely worth it
M.
"Some people already think we're a bit "odd" for not having accounts, and it's been a battle getting schools to continue sending paper letters home, but it's definitely worth it"
Wait!
What?
Your kids' schools try to use social media for letters to parents? Why are they so bloody stupid? This is no better than companies who seem to want to advertise their Facebook presence rather their own website. At the very least, the school could use email - if the issue is one of reducing costs, then a simple email would do the job. (Just so long as they use a proper tool that's not going to make it far to easy to use CC instead of BCC)
Do what they do at my daughter's school where they have their own private, secure online info service. Having registered already you simply get an email telling you there is new info available and you need to login to find out what it is, you login securely and pick up the info, no links or other guff and no public broadcast. Certainly not posted on some public site like FriendFace or Twatter!
The thing about using the old paper method, other than destroying the environment to tell you the school disco is coming up, is that kids almost never remember to bring home important letters especially if it concerns something about them that parents might get miffed about. With the info being secure online, kids can't "accidentally" forget to give us the letters!
"private, secure online info service"
My sons' school did this ... however security was slightly compromised by having a single login for all paremts where the password (a) was the schools postcode and (b) remained the same for >5 years!
As for kids not bringing paper letters home, the school, a new secondary school, avoided that problem in the first 2-3 years by sending out everything via post - I dread to think how much they spent on that!
The logical endpoint of Admiral's idea is that if anyone doesn't have a "social media" profile* then they don't get car insurance, or that any insurance is at an unaffordable premium. What next? No job? No mortgage? No holiday booking?**
On the plus side it might drive people off social media. And be the death knell of the growing narcissism of selfies.
* OK I know it seems improbable.
** Admitted to getting a bit pissed one Friday and the airline won't touch a booking from you. And neither will the hotel.
'The logical endpoint of Admiral's idea is that if anyone doesn't have a "social media" profile then they don't get car insurance'
It depends on how you look at it. I'd regard not having a profile as in indicator of a sober, well-balanced personality and set the premium accordingly.
The logical endpoint of Admiral's idea is that if anyone doesn't have a "social media" profile* then they don't get car insurance....
Um, no. The logic, if you re-read the parts you missed in the article, is that first-time drivers can opt in to having their FB posts analyzed in the hope that their first-time premium will be lowered.
Nothing in this scheme has anything to do with established drivers because those already have a cast-iron reputation with the insurance companies (either good or bad, they have their reputation).
I really hate to do this but kudos to FB. This reminds me of certain employers demanding your login and password to FB to check your "character". If you didn't have an FB account, they assumed you were hiding something. I'm of the belief, the insurance company would do the same.
The media have been deceiving you all & managing your perceptions for decades, why would this be any different?
If faecesbook wants to do a backroom deal with a motor insurer, they don't need to tell you about it, it's already covered in the user agreement which you agreed to, under the section titled, sharing data with our partners. You agreed for faecesbook to have access to your camera etc.
Ask the question, who told the media about the "failed" business to business deal?
Faecesbook or Admiral?
Not all news articles are as they seem, some are just made up PR stories, some are blatent advertisements, many if not all are slanted presentations, some are outright lies. Some may say conspiracy theorist or tin foil hat, but you only have to look at the previous 15 years alone to see the kind of times we currently find outselves "living" in. Depressing, I know.
Don't even get me started on the remembrance poppy being rebranded into something horrifically fascist...
One of the accounts i occasionally peruse, a 21 year old woman, quite openly tweets her driving record :
4 crashes to date, drives without her vision correcting spectacles, drives whilst under the influence upto 36 hours after nights out and brags that no one, i repeat no one, will ever beat her in a race home out through the suburbs.
Presumably the police (UK) haven't noticed any of this as they're focussed on reading whether i've upset her in any way, say calling her a "fat bitch", she isn't. Numerous pouting selfies confirm this.
Mind boggling.
The heuristics (mentioned in other reports) the Admiral's algorithm would use look rather dubious to me. For instance, people who use words "never" or "always" would be regarded as overconfident and would get higher quotes, while people who prefer "maybe" would be regarded as cautious and thus safer drivers.
So, if you are cautious, or just care about your car insurance premium, never say "never" on FB, and in general always watch what you post. Uh-oh, did my premium just go up? Or is the algo smart enough to analyse the context? Somehow I doubt it is...
Everyone would have to create new, corporate facing accounts under their real names. These would be the ones where all the posts were designed to make them look like careful drivers. Stuff like, "Gosh, I've had two cans of coke today. I thik I'd better catch the bus hme rather than drive with all that caffeine in my blood."
Facebook can claim they have 100% more users.
Meanwhile, everyone carries on using the site as normal under pseudonyms, posting stuff like, "shit the bed! im still so fucked from last night but gotto get to work. wears me car keys LOL!!!"
It's just a publicity stunt because Admiral know perfectly well that journo's will have a wank-fest over any suggestion of using facebook to assess people's driving skills. They'll claim to be analysing their twitter feeds live next.
It should be bloody obvious because it would take years of research covering thousands of profiles of willing volunteers to even gather the stats data, then a not insignificant research effort to establish whether it has any correlation to driving at all. Even if you did all that it would likely not boil down to "organised people drive more safely" but more likely "males are more risky insurance prospects" which will in turn fall foul of the gender bias ban once someone points out that females are getting bigger discounts.
Clearly they haven't done this which suggests it's come from the marketing dept rather than risk.
Some "journos" should get a slap for taking this at face value, they should be ashamed of themselves.
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