Insurers & Social Media Trends: Not A Healthy Mix

Here's a social media trend that is going to become mainstream in time to come, as it is currently happening in America where life insurers are testing the vast amounts of personal data a-washed on the Internet and using it to predict people's health and life expectancy. Data-gathering companies have so much information on most US consumers from online shopping details, magazine subscriptions, leisure activities and information from social-networking sites; that some insurers are exploring whether this data can reveal nearly as much about a person as a medical check-up.

The research marks a significant point with how to use consumer-marketing data, as traditionally till now social media trends information has only been used for advertising purposes. Some of the biggest data firms harvest online information from social-networking sites and often than not we as consumers are not really aware that separate bits of information about us are being collected and collated in ways that can be revealing. These data companies use this online social media trends information to determine who exercises, healthy, dieters or lead a sedentary lifestyle, suffer depression and high blood pressure. Online marketers often tap data sources like these to target ads at Internet users.

However, there is something worrying and unsavoury about this data collection as it drifts into the murky waters of privacy and this whole new approach could (I believe should) open up a regulatory can of worms for insurers and data-sellers. Currently, the information sold by marketing-database firms is lightly regulated. Selling this data to a life-insurance company who will use it to assess a person's application process will raise questions about data privacy and identity protection. Acxiom Corp. a big data firms has said that it acquires a limited amount of public information from social-networking sites, helping its clients to identify active social-media users, their social media trends, their favourite networks, how socially active they are versus the norm, and on what kind of fan pages they participate. Increasingly, information comes from people's online behaviour.

Life insurers argue that this data wouldn't be used to make final decisions about applicants and instead be used to speed up applications from people who look like good risks; while, other applicants would go through the traditional assessment process. These predictive indicators wouldn't necessarily look for signs of all diseases, such as AIDS, because the insurer would likely learn about such conditions from the answers on an application. Instead insurers say a model would tend to look for potential risks such as diabetes from a poor diet.

Owing to the controversial nature of their work insurers could use social-networking data to help price policies and aid in fraud detection. Whether people actually realise it or not, they are significantly increasing their personal transparency; it's all public and electronically mineable. I think you will agree with me, this is one of the unfortunate and worrying sides of social media and social media trends.

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