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Insurances Companies To Use Facebook, Twitter Social Media Profiles To Set Rates

(CBS SF) -- Your Facebook page, your Twitter profile, your Pinterest boards are all a better indicator of your risky behavior than anything else out there, and if you want insurance for your car, your home, or your life, you're likely to have what you post scanned, processed and scored as your rates are set.

"Social media gives P&C insurers powerful information previously unavailable to enhance pricing, underwriting, payment plan offerings, claims routing, and numerous additional areas," states Social Intelligence Corp.'s website, describing what may be the first ever data-mining service that insurance companies can begin using.

The idea of tapping into your "firehose" of vacation photos, descriptions of your weekend, and you new friends, followers, and retweets is that it's instant, it's rich in detail, and it's cheap.

How much and how often--even what type of beverages you drink, your emotional state, what you bought recently, your marital (or lack thereof) status, and your career prospects are all data that companies can now access instantly.

The cost of pulling a credit report is high, and how often do you open or close a credit card or take out a loan? Compare that to how often you post something to Facebook or Twitter.

Other traditional documents like motor vehicle records take time to get and require using government bureaucracy. Parsing your posts is instant.

The good news, writes Media Post is that you have to opt-in to the social risk scoring (although we all know many of our posts are public). Incentives for allowing it could be faster claims or discounts.

Social Intelligence CEO Max Drucker tells Media Post, "The social Web gives insurers the opportunity to gain actionable intelligence on consumers who do not have credit histories or other, more traditional forms of risk profile."

A Stanford University study cited by Social Intelligence found, "by mining a person's Facebook "likes," a computer was able to predict a person's personality more accurately than most of their friends and family. Only a person's spouse came close to matching the computer's results."

Researcher Michal Kosinski and his team examined the articles, videos and artists that people had liked on Facebook to gauge the person's personality dimensions of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

"This is an emphatic demonstration of the ability of a person's psychological traits to be discovered by an analysis of data, not requiring any person-to-person interaction. It shows that machines can get to know us better than we'd previously thought, a crucial step in interactions between people and computers," the study found.

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