Computerworld - An insurance expert told the Britain's Telegraph newspaper that using location-centric mobile social services like Google Buzz, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare could raise your home-insurance premiums in the future, or even result in the denial of insurance claims.
Wait, what?
A gag Web site launched this week called "Please Rob Me" raised an ugly but obvious truth about location-based mobile social networking: When you tell the public where you are, you're also telling burglars you're not at home. The site originally displayed a real-time stream of Twitter and Foursquare posts that might interest criminals.
Twitter has since pulled the plug, apparently, and now all posts are from Foursquare. Each post begins with the user's name, followed by "left home and checked in" followed by an exact address of where the person is.
Insurance industry watchers like the one quoted by the Telegraph predict that after customers get burglarized and file claims on stolen property, the insurance companies will probably investigate to see whether the customer broadcast information over social networks in a way that constitutes "negligence." They could also make "social networker" the insurance equivalent for home insurance as "chain smoker" for health insurance -- a category for higher premiums.
In my "Inside Google" blog yesterday, I wrote a detailed post titled "How to rob somebody using Google Buzz." My point was that even though Twitter and Foursquare can expose users to crimes, Google Buzz is even more compromising.
You can read the rest by clicking on the title link.
Alright, I'm not some kind of misanthrope entirely hostile to social networking, but lately I've been finding that the whole trend has become extremely invasive.
I value my privacy and I don't like to have social networking thrust upon me. Maybe there's a reason I don't want to be easily "found" by people I attended high school with. Or, does Facebook truly think I care about my contacts commenting on the posts of somebody I don't know? (no offense to those of you here on my FB, I just don't think that sort of thing is necessary
).And when Google Buzz launched, like many people I was appalled by the potential breach of privacy, and I immediately ensured nothing on my account was public.
Thoughts?
