[newscracker]

Won't this cause people to game the system to get discounts? I'm sure once people learn more about the internals (some of which have been revealed in the article), they could change their online behavior (not necessarily offline) to make it more suited to what gets a better value for them. Or they could even have multiple accounts - one to show a good face to such companies and another that's a personal account (even though this is not in line with Faceboook's ToS). This in turn could mean that the company would be relying on curated and made up information to make decisions.

[ominous]

You mean what happens when people dress up and carefully pick photos for work interviews and dates? Or any other infinite social situations?

> The reason we’re such consummate bullshitters is simple: we bullshit for each other. We tweak our stories so that they become better stories. We bend the facts so that the facts appeal to the group. Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures. [0]

Everything is already fake. Might as well admit it.

[0] - http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2011/10/28/the-falli...

[geomark]

This looks like yet another business opportunity where online personas are crafted for a fee.

[MichaelBurge]

Do you personally plan to spend time trying to reverse-engineer Admiral's insurance model? If not, multiply that by everyone else and you have your answer.

It's less work to just switch insurance companies.

[newscracker]

One thing I missed in my point was that many other companies seem to want to exploit (or have already indulged in exploiting) information on social media. This could just be a trigger for other insurance companies to do something similar. Once it becomes somewhat well known, then more people will start curating their social media presence. This curation has already been a big thing on Facebook for other reasons. [1] It's just that the companies may not derive any real value out of such exercises in the long run.

[1]: https://stratechery.com/2016/what-facebook-is-and-isnt/ - this is a great read on this topic of how people present themselves on Facebook

[maxerickson]

The insurance company will be far better at pricing the predictive value of the information than the typical customer will be at manipulating the information.

Especially over a longer time periods.