[cortesoft]

Ideally, it is true that COMPLETE information makes an economic system work better..... but the improvement isn't some sort of linear progression, where every bit of more information adds a bit more economic efficiency. Sometimes, getting more information without getting ALL the information actually hurts economic efficiency.

A very easy example of this is wikileaks and the elections in 2016. It appears that wikileaks received information about both the democrat and republican parties; however, they chose to only share the information they recieved about the democrats.

By your assertion, we should not be concerned about this; after all, the information that was leaked was true, and therefore added to our overall body of known information, we should have been in a better place to make an informed decision, right? More information is better!

However, this isn't the case; because the information was selectively released, we only got the information that benefited one side, meaning that our overall understanding of the state of things actually DECREASED as more information was released.

This is the same thing happening here; you know Allstate isn't going to be looking for social media information that HELPS your claim. They aren't going to say, "Well, we were going to deny your claim, but we found from your social media feed that you were clearly really hurt. We have decided to pay out instead!"

Basically, if the extra information you receive is being selectively given by someone who has an agenda, you can be mislead even if all the information is true.

[itp]

You wrote:

you know Allstate isn't going to be looking for social media information that HELPS your claim.

But from the article:

As for use cases for social media during the insurance claims process, Carpe Data cited two examples. The first one was where a customer was paralyzed. A social media search helped confirm the information more quickly through pictures of the customer in a wheelchair, which ultimately led to the claim being settled and paid out faster.

It's presumably in Allstate's interest to identify fraud, but also to process claims as efficiently as possible, no?

[CPLX]

> The first one was where a customer was paralyzed. A social media search helped confirm the information more quickly through pictures of the customer in a wheelchair

This seems highly dubious. Are they really using information like this to decide to pay a claim? It's pretty easy to put someone into a wheelchair and take a video of it.

The flip side of that is that it's pretty challenging to take video of a paralyzed person playing basketball. It seems clear that the use of this is going to be biased in one direction.

[cortesoft]

My point was a critique of the idea that ‘extra information always makes you more informed’, not specifically about this case.

That being said, I would still be skeptical of the claim that they will always use this information in a balanced manner.

[FireBeyond]

I'm sure it's absolutely no accident that Carpe Data tried to present a (hypothetical?) example that touts the "positive" value of its service.