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Allstate uses social media to check claims
- chatmasta 9y ago> The tech company [Carpe Data] [0] looks at anything publicly available on social media Keyword being public. I've never understood why people get so upset about this sort of thing. You are responsible for anything you choose to post publicly. My feelings would be different if it involved fake accounts friending users and seeing items meant only for their "friends." [0] This article is basically an ad for Carpe Data. May as well link to their site: https://carpe.io/ https://carpe.io/
- us0r 9y agoJust today I was going to go skiing but my foot hurt so I'm home. Let's pretend it was something bigger and I've been home and being paid on an insurance claim. My family makes a new facebook post of last years trip with all of us in the photo and no description or anything. Carpe does the happy dance and sends it to Allstate. Allstate says we are not paying your claim and canceling your policy for fraud. Now I have to prove the claim, can't get insurance cause I'm on a blacklist and hell knows what else due to an inaccurate photo scraped by a company without official access. You don't see a problem with that?
- raverbashing 9y agoOr you just say "yes, this trip was in the following dates and not during my claim, which you can see from (provided documentation or other posts you made)" (and you can also untag yourself from other people's photos)
- lowbloodsugar 9y agoDo you tho? Do you "just say"? Out loud? To the room? Does your couch hear you and fill out all the bullshit paperwork, wait hours on hold, go to court?
- sctb 9y agoCould you please post civilly and substantively, according to the guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mfringel 9y agoYour usage of "just" implies an ease of action that is incongruous with the parties and the conflict.
- athenot 9y agoThe problem is you'll never know what were the actual criteria used to deny your claim, it will remain some vague denial reason. Or you will get to know but after much back-and-forth during which it incumbs to you to pony up with that cash flow. This opacity is just another form of information asymmetry, benefiting the large asset holders and negatively impacting the individuals.
- fludlight 9y agoThe way to find out will be to (threaten to) sue your insurance company, which is costly in terms of time and money.
- dewski 9y agoI would hate to have to go through the effort to try and sue my insurance company to get this information.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago> which is costly in terms of time and money. Yes; to you. The insurance company just has to figure out if it's cheaper to see you in court, or to pay for your medical claim.
- fludlight 9y agoAlso, many people won't sue even if they have a legitimate claim.
- bahram_banisadr 9y agoPretty much everything digital has metadata tagged on it including the time at which the event occurred. Its very easy to prove the timing of the photo in this hypothetical case. Insurance is a good that adds to the overall wellbeing of society IF it can be properly priced - meaning both fraud as well as incorrect denials of claims damage the insurance companies to properly price coverage and provide protection for everyone. Why would we dislike more complete information? Economic systems always work better with fully informed players.
- TehCorwiz 9y agoThe flip side of that is that many services mangle or strip meta-data. Exif data is also easily editable and not all cameras, phones, or software properly populate it. I can see a situation where someone edits a photo before uploading which causes the creation date to default to the date it was edited and not the date the photo was taken.
- FireBeyond 9y agoAdobe Lightroom, default options for exporting to JPG: - "Remove All Metadata" - "Remove Location Information" - "Remove Person Information" _All_ of these are removed by default and you explicitly have to enable them.
- abiox 9y ago> You don't see a problem with that? is it really any different than a private investigator (or even a company one) snooping around your residential area and talking to you and your family ... perhaps even seeing the photo in question on your parent's mantle?
- cdr2020 9y agoI agree that people should be more responsible about what things they choose to post publicly. But networks such as facebook make it really difficult for the average joe (the guy that rock climbs after claiming a back injury) to decipher what is private vs. public. When it's tied to your real-life identity, and potential consequences therein, it should be so simple a toddler could understand. Either get serious about your privacy on public networks tied to your identity (see facebook privacy checker: https://www.facebook.com/help/443357099140264/ https://www.facebook.com/help/443357099140264/ ), only use 100% anonymous public networks (see reddit: https://www.reddit.com/ https://www.reddit.com/ ) or stick to a 100% private social network, like I've done (see select: https://mailchi.mp/231daaf5ccef/select-03 https://mailchi.mp/231daaf5ccef/select-03 ).
- Consultant32452 9y agoI don't think this is as much of a problem with the social contract of privacy as it is about the social contract regarding distributed risk. I'm happy to pitch in publicly via taxes and privately via insurance to make sure people are taken care of in the event of a serious injury, because it will probably happen to me eventually and I'd like to be taken care of too. But if you've got a serious injury claim, you should NOT BE ROCK CLIMBING. The idea that the message there is that you shouldn't post public pics of you rock climbing is the wrong message imo.
- Karunamon 9y agoReally difficult? It's a single click at post time. Example from mine: https://imgur.com/3EcvT5E https://imgur.com/3EcvT5E
- gruez 9y ago>only use 100% anonymous public networks (see reddit: https://www.reddit.com/ https://www.reddit.com/ ) nitpick: reddit is pesudoanonymous, anonymous would be something like 4chan.
- olefoo 9y agoReddit, much like this site; offers the potential for anonymity but it is all too easy to inadvertently leak correlation handles that allow for deanonymization. General rule is going to be the longer you use an identity the more likely you are to taint it with information having direct or indirect deanonymization potential.
- glitcher 9y agoBut the _spirit_ of social media is to publicly share information for specific types of social interactions. I have always felt that examples like job recruiters researching applicants' facebook content is morally corrupt, although I don't expect it to ever stop. For a crude analogy, let's say you're having a yard sale in your front yard. Everything for sale is on public display. How would you feel if a company rep from xyz corp decided they could make a better profile of you by judging all of the contents of your yard sale? It's publicly available data, but is it appropriate?
- rietta 9y agoA friend of mine worked as a private investigator for years after his dream of entering law enforcement didn't pan out. His job was mostly investigating insurance claims. He would actually drive his car and park near the home of the claimant for days and take photographs of any activity that would tend to support or disprove their disability claim. He's moved on to another career now, mostly because the career path in that field was not great. I'm not seeing how this is more invasive. I mean, people are making certain content public. Having a PI parked up the block in a car with tinted windows seems much more invasive and that is business as usual and legal for the insurance industry.
- amelius 9y agoMaybe they do both now? Also, I assume you can't PI every case. So social media may help as a pre-selection step for PI-work.
- JackFr 9y agoYou PI chronic back pain disability claims. They are expensive to pay out and often real chronic back pain is not easily differentiated from fake chronic back pain by a physical. The diagnosis is made based on patient reported pain. The easiest way to confirm the diagnosis is observe if the claimant is behaving in a manner consistent with debilitating back pain.
- will_brown 9y agoI’m a lawyer and these tactics (for better or worse) are par for the course. Say the claimant in a civil suit makes a claim that due to their injury they can’t engage in normal daily activities leading to a loss in quality of life, example, I can’t lift up and hold my kids or I can’t take out the garbage. Better believe pictures of those things will pop up at a deposition, if the claimant has in fact done any of the above. I worked a worker’s compensation claim once, where a contractor claimed that due to a back injury he had basically become immobilized, sure enough he had Facebook posts that included zip lining - and was able to subpoena the waiver he signed declaring he had no injuries - and other posts like “drinking getting fucked up and dancing all night at the club” with pictures. So yeah basically people are doing the job for the insurance companies and lawyers that they used to have to hire and pay PIs to do.
- amelius 9y agoSoon: "AllState wants to be friends on Facebook (accept/reject)"
- ceejayoz 9y agoNo, it'll be "connect your Facebook to your Allstate account to receive discounts".
- ataturk 9y agoAnd install a tracking device in your car so we catch watch your every move and second guess everything you do while driving.
- handedness 9y agoNot sure why this comment is dead. Car insurance tracking devices are already a thing, with some scoring the safety of your driving and providing suggestions (recording the G-forces attained and determining that hard control inputs are indicative of dangerous driving).
- mavrc 9y agoI've had a few friends volunteer for this already; in my limited experience they are typically used only for a period of time (weeks not years) and are typically marketed as "use our tracking device and get a safety discount." It strikes me as creepy, but I might think differently about them if I needed a discount.
- nerfhammer 9y agoTo continue your application, sign in using your facebook login. Requested permission: view your public profile
- fkj_9 9y agoBlank page with third-party Javascript disabled. Boycott Web sites that do this.
- tyfon 9y agoWe use facebook all the time in my bank to check on fraud/claims of stolen credit cards. Once a customer claimed a stolen card but it was used every day at a specific parking lot. Said customer would post "Checking into work at xxx" every day on facebook where the specific parking lot was xxx's parking lot. Needless to say I don't have a facebook account or post anything using my full name anywhere public. The scary part will be when the insurance companies buys a direct feed into private posts from facebook or google sometime in the future.
- mc32 9y agoA good faith effort might be to provide two parallel offers: One based on using the social media meta data coefficient and its commensurate reduced fraud rate, a second tier without social meta data coefficient and obviously without the reduced fraud discount.