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NY Insurers Can Evaluate Social Media Use If They Can Prove Why It’s Needed
- elektor 8y agoI don't imagine this will go over very well with most people. However, headlines like this are a good reminder to practice good social media hygiene; I've been careful about what I post and have a habit of deleting old Facebook posts from my teenage days.
- taurath 8y agoThat reminds me I’d like to erase my HN comments over a few years old.. oh wait. (Seriously, can we please make it easier to remove comments/accounts from non-archive sites? There’s not a single person on earth that can survive a Willie Horton style campaign where everything you say is examined without context - it’s an abdication of responsibility on those running a community)
- darpa_escapee 8y agoI wonder how compliant HN is with Article 17 of the GDPR[1]. It's the "right to erasure". [1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/
- taurath 8y agoPersonal data is not the same as comments posted on a public forum, but its not to deter the most determined actors - its more to indicate that I no longer want to have any association with the comments.
- dbuder 8y agoIt is really sad to read old forum threads and seeing them full of deleted comments and hacked accounts. I prefer the reddit system where you can delete the account but the comments stay.
- nabla9 8y agoWhen social media use and friends you have there affects the price of the services, it's already a type of social credit.
- neonate 8y agohttps://outline.com/c82rJ3 https://outline.com/c82rJ3
- shishy 8y agoHadn't heard of outline before -- very cool. Thanks for sharing this link.
- briandear 8y agoYes, outline is a tool used for people to cheat on paywalls. It's very handy for those that are into that sort of thing. Bad for journalists, great for people that like free content.
- DaiHafVaho 8y agoI bet that you're into free content too, when you're not on your high horse. The public domain is a great thing and we should feel entitled to it. Don't forget that a paywall only enriches the owners of the site; it does nothing to ensure that journalists are compensated. If you want to fund artists, do it directly; paying an artist's owner and hoping that the owner is a good person is a losing strategy.
- mc32 8y agoNY has some odd laws. On the one hand they are progressive (energy, human health), on the other hand they allow some very neo-liberal things to happen like where debt collectors can continue suing you, if your bank has one branch in NY, and now this nonsense.
- dajohnson89 8y agoIt's almost as if NY has a huge financial industry that lobbies an otherwise liberal government.
- mc32 8y agoYet they overcome the auto industry lobby’s efforts and many others’...
- bluGill 8y agoThe financial industry being in NY means actual voters. While a company cannot force their employees to vote in any particular way, they can make their employees aware that some politician did something... They can't actually say raises and bonuses were affected but if you read between the lines you can see the relation. The auto industry isn't large in NY. When enough voters in NY decide the auto industry is doing something bad, no amount of lobbing from the industry will prevent the laws they don't like. Politicians need votes. Money is not nearly as powerful as a voter who is informed.
- Dirlewanger 8y agoAh, yes, this is when the real dystopia begins
- a_tractor 8y agoHonestly, dying from some otherwise treatable disease is preferable to whatever this emerging totalitarian extortionist system which unapologetically uses surveillance for purposes of behavioral and social control by claims to offer. It is stuff like this when I remind myself that there are still a few islands around the world with people who have never had contact with modern technology. Its weird when suddenly something like that starts to feel like a light at the end of the tunnel.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago"Hey, why did my rate go up?" "I'm sorry, we cannot offer you a CleanSocial(TM) discount because your social media footprint is insufficient to properly inform us of your risk profile"
- kozikow 8y agoIt's quite hard to avoid "disguised and illegal race-based underwriting", so expect some lawsuits soon. Even something as simple as a zip code is too biased, so an attorney shut it down in a project I was working on.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Rebelgecko 8y agoNot particularly surprising after the recent NY bill which will require gun owners to share their social media logins and search engine history with the state. Sometimes the slope really is slippery.
- FiveSquared 8y agoThen spying, tracking, censorship of "offensive" or "unpatriotic" words depending on your political side for little gain of the little people. Of course, the state won't do anything to actually reduce mass shooting, they profit of fear and hate. History doesn't repeat, it is remixed.
- Zecar 8y agoMass shootings are vanishingly rare. Your odds of being in one are microscopic.
- DanBC 8y agoOnly if you use the perversely tight definition of 4 or more people killed (not including the shooter), not in a robbery, not as part of gang violence, not as part of domestic violence, and not including sponsored terrorist events, on the same day in close geographical proximity. As soon as you drop some of those requirements the numbers increase dramatically.
- Zecar 8y agoIn fact they do not
- munk-a 8y agoLots of things are vanishingly rare, the odds of being in a mass shooting are a lot less vanishingly rare then I am comfortable with. If the odds were up near where tornado deaths are I'd prefer it. The numbers I saw gave a 1/11125 chance per year of being killed in a mass shooting in the US.
- Analemma_ 8y agoA bunch of people have pointed out that, for all the criticism we’re leveling at China’s nightmarish social credit system, we’re well on our way to building the exact same thing but with corporations in charge. And while you can talk about how this is totally different because the corporations can’t put you in jail, that really doesn’t matter at all if I have to constantly self-censor all my words and thoughts or lose my health insurance. That’s an equally shitty outcome.
- FiveSquared 8y agoTrue, I never show my real name in any public platform unless it's my "official" one, which is whitewashed. I go through pseudonymous accounts every 2 years for my privacy. We already do have social credit, it's called your credit score. Self-deception is a powerful force. Everybody rise up to the polls! Oh wait, it's both sides that are abetting this crap. Just vote with the closest to freedom (including a social safety net) and don't worry, cause you can't control it.
- abapologist 8y agoUnless I’m mistaken, your credit score is your financial credit rating, not your social. It isn’t affected if you get a ticket jaywalking, or acting like a jerk. There are interconnections between the two, but there are pretty clear distinctions.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoA matter of time, I guess. Your "insurance score", as seen by insurance companies, provides information on how likely you're to be able to pay back a long-term loan, or even to be alive long enough to pay it back. And "insurance score" is based on increasingly deep insight into your lifestyle. It's only a matter of time before someone will have the bright idea to use "insurance score" as an input to credit score - and then, suddenly, you have social credit (sans the politics part).
- contribute 8y agoJail and losing health insurance are not equally shitty outcomes.
- gruez 8y agoThe only reason this works now is that people behave naturally (or at least natural enough) when posting on social media. If social media profiling becomes more prevalent (like this article suggests), everyone is going to be much more careful when it comes to what they're posting. All their real activity is going to be driven into pseudonymous (or at least private channels) that can't be easily monitored, and their "real" accounts is going to be so carefully curated that the signal to noise ratio is abysmally low. Or at least, this is my hope. I could be overly optimistic, and people will continue posting their true selves against their own interest.
- Spooky23 8y agoPeople are pretty dumb. There’s another side to this though, why should a low risk person be in the same risk tranche as somebody who has lots of guns in plain sight, is out drinking 3 nights a week or has high-risk hobbies? Life insurers have pretty transparent interests. A middle aged guy with guns and heavy alcohol use is a more expensive risk for death. Right now they only use age, occupation, specific medical and smoking status.
- mikeash 8y agoInsurance is weird. It operates by taking events that are unpredictable individually and grouping them together such that they are predictable in aggregate. The larger the groups are, the better this works. At the same time, there’s a competitive advantage to using smaller groups, if you can reliably discriminate. Except that once you take it too far, you approach the individual case again and insurance ceases to have a point. A life insurance company that buckets everyone together will lose out to one that divides people up into groups based on their risk. That one in turn would lose out to a company that has an accurate death clock they can use on every customer to provide perfectly individualized coverage. And yet the death clock company won’t be able to sell any insurance at all, unless they can keep it a total secret, because people could accomplish the same thing on their own.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
- arcaster 8y agoLooks like it's time to either fudge all my social media with unicorns and rainbows or start operating purely behind pseudonyms?
- no_love 8y agoJoke’s on them. They’ll be lucky to uncover a handful of uncorroberated shadow profiles and spam catcher email dead ends that flout “real name” policies. Meanwhile, I scarcely have a need for insurance. Come up and get me.
- maccard 8y ago> Meanwhile, I scarcely have a need for insurance. Come up and get me. I don't live in the US but I have 5 insurance policies - home insurance (mandated by my bank for my mortgage), car insurance (mandated by having a car), health insurance (optional but less so if you live in the US), Travel insurance (traveling for work mandates I'm covered by a policy) and life assurance (the only actual optional one) - should I have to provide all of these groups my social media details even though I don't "want" to have them? Further, whos to say they decide that by me not participating in "normal" activities online, that they won't decline or offer me a substantially worse policy?
- munk-a 8y agoJoke's on you! As we've seen in the credit rating system if there is a fake profile sharing your information the company is pretty likely to assume it's just you - I'm not certain how being known as a v1agr4 reseller will impact your insurance prices but it'll be fun to find out together.
- williesleg 8y agoNice way to jack up rates.
- erentz 8y agoI would like to see the increasing granulization of insurance put to an end, because otherwise it won’t stop. There should be one pool, everyone’s in it, we spread risk, and the whole damn thing is simpler and easier to regulate. Sure, Mr Base Jumper is going to raise your premiums when he breaks his leg, so what. Maybe he doesn’t drink and so has less health affects than you. Or you’ll raise his premiums when it turns out you carried a gene for disease-X and got it at 45. What we have now is an ad-hoc nonsensible set of what you can and can’t risk profile on, and every time we learn some new way to risk profile then we’ll have to decide again if we want to regulate it. On top of that this just increases the risk of insurance companies getting it wrong and needing to be bailed out. I’d rather we had a conservative, boring and simple insurance industry and just get off the treadmill.
- conanbatt 8y agoCost, Quality or Access. Whatever you get on one comes at the sacrifice of another. This is called the Iron Triangle of healthcare. Furthermore, you can have public insurance that charges co-pays, high-deductibles etc. Public Healthcare does not guarantee 'free healthcare', and if it did it would do so at cost of access (rationing) or quality (cost-effective care). You can do that today with an HMO or a High-deductible plan if you wish. There are many issues with healthcare in the us, but this is not a solution for them.
- mikeash 8y agoThis story is about life insurance, not health insurance. That Iron Triangle assumes that you have an efficient system. If you have a wasteful system (say, you pay twice as much per person as other places do without any advantage in quality or access) then you can reduce costs without hurting other things.
- erentz 8y agoYou seem to be thinking about something different wrt cost sharing and public healthcare. Cost sharing structure is a separate matter to risk pooling. Taken to its conclusion we should all be in risk pools of 1.
- 8y ago