Users of social networking sites may face higher insurance premiums due to the shear volume of users posting irresponsible information to the masses.
What you may feel is just a harmless status update or tweet informing every one of your up and coming holidays may actually be an invitation for opportunistic burglars to raid your empty home. According to insures Legal & General, more and more thieves are using the vast amount of information available to them on social networking sites to “shop for victims” online from the comfort of their own homes. With other resources such as the recently introduced Google Street view, burglars will have the potential to know where you live, when you will be out of the house and what your house looks like.
Malcolm Cooper, director of pricing and underwriting at Legal & General, told the Daily mail, “It’s a challenging one for the insurance industry. Just because someone is burgled, you can’t prove that it’s down to details posted on Facebook.” He continued to say that “It could be that we start asking how many youngsters are in the home for example.”
The significant warnings to users come soon after the Digital Criminal report which polled 2000 social network users to study the possible dangers. The report found that 40% of users had posted details about their holiday arrangements, 60% of which were 16 to 24 years old. Furthermore, one in seven users had their home addresses visible to anyone which is a scary thought.
So many of us worry about the possibility of having our homes burgled, yet some of us are so naïve that we display information which could give a potential burglar the advantage they strive to gain.
August 28th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Any excuse to raise insurance premiums! A lot of the youth today certainly don’t see the potential implications of sharing absolutely all their private information. for years, people have thought up cunning scams to capture personal and private information, now it seems as though everyone is freely giving it away! How strange!