Let’s face it, who bothers reading the small print on Facebook! Not car insurance provider Admiral, that’s for sure!!!
Earlier this week Admiral announced that its smartphone app Firstmotorcarinsurancequote would be trawling users’ Faceboot posts to work out what kind of a driver they might be. Just hours later, Facebook announced that: Oh, no it wouldn’t!
Shame really, because Admiral’s tech people had clearly put a lot of work into creating some fiendishly sophisticated algae rythmns that can somehow judge a person’s driving characteristics based on how often they use exclamation marks and words like blazin’, rat*rsed, burn and turbo.
What they hadn’t done was read the bit in Facebook’s ‘platform policy’ that expressly forbids the use of “data obtained from Facebook to make decisions about eligibility, including whether to approve or reject an application or how much interest to charge on a loan.” With a bare minimum of extrapolation, this pretty clearly suggests that stalking facebook usage for underwriting clues might not go down too well.
Never mind that Facebook was only planning to stalk willing victims, who would clearly have had the option of creating separate alter ego Facebook accounts that talked exclusively about choir practice, world peace and animal welfare – with none of the over-emphatic language and exclamation marks that signal recklessness and wild abandon at the wheel.
Following its slapback at the hands of Faceboot, Admiral is concentrating on maintaining some semblance of dignity, insisting that its social media surveillance plans have merely been delayed, while the company works with Faceboot to resolve “a few outstanding issues”.
Civil liberties groups were unimpressed with Admiral’s botched surveillance play. Ren Samsung of Big Brother Watch condemned Admiral’s initiative, reminding social media users to mind what they revealed about themselves online.
But, seriously, WTH!! YOLO!!!!!
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