Insurance Companies Could Start Tracking Social Media Accounts To Determine Premiums

“Fox & Friends” contributor Kurt Knutsson said insurance companies will likely start looking at social media accounts to determine premiums for their customers.

“There’s very little of anything that’s stopping insurance company representatives from scouring through history of all of our online posts,” Knutsson said Friday.

“A warning this morning to really pay attention to what’s on there from, well your cigar smoking and skydiving photos might want to come down. Anything that shows risky behavior, you can go ahead and look in the history of your posts, you know, you don’t want to show yourself smoking if you smoke. You don’t want to show yourself having what would seem like a rambunctious time with alcohol.”

Knutsson said activities like extreme sports without a helmet or other high risk behavior could end up costing people money.

“Engaging in high risk sports such as for skydiving, especially without a helmet — You want to make sure you have your helmet on if you do that. Any sort of reckless behavior that you know inherently would freak your mother out would be the same thing that’s going to freak out the insurance company,” he said.

Knutsson recommended bolstering personal security settings to limit how much of your account remains open to the public.

“This is a perfect morning to do a privacy check. Go into your own privacy settings and you want to look for this. ‘Limit who can see past posts,’” he said. “Check that. And make sure that you’ve limited it to just your friends or friends and family or ‘only me’ you could set it for.”

Knutsson also claimed there’s no proof insurance companies have started spying on customers, but said there aren’t any laws in place to stop them either.

“What we do know is that there’s really little anything stopping them. So there are few laws on the books that prevent that being analyzed as risk,” he said.