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Comment by us0r | Hacker News Reader

Just 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?

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Or 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)

Your usage of "just" implies an ease of action that is incongruous with the parties and the conflict.

The 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.

The way to find out will be to (threaten to) sue your insurance company, which is costly in terms of time and money.

I would hate to have to go through the effort to try and sue my insurance company to get this information.

> 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.

Also, many people won't sue even if they have a legitimate claim.

Pretty 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.

The 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.

Adobe 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.

I seriously doubt that most people using social media are running their photos through Lightroom before posting them online..

Which posting sites don't strip metadata?

Flickr, for one.

I also doubt Facebook throws away photo metadata when an image is uploaded.

The image that gets returned in your browser may have none but the original, with all its camera-identifying, time-stamped GPS located gold mine will be intact.

Flickr, for one.

Yeah, I imagine the putatively photographer sites like Flickr preserve it. My assumption is that Facebook saves it, removes it, then allows the image to display. ISTR years ago some controversy about EXIF stalking on FB, but it may have been another service.

I think you'll find all the major social media sites strip metadata nowadays.

Ideally, it is true that COMPLETE information makes an economic system work better..... but the improvement isn't some sort of linear progression, where every bit of more information adds a bit more economic efficiency. Sometimes, getting more information without getting ALL the information actually hurts economic efficiency.

A very easy example of this is wikileaks and the elections in 2016. It appears that wikileaks received information about both the democrat and republican parties; however, they chose to only share the information they recieved about the democrats.

By your assertion, we should not be concerned about this; after all, the information that was leaked was true, and therefore added to our overall body of known information, we should have been in a better place to make an informed decision, right? More information is better!

However, this isn't the case; because the information was selectively released, we only got the information that benefited one side, meaning that our overall understanding of the state of things actually DECREASED as more information was released.

This is the same thing happening here; you know Allstate isn't going to be looking for social media information that HELPS your claim. They aren't going to say, "Well, we were going to deny your claim, but we found from your social media feed that you were clearly really hurt. We have decided to pay out instead!"

Basically, if the extra information you receive is being selectively given by someone who has an agenda, you can be mislead even if all the information is true.

You wrote:

you know Allstate isn't going to be looking for social media information that HELPS your claim.

But from the article:

As for use cases for social media during the insurance claims process, Carpe Data cited two examples. The first one was where a customer was paralyzed. A social media search helped confirm the information more quickly through pictures of the customer in a wheelchair, which ultimately led to the claim being settled and paid out faster.

It's presumably in Allstate's interest to identify fraud, but also to process claims as efficiently as possible, no?

> The first one was where a customer was paralyzed. A social media search helped confirm the information more quickly through pictures of the customer in a wheelchair

This seems highly dubious. Are they really using information like this to decide to pay a claim? It's pretty easy to put someone into a wheelchair and take a video of it.

The flip side of that is that it's pretty challenging to take video of a paralyzed person playing basketball. It seems clear that the use of this is going to be biased in one direction.

My point was a critique of the idea that ‘extra information always makes you more informed’, not specifically about this case.

That being said, I would still be skeptical of the claim that they will always use this information in a balanced manner.

I'm sure it's absolutely no accident that Carpe Data tried to present a (hypothetical?) example that touts the "positive" value of its service.

> Why would we dislike more complete information?

Perfect information is impossible. The problem people have with this is that social media information may not enough have enough context to provide anything more than noise or a misleading picture.

> Economic systems always work better with fully informed players.

Except in the current commercial environment, most information is shrouded by the industry and the regulatory processes systematically corrupted. Allstate in particular weaponizes [1] its claims process to low-ball claims, slow legal proceedings and starve-out claimants until they settle. We should be dubious social media information will be used fairly.

[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/13/insurance-claim-de...

*When both players are better informed.

Allstate is the only player better informed. The % of Allstate customers that know their social media is being scraped to detect fraud has got to be incredibly small.

If anything, this is asymmetric, which rarely turns out well for the player with less information.

> 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?

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