When J.A. Barnes, a social anthropologist, studied a Norwegian fishing village and coined the term “social network” in the 1950s, few could have imagined that the advent of personal computers in the 1970s and the Internet in the 1980s would spawn the social networking services that today connect nearly half of the world's population.
The web-based and mobile technologies and applications now comprising social media power much of today's commercial and social communications, providing individuals and businesses with limitless opportunities to generate and publish electronic content: content that sometimes conflicts with policy application representations or the reported facts of insurance claims.
Internet-based social networking platforms rest on the premise that people of similar personal or professional interests want to interact, and the efficacy of a social network depends on such people first being able to find one another. One cannot download a mobile application today without being asked to share its use or permit entry into its data by certain social networking sites such as Facebook. Indeed, Facebook has become a nearly universal means of logging into many applications, rather than establishing application-specific profiles and logins.
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