"Admiral Insurance will analyse the Facebook accounts of first-time car owners to look for personality traits that are linked to safe driving. For example, individuals who are identified as conscientious and well-organised will score well.
Facebook forces Admiral to pull plan to price car insurance based on posts
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The insurer will examine posts and likes by the Facebook user, although not photos, looking for habits that research shows are linked to these traits. These include writing in short concrete sentences, using lists, and arranging to meet friends at a set time and place, rather than just "tonight"."
"Graduated top of your class in Ghana and managed to land a place on an MBA at Oxford? Then you're heading for a salary high enough to make repaying your student loan a cinch - especially if half your Facebook followers are from McKinsey. At least, this is the kind of calculation being made by private funders stepping into the increasingly complex and competitive student loans market."
"Going from small data analytics to Big Data analytics or to predictive and prescriptive analytics is trickier. Expanding in both dimensions is human capital intensive, requiring talented data scientists. A McKinsey report (2011) estimates that by 2018, there will be a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 workers with "deep analytical" experience and a further 1.5 million data-literate managers in the US. Technology giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, and large investment banks and top hedge funds can afford such employees, however even now the competition is fierce, as is evidenced by the ongoing talent war in Silicon Valley. The data scientist is indeed a sexy job in the 21st century."