That’s right. It’s funny news season. It turns out that insurers are really thinking of cranking up the premiums for households that make use of social networking. The concern is that too many people announce to the world when their houses are empty and ripe for plundering.

The director of pricing and underwriting at Legal & General, Malcolm Cooper, told the Daily Mail that;

“It’s a challenging one for the insurance industry. Just because someone is burgled, you can’t prove that it’s down to details posted on Facebook.

“It could be that we start asking how many youngsters are in the home for example.”

The comment is worth thinking about. Legal & General must associate social networking with youngsters.

It may be that older people are just as common on social sites (there’s debate as to whether teens even bother with Twitter at all) and just as likely to announce when they’re on holiday.

Earlier this year an American couple announced they were off on holiday and had a 10 hour drive to their 2000+ followers on Twitter only to come back to a burgled house.