Worried that your edgy new advertising campaign might offend a lot more customers than it attracts? Worry no more. The CBC has a great story about a new concept for how businesses and people can protect themselves from saying stupid things: Social media insurance. The idea is that, before engaging in some heavy Facebooking, a company can hedge against the possibility that they'll say something stupid by paying an insurance company for protection.

As the CBC describes it:

An interesting story in the Los Angeles Times highlights the different ways that insurance companies have begun to monitor social networking cites in an effort to root out fraud. For example, a fraud investigator who sees a disability patient post photos of a recent distance run, might use the photo as evidence for further investigation--or to stop paying a disability claim entirely.

This sort of practice, according to the Times, is pretty common:

An easy way to identify a future dilemma is to spot two polar, but entirely sensible, reactions to an emerging practice or technology.

A couple months ago, a broad consortium of bloggers, patients and companies endorsed a declaration of health data privacy aimed at ensuring individual privacy and control over health data.