Could your social media habits raise your home insurance premiums?

It's purely speculation at this point, but it's a question raised in The Telegraph, a popular paper in the United Kingdom: Could telling the world, on FourSquare or Twitter, that you're not in your house, raise your insurance rates?

Darren Black, the head of Confused.com, an insurance comparison site in England, suggested that this very scenario might begin happening, telling The Telegraph: "I wouldn't be surprised if, as social media grow in popularity and more location-based applications come to fore, insurance providers consider these in their pricing of an individual's risk."

It's something to think about, especially with his comment coming on the heels of the creation of PleaseRobMe.com, a Web site I wrote about for WalletPop last week. The Web site was designed to highlight the dangers of posting your location on social media sites that complete strangers can access.

That said, it seemed dubious to me that social media would really cause rates to be raised. So I emailed my own insurance guy to see what he thinks. "It's an interesting question, but I haven't really seen any rates going up due to social networking," said Jeffrey Grant, sales manager at the McFarland Insurance Group in Cincinnati, Ohio. "It's just the typical claims, like theft or weather."