Have you now or have you ever been a member of the “social-networking site” Facebook?
Because Facebook could destroy your credit worthiness.
Facebook is evil. Guilt by association. I’m glad I’ve never had anything to do with it.
This could work to my benefit. The vast majority of my friends have stellar credit because they are good bookkeepers.
Wonder how the FB algorithm would work when it encounters my friends in the UK, Canada, Germany, and Greece?
Facebook can patent anything they want, but it’s up to the lenders to decide how they want to lend money. And I’m guessing they’d want to do a lot of research before deciding if there’s any correlation between your Facebook friends’ credit ratings and your likelihood of defaulting.
ETA: The quoted line about “the loan application is rejected” doesn’t even appear in the patent! Nice going, Huffpo.
Too late to edit - reading the patent, it’s pretty technical, so it’s possible Huffpo linked to the wrong one.
ETA: Here’s the patent with the offending quote:
The quote is an example of a way that a mechanism to search a user’s friends in order to authorize some occurrence could be used.
The really scary thing is that not too long from now, not being on FB or whatever will be viewed negatively by credit grantors, insurers, etc.
I understand it’s already viewed negatively by some employers and certainly by folks on dating sites looking for intel on you before agreeing to a date.
The absence of information is/will be viewed as suspicious. We’re all guilty until FB declares us innocent enough.
I’m sure there is a snopes rebuttel to that somewhere ----
I’m not sure why you say that. The evidence is that all kinds of “outside the lines” monitoring, tracking, snooping and data correlation is being used to manipulate our lives as consumers; I don’t see anything outlandish about being judged by your online presentation and associations.
Outlandish about the possibility of it occurring, that is. I think the current level of tracking, monitoring and resulting shaping of online and consumer perception and choice is beyond appalling.
- twas a joke related to the Facebook/snopes thread -
Still agree with AB.
I would not use such good language though.
Facebook only bought the patent for this “invention”. It isn’t using it. Yet.
But let’s say they implement it. If you don’t like it, just quit Facebook and go to one of the other social [del]data mining[/del] networking sites while remaining connected to your friends and family. That’s how the free market works, right?
Can you really leave Fb? Can you delete your pages permanently in an easy and certain way? Or, for a real hard one, once you have given them enough info that they can tell who you are, how can you ever get them to throw out all the info they have on you or for that matter stop tracking you even when you stop using their service?
One does not at all imply the other. You can be a great bookkeeper but not earn enough to make ends meet and therefore rack up credit card debt, gambling losses, default on home and car loans etc and therefore have terrible credit. And, of course, most people that have good credit aren’t bookkeppers, (not that I’m suggesting that suggesting that just because you said A implies B that B implies A as well.).
Anyways, not everyone practices what they preach. Even if someone does make plenty of money, they still might do a lousy job of keeping their own books.
Yup, it’s pretty easy.
What you’ve put on facebook is permanently logged. For example. You can go back and delete some old posts and all that means is that they’re no longer displayed, to the public. The police (should the need to) could still view them, Facebook officials can still see them, you can request a hardcopy, apparently, and it’ll be there. I’d be willing to bet when you delete your account it’s simply not accessible to the general public anymore, but still exists on a server somewhere.
Actually, I believe FB actually deletes that data. From the page I linked to:
Based on that, it appears they actually delete the data. They may keep meta data but the actual photos and posts appear to be removed.
“Metadata”. Like, the network of FB friends? Which is the basis of this patent?
Apparently, you can’t delete enough to protect yourself from this.
ETA: traffic analysis is based on the study of connectivity and communications metadata. “Who interacted with whom” is metadata. In FB terms, that becomes “Who is FB friends with whom?”
Lets face it, they will not get rid of whatever makes them money, and that might be just about anything. They are doing whatever they imagine helps them, and whatever they officially say they do or whatever spin they put on what they claim they are doing is irrelevant to their actual practices.
Once/If they used your friends’ ratings as well as yours, it doesn’t seem that difficult to manipulate the data they can gather. I should think there’d be a lot more ways to influence it than to influence a ‘proper’ credit check, so much so a bank isn’t going to put a lot of weight on your FB ‘rating’.
Anyway, I haven’t missed a payment in over a decade, so if some misguided risk analyst decides a friend of mine is a bad credit risk, and so in association I am too, I’ll take my business elsewhere and could publically shame the bank.
That’s an excellent question that I know less about than others here do.
I wanted to make the point that Facebook, as a single company, has a monopoly on “connectedness” which enables it to abuse its clients without repercussions. If you don’t like what they do, you can’t leave and still stay connected with your contacts, not like you can get another make of car and still drive, or switch your phone provider and still be able to call your friends.
Also, I’m not a legal expert, but there’s something about this idea that smacks of unlawful.
I’m not going to say I wouldn’t date someone who had no social media presence, but she’d be at a disadvantage compared to someone whose social media presence demonstrated compatibility.
“I’m not on Facebook” nowadays comes off a little bit like “I don’t own a television” did 15 years ago
I’m would assume that they delete everything they say they delete – and are accordingly very careful about what they say they delete. If you assume people are lying, you can’t successfully interact with anyone.