Slashdot Mirror
Should Social Media Affect Your Creditworthiness?
theodp writes "Betabeat's Adrianne Jeffries takes a look at the questionable young science of using social media to evaluate creditworthiness. As banks start nosing around Facebook and Twitter, Jeffries explains, the wrong friends might just sink your credit. 'Let's take a trip with the Ghost of Christmas Future,' she suggests. 'The year is 2016, and George Bailey, a former banker, now a part-time consultant, is looking for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for a co-op in the super-hot neighborhood of Bedford Falls (BeFa). He has never missed a loan payment and has zero credit card debt. He submits his information to the online-only PotterBank.com, but halfway through the application process, the website asks for his Facebook login. Then his Twitter. Then LinkedIn. The cartoon loan officer avatar begins to frown as the algorithm discovers Mr. Bailey's taxi-driving buddy Ernie was once turned down by PotterBank for a loan; then it starts browsing his daughter Zuzu's photo album, 'Saturday Nite!' And what was this tweet from a few years back: "FML, about to jump off a goddamn bridge"?' So, could George piggyback his way to a better credit score by adding Larry and Sergey to his Google+ Circles?"
C'mon, slashdot.... Is this news ? Does this matter ? Slow news day ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
And in the EU there are data protection and privacy laws that could be used to deter this kind of thing.
and angel gets his wings!
+1 AC Likes This
No.
Next question please.
At least George has Clarence as an angel investor.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Everybody that uses social networks have connections to somebody that gone broke, or made bad comments on the past. That fictional bank wouldn't be able to lend money. Thus wouldn't generate any revenue.
Searching social networks will probably happen on the real world, but you can bet the information the banks will gather will be way saner than that, and they won't jump to conclusion that fast.
Now, about the real problem. Why is everybody so concerned about their credit worthness?
Rethinking email
Any and everything about your life except for your history of paying your bills......... Just like the banks...
I Wonder what if you don't actually have any of those accounts. For me I don't have twitter or linkedin accout at all.
I mean, after all, you're borrowing their money. You don't have a right to it.
"halfway through the application process, the website asks for his Facebook login. Then his Twitter. Then LinkedIn." If any site of a supposed financial institution were to start asking for my logins for any site other than it's own, frankly I would run from that site like the plague.
So I'll be turned down for a loan if I claim I don't have any of those?
Same absurdity as requiring these for crossing a national border or interviewing for a job.
...as long as not using social media does not affect my credit worthiness.
Slashdot is so lam, the site sole purpose has become to trick people to visit rogue sites. And lets mention those stupid polls; how they gather information for the police. "How many drives do you have?", "where is your favourite hiding spot?", "Do you ever write your password down?", "Do you encrypt your drive?". Welcome to the new world order, you are guilty and you will be punished.
Couldn't be much worse than S&P and Moody's evaluation of subprime (aka supershit let the 99% die) AAA rated debt.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-31/subprime-mortgage-bonds-getting-aaa-rating-s-p-denies-to-u-s-treasuries.html
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
The company iZettle, which provides "personal payment" via credit cards (chip reader that plugs into phone+app),
requires not only traditional autentication and a bank account - but also your facebook profile with an established social network. I.e. you must have friends as a voucher for your identity.
No facebook, no service. True, they dont base credit reports on your profile, but I find it a disturbing development where traditional identification and bank account are not enough (especially here in Sweden where we already are tracked since birth with the personnummer supercookie).
This isn't going to be particularly pleasant to hear, but ultimately these sorts of activities are all about finding indicators of your likeliness to default on your credit, in much the same way that indicators are used when providing insurance to evaluate someone's likelihood of needing to make a claim and price them accordingly. So having these extra indicators isn't by itself necessarily bad. It's not in the lender's interests to come up with bad indicators. To stay competitive, they have to strike a good balance between covering their ass and giving you a better rate than the next lender. So ultimately they're trying to find out something about your creditworthiness (as a probabilistic measure of default) that is more likely to be right than wrong.
The real philosophical issue is, if non-financial indicators are used to evaluate our creditworthiness, then are we being unfairly induced to make changes to our lifestyle to accomodate our need for credit?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Depend on what you put in a public way. From the start in G+ you had circles to choose with who share some things, so giving your id to a bank, unless you put it in your Friends circle, won't disclose anything that you didnt made public. I think that Facebook and Twitter enable to restrict the audience of some posts, but could remain plenty of old public things (and, of course, there is the problem of resharing somewhat private things)
The problem with Larry and Sergei is not G+, is plain google (or any other search engine). If you posted with your name or known email something public (or made public) long ago, it could be found and (mis)used against you in the future.
...by having multiple accounts for these sorts of things
I see you, samzenpus
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
They've dressed the issue up as something hypothetical, when in fact it already happens. It's just not banks that are doing it
Insurance companies are infamously snoopy and manipulative. They'll look at anything and everything they can possibly get their hands on, legal or not, to analyze your risks. I'd bet serious money that insurers already pry in social networks.
And they've managed acts of regulatory capture that would make even banks and defense contractors blush. Here in North Carolina you're not even allowed to have a driver's license unless you have car insurance. If you don't actually have a car that's tough shit; you can't even drive rentals or borrowed cars.
If anyone every writes an algorithm that sophisticated I want part of it. Till then it's just a decent premise for a side-story in a science fiction novel.
Oh, I'll take that, too.
Please mod me up, I want to refinance!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Credit ratings as currently implemented are wild guesses and are basically weapons against you that you are to supply the munitions for. If you have had credit (and paid interest on it) you have a better credit rating than by financing things from your savings, not spending on interest, for one. And it goes on. Take an objective look and notice just how much you are the product. The problem is of the same "approached from a wrong angle" systemic nature as why credit rating agencies are currently in hot water for mis-assessing banks and cdos and whatnots, even entire countries, contributing to lots of banking troubles, except you the assessed have far, far less market power to do anything about it.
So, no, more data sources is not necessarily going to improve the ratings, rather unlikely even. Killing off the rating agencies and starting over has a better chance of alleviating the misery.
Frankly, I think Social media sites should not be used to judge someone for credit worthiness, or for jobs or for marking someone's abilities to perform work. People have lives that are not always accurately reflected from social media sites.
People do things in there personal time that is there personal time. This should not be used against you.
Conversely, people who don't post on social media sites should not be scrutinized either for their lack of personal info on the Web.
Credit worthiness is based on one's abilities to pay their debts incurred. Credit rating companies already provide this info.
While I think the way Credit agencies horde data on an individual is appalling, it does have the ability to show patterns in people and their spending.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Dear bank, sorry, I can't give you the login directly, privacy you know. But (wink, wink) you can find them - just Google for my nickname "Anonymous"...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Just stop with all this credit card madness. Save money before you spend it. Don't let the bank own you and your stuff. I thought in the USA everything is about freedom, yet why is everyone a slave of the credit card companies???
You give it your professional ones not your personal ones.
Honestly what idiot is posting everything professional and private to the same profile?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If you have a credit history, the bank is going to use that to determine whether to give you a loan or not. Paid off all your debts? Make more money than you spend? Never had a late payment? Banks will be falling over themselves to lend you money. Defaulted on everything? Bankruptcy? You're going to have some high interest rates.
What I see here is a tool banks and credit unions could potentially use to inform them about people without a credit score. Maybe I haven't had a credit card or mortgage before, but the fact is that I have a good work ethic and deep sense of integrity about paying of my debts... up till now, a lending institution has very little way of differentiating me from the kid who doesn't understand credit and thinks it's free money.
Now, if the institution can check my interests, and simple, potentially-significant measures like my quantity of friends or how many people like my updates, they may be able to determine whether I'm a safer risk. If they do, it's better for me.
I know it's kind of a devil's bargain -- give them the ability to look at private info for a reasonable, helpful purpose and next thing they'll be making bad decisions based on it... I would never consider letting a faceless megacorp like BofA or Wells Fargo look at it. But my bank has 2 branches, and everybody there knows my name... some of them could legitimately be my real facebook friends. I don't have a problem sharing my social networking info with them. It has the potential to be a win-win with better rates for me and lower risk for my bank.
From TFA:
in 2009 a woman in Quebec stopped receiving disability payments for major depression after Manulife decided, based on beach vacation photos on Facebook, that she seemed happy enough to work after all.
There's no mention of any further investigation, but this sounds like jumping to conclusions to me.
Well, it depends on what she told the insurance company. Major depression is a massive brain malfunction, the kind where many sufferers can't even get up out of bed for hours or days at a time, and not because they feel so miserable that they don't want to; they actually can't get up. Even major depressives can have good days, but if she told them she had catatonic major depression and never left the house (which would be plausible), and they saw recent photos of a smiling beach vacation, that would be a very serious contradiction to her story and the pathology of her illness.
So denying that claim based on photos is harsh, but possibly tenable.
The second this takes off, there's going to be a business in optimizing people's social profiles - if nothing else, the things you should have/not have on your profile will spread through word of mouth and experience. The reason facebook et al is used for evaluating people is the idea that people might not "keep up appearances" there, right? But if it impacts your personal finances or job prospects most people would just tighten up out of fear. It's self-defeating. It's also dreadful since it'd presumably lead to people making themselves out to be oily cookie-cutter smilies for financial benefit, conformity of the worst kind.
Emotions! In your brain!
Worse, what verification could possibly be carried out that the Facebook/Twatter/whatever account is actually associated with the person in question? My name isn't anywhere nearly as common as "John Smith", but if I do a casual search for Facebook accounts with my name, I get 8 (approximate) hits. Who's to say that someone else can't poison my reputation, despite the fact that I do not have a Facebook account?
Inorite?
I didn't think much of "What's your favorite color?" or even "What's your favorite brand of pop?".
But then, out of nowhere it was all "If you *did* have a dead body to hide... where would you put it?"
I probably should have lied on that one...
Absolutely not. I'll tell you why: There is currently no way to verify who you say you are on social networks, hell, some of them you can sign up with a fake, made-up name... all you need is a valid email address which can be anything. Oh, and that email address can be webmail, which also does not attempt to verify your identity. This makes it incredibly easy to set up fake accounts or profiles in someone else's name.
Absolutely NONE of these services have a way to accurately verify your identity. They don't even try for the most part. This alone means that searching for Bob Smith's facebook page does not guarantee that I find the real Bob Smith's facebook page. Or that anything posted or linked to Bob's profile has any accuracy whatsoever.
Stuff can become attached or linked to your social media profile, even without your knowledge. Character assassination anyone? Someone you know (or even don't know) can take a picture, post it online and tag it with your name, and there is absolutely no way to verify who is in the picture. I can take a picture of my cat taking a dump and post it, tag it with a friends name, and this will then get linked to their profile.
Do you see the problem with this? If a prospective employer or a credit service wants to search for my name on social media sites fine, but I expect they will be smart about actually using unverifiable information to determine my credit or job worthiness. The mere act that they would use unverifiable data to back up a decision on something important like a job position or a credit score, tells a lot about the company. Luckily I live in the EU where this sort of thing is not widespread and we actually have strong personal data protection laws.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Another question you should ask yourself is, why would anyone trust a lender so concerned with noise? Just a thought. Oh and it's against the terms of service almost everywhere with give you your login information, a real bank is not going to ask you for to break a contract with other players if they want to play nice with say Facebook for example.
One constant of humanity is their ever willingness to look for any metric with which to divide themselves into lessers and greaters.
I am John Hurt.
After all, Facebook is already selling that info.
You providing your profile information for free is probably a Facebook TOS violation.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
So denying that claim based on photos is harsh, but possibly tenable.
Using the photos as a basis for further investigation is tenable, relying on the photos as the only evidence is jumping to conclusions. I never said it was the wrong conclusion, but it is effectively making a choice with little and incomplete information. Much like we don't know what she told Manulife about her illness, Manulife also don't know the circumstances surrounding the reason she was at the beach. There are many beaches in Quebec, for all we know, this could have been in her back yard on one of her good days.
"but halfway through the application process, the website asks for his Facebook login. Then his Twitter. Then LinkedIn."
This seems like a fair data point for determining credit risk. Anyone stupid enough to actually enter this information is definitely a credit risk! The same goes for employers or potential employers who are starting to ask for this; if you are dumb enough to give them login credentials to your accounts then you are a security risk.
As for the rest of the article, I don't think the information on your social media sites is the least bit reliable for determining credit risk so financial institutions should not be using it.
is available usually very cheaply. That would meet the insurance requirement.
Unless your fiend is cosigning a loan, banks aren't going to care about them.
Banks only care about your ability to repay loans. They get the best data from your credit and employment history.
If banks are going to use social media, they will only look at your personal profile and it will be an insignificant factor in judging your credit worthiness. It is easy to fake a clean Facebook profile but hard to fake a credit score. Use some common sense.
Skirt design dust coat and replica Louis Vuitton handbags
If you is a melting temperament girl, so don't let a inflexible dust coat let you look old fashioned, choose a big skirt design, fasten belt, your sweet also be reflected.Every year we said in the classical style, dust coat, the wool coat, leather jackets are certain your closet is the necessary sheet is tasted, but how can wear a pattern in this season? Or if you want to invest a single product should choose which one is the most popular style? Believe you can from the latest global street snap in the help you find the most fashionable, most practical 12 look, let you choose this season in the classical style not lag behind. The replica Louis Vuitton BOETIE PM is a nice handbag , this replica Louis Vuitton handbags is made of natural cowhide leather , it is the feminine Botie PM handbag is ideal for everyday sophistication. Its soft pleats, Monogram canvas and elegant shape add a touch of glamour to any outfit. There are double handles for hand carry , this replica Louis Vuitton handbags is deserve for you have one.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So, the end of the summary questions about adding prominent google people to your google+ circles. How would this change anything if it is looking at your facebook/twitter/linkedin... I also wonder why you would put in your facebook or twitter info unless it forces you to.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Quick, someone look up Kevin Bacon's credit score!
I'm one of the few nowadays that's actually still flying NOE under the radar. I'm not on any social media sites and a Google search turns up nothing about me. Searching for one of my half a dozen aliases do turn up results, but connecting the dots between them and unravelling the web of lies to uncover my actual identity should be quite difficult. This isn't a challenge to find out my identity, but I just want to point out that I already run into problems due to my stealthy online lifestyle. Twice I've had questions from prospective employers openly asking why they couldn't find anything about me. One actually looked me in the eyes and asked if I had served time in prison. Makes one wonder if this scenario might actually become reality. ooh, and I'm *totally* posting this as an anonymous coward.
I have no friends you insensitive clod.
"He submits his information to the online-only PotterBank.com, but halfway through the application process, the website asks for his Facebook login. Then his Twitter. Then LinkedIn."
...
Next, this would require a wholesale change in the entire way our society handles private contracts. Giving the logins above would be a breech of TOS for all those sites just to start with.
Additionally, this would require a complete 180 turn in regards to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Currently if someone were to login using your credentials, they would technically be in violation of the Act as it would be considered Unauthorized Access to a Computer or Network Device, which just so happens to be a Federal Felony....
The noun "login" is ambiguous; it could mean "username and password" or just "username." Presumably, they mean the latter (since that would be sufficient in most cases to do the kinds of who's-your-friend investigations they're talking about.
Mine checked my score, got a copy of some of my last few credit stubs, and my letter of employment from when I took my position permanently. No calling my boss or anything like that.
It seems your bank is a bit more hardcore than mine (not that it's necessarily a bad thing considering all the issues with bad mortgage debt).
Sounds like someone's been goatse'd a few times on here.
You have such accounts.
What if you don't have accounts on social media like that?
Not everyone does you know.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
What bothers me is that they seem to be looking for ways to lower credit scores of people who have good credit scores. It seems obvious to me that this has nothing to do with borrowing and repayment, as they want to keep linking in items that are not related to borrowing and payment history or income. They made a run at using driving records to contribute to credit history, and now social networking.
Their statisticians claim these are relevant, but if they are, why doesn't borrowing and payment history represent this? Next thing you know they'll correlate hair color or something and charge more, since blondes are slow pays.
My sense is that the purpose of this is to drive down credit scores for people who have good credit histories. Why? It allows banks to charge higher interest rates or more fees those borrowers, something of a rising tide that prevents a lot of shopping around as it gets factored into a "credit score" that all lenders use.
Creditors don't do a lot of individualized underwriting anymore -- it's not like the old days where you sat in the banker's office and told him how your mortgage payment was late because Aunt Dora died and you had to travel to the funeral and didn't get it in the mail or that you were in line for a promotion which would raise your salary by 35%. Now the banker just looks at your score and makes a decision. Shopping around is pointless -- it's the same score everywhere.
IMHO, this is the biggest problem with the dependence on the credit score. A small number of organizations (2, maybe 3?) generate them and lenders use them as an objective number. The problem is that the credit score sellers see banks as their clients, and thus have an incentive to suppress scores as it increases bank profits and the value of the score to the lender. ("Use our score and make more money.")
Here is the problem as I see it. Lets say that you are credit worthy and would qualify for a loan if only your financial history was considered. Now if the credit agencies could use the data about your friends the following is plausible.
1 Lets say you list Joe blow as one of your friends.
2. Joe Blow has a very poor credit rating. In fact he has a bankruptcy on his record.
3. Joe Blow is looking for friends to loan him money (there is a chance he might not pay it back).
3 Your loan application is refused because they think that you might give money to Joe Blow and he will not repay you.
Do we really want to have our financial history dependent on people we call friends? Also the concept of a friend has been changing. Someone you list as a "friend" on FB might not be a good friend that you know on the outside world (face to face). In some respects, FB has cheapened the term "friend". We actually need a different term for someone that you occasionally meet online.
I hate to say it, because I don't like saying anything that further legitimizes generally unethical behavior (insurance scams), but in this instance there's nothing wrong with using social media as another fact-checking resource. If the goal is management of the risk accrued by your behavior in exchange for money, then those who will manage that risk have a legitimate right to ASSESS the degree of it by whatever means is available. If a person's behavior in the context of Internet social media identifies a degree of risk in the person's behavior and motives not made obvious in other contexts, then denying access to that information amounts to creation of a fraudulent contract.
If people started to be evaluated by banks by the people they associate with, even online, it would create a caste system. There really would be an untouchables class that nobody wants to associate themselves with, and there would also be a superior class that people think of as better than the common people.
You have no control of what others post. Maybe the stuff that others post about you is unflattering but doesn't rise to the level of libel (where you could sue the cretin). If deep data mining is allowed, this unflattering data might be found and put into your credit history. You might not even be aware it is out there. Had an engagement or marriage that didn't work out? Maybe your ex or dumped spouse to be is mad enough to put true but unflattering stuff online.
If this article is for real, I'd like to know how creditors intend to boil down a very multi-dimensional social networking profile into a hard number to factor into a credit score, just so that independent analysts could search the algorithm for exploits.
For that matter, I'd like to see a little more transparency from the credit bureaus on the formula they already use to generate this all important "credit score". They'll gladly tell you what sorts of things will affect a score, but the actual math involved is like a jealously guarded secret or something.
NO No no NO NOo NO No noNO NNO No NO NO No noO NO.
NO.
Not the inadequate credit worthiness determination system.
The current banking crisis, housing crisis, EU crisis, sovereign debt crisis, liquidity crisis and credit crisis were caused by crooked bankers gaming the system, not by billions of people gaming the credit application process.
This is to push you all to use your real name to get a facebook page, disclose your every detail, do self surveillance, not drink, not say or do stupid stuff, and get rid of all your hoodlum friends.
This is about a piece of Real ID to get approval to exist from the State, and a credit card/credit score from the banks to get approval to exist from the Banks.
That credit card is a piece of ID to the banking system.
Now the banking system wants to replace the church as the decider of your morality.
God watchin you all the time was just a mental construct. Cameras, facebook, no warrant wiretaps, ARE watching you all the time. They set themselves up as Gods.
All the fools that thought getting rid of church, god and religion would free them the moral tyranny of their Puritan masters.
Wrong. The Banks and the Justice System just wanted that space in your heads for themselves.
People are still telling what to do, how to live, how to think, what is right and wrong. It now just Mark Zuckerberg and Goldman Sacks. Backed by Pentagon, The Department of Justice and the Banking Cartel.
It is not just Mrs. White and here church ladies wagging their fingers at you. It is the entire weight of military, industrial, legal, banking, media complex.
But what the really evil part is? The church ladies never stop. They are never satisfied. They do not make deals. They do not compromise with evil.
"If they save only one child's life" they say.
GOT IT? These do gooders, these world improvers will not stop until they have total control and have made it is a perfect world.
Which is impossible. IF this was religion, they would be labelled as zealots. If this was mental health, we would label them as delusional and obsessive compulsive.
But wrap it in the Flag and the Children and no one dares to speak out against this sacred cow.
This is absolutely ridiculous. What a nonstory. Anybody who knows anything about credit rating knows that this, if put into effect, would barely even change your current rating. These are such minor risks that they're barely, if at all, worth calculating. So no, nothing noticeable will change, and enough with the shit stories already.
I'm reasonably sure that there's nothing in any of my social network sites that would reveal that I have over $50,000 (that's about 18 months worth of take-home pay, for me) in cash assets. Only an idiot would assume anything about my financial situation from the Facebook friends I keep.
Such is insurance. The first part of their job is to convince you that you may need a large sum of money in the future to recover from an otherwise unforeseen cataclysm.
The second part of their job is to convince you that you are a massive risk and must pay larger fees because, let's face it, you're going to be using their services more than others.
The last part of their job is to resist paying out in the case of a cataclysm because they have proof that you were a much higher risk that you originally stated and that lack of disclosure invalidates your relationship with the insurance company. Of course, they will have known all the risks ahead of time, but if you don't state them, they'll hold it against you.
Social media sites are means for insurance companies to find these unstated risks and use them against you later. It does or will happen. Accept it. Now, change your social media habits accordingly.
is not!
BTW, emacs is the best editor
Switch to a credit union. They generally don't use every interaction with customers as an opportunity to bend you over and fuck you in the arse.
Nope, the problem there is that you are uneducated about credit scores. You can build a fantastic credit score without going into debt 1 cent. Having credit cards and using them responsibly - not going over your limit, paying them off each month
Each and every time that you use a credit card you are going into debt. Being prompt about paying off those debts can allow you to avoid paying interest on them, but be under no illusion that you incur a debt from the moment you use your credit card.
If you never incur a debt on your credit card, the bank will eventually cancel that line of credit and your credit score will go down. Try going 20 years without without any debt whatsoever (not even zero-interest debt) ... you will end up with a credit score that is mediocre to sub-prime.
It's not as back-a**wards as it sounds if you remember that the purpose of a credit score is to predict how likely you actually are to pay back new debt and is not a measure of whether you are capable of repaying a debt. And if you don't understand why those are two different things then go read about "strategic default".
I have a policy: If something is asking for a username and password to ANYTHING for ANY reason, I walk away. The one exception would be if the federal government was asking because I was applying for security clearance. Passwords are highly privileged information. Anyone with them can pretend to be me. Not happening.
They can ask for that information, but they're not going to get it.
I'm waiting to see a solution you propose. By what method should a bank decide you are not only capable, but willing in the past, present, and future to make repayments on debt?
I didn't think much of credit scores when I grew up. I have assets, lots of them. My cheaparse car, cash. My phone, prepayed. My credit card, is linked to a debit account. I have shares and investments. I even had about $80k cash. If I liquidated everything I probably had a net worth around $300k
That didn't come into it though when I asked the bank for a $350k loan. A search showed no credit history. No way of knowing if I am a good little angle and pay my bills on time. How would they know? I have no bills. All they saw was a man with money, who needed more money, and who may or may not pay them back. And if he decided not to pay them back there'd be an arduous process to get through to get the money back.
Now you don't need massive amounts of debt to get a good credit history. Something as simple as a mobile phone on a plan rather than pre-paid system is provides you with credit history. Get a credit card, but don't use it, many banks will give them to you for free anyway. What this shows it that you never missed a credit card repayment. There's all sorts of things you can do to give you a good credit history short of spending $30k of the banks money on a car you don't need.
The idea that everybody has to have insurance sounds like a good idea because this can help to settle disagreements right?
In practice itÂs a corrupt tax.
If you want to bypass all this and have the minimum requirements to self insure (ItÂs about 100,000 in the UK) you can bypass this BS.
A blog I run for the wealth
Even the most severe depression can lift briefly. They MIGHT have caught a cheat OR they might have taken a severely depressed person's one and only moment of happiness in years and turned it into just one more tragedy.
Somehow, I doubt they really cared which it was as long as they got away with it.
As a society we have never been able to really tell the good guys from the bad guys even under intense scrutiny. The credit industry would be reckless if they took these types of associations into account in relation to loans and interest rates. It is not a "freedom of association issue" as that clause is aimed at government and not at non-governmental situations. People and I suppose companies as well are free not to associate with individuals based upon their personal associations. Somehow society needs to look at frightening facts. We now know that many innocent men have gone to prison and surely to death row for rape. The chances are that we would find many more innocents across the entire legal spectrum who have been wrongly convicted and punished. If we were getting false convictions for rape just imagine how many people who were convicted of armed robbery must exist. After all, armed robbers usually have a mask, watch cap, dark glasses or numerous other foils designed to stop a positive ID from being made. The terror of a gun and the speed at which armed robberies take place probably makes an ID of a crook really shaky at best. Anyone who thinks that they know bad guys when they see them would have a really hard time explaining Spiro Agnew or Richard Nixon or the overwhelming devotion to a young Adolph Hitler during his rise to power.
Leaving aside that I have doubts that looking at someone's facebook page will tell you very much about their credit worthiness. I think banks and other companies wishing to give you loans/finance should be able to use any information they can obtain to look at whether you are a good credit risk. If your myspace page can in a documented proven way tell them whether or not you are a good loan risk then they should be able to use it, I'm halfway tempted to say that they should be required to use it. Remember this whole financial crisis we seem to be having because the banks lent a load of money to people who couldn't pay it back? Is it really a good idea not to use any possible method to try and pick out people who wont repay their loans?
And this is the point where I say, "FUCK THAT" and go to a credit union or alternative lender. I don't have a Facebook account, and my Twitter is my business. Any corporation or financial institution thinking they get to nose around can go stuff themselves.