How Deadbeat Facebook Friends and Using ALL-CAPS Can Lower Your Credit Score

McGruber writes "CNN has the news that some financial lending companies claim that Facebook social connections can be a good indicator of a person's creditworthiness. One company determines if you are friends with someone who was late paying back a loan; if so, that is bad news for you. It is even worse news if the delinquent friend is someone you frequently interact with. Another company gathers information from the manner in which a customer fills out the online loan application. The chances of getting a loan improve if you spend time reading information about the loan on their website. Conversely, if you fill out the application typing in all-caps (or with no caps), you are knocked down a couple pegs in that company's eyes. A third lender requires that small business borrowers grant them access to the borrowers' PayPal, eBay and other online payment accounts (what could possibly go wrong with that?), thereby disclosing real-time sales and delivery information."

Comments

Kind of a warning sign actually

[Anonymous Coward]

If your bank carries that much stock in Facebook "friends" you may want to consider borrowing from a different bank.

Kind of like employers who want your twitter password, just maintain eye contact and slowly back out the way you came in.

Re:Kind of a warning sign actually

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

The problem is, how do you know whether the bank even uses that as a metric?

Re:Kind of a warning sign actually

[Jiro]

Using someone's skin color as a factor in whether you grant them credit would also be statistically relevant and improve profit. We don't permit it, for a very good reason.

Only in the modern era has it become possible to discriminate based on so many other criteria as easily as based on race. If someone walked into a loan office, their race was normally visible. But whether they were a Star Trek fan or whether they're in a knitting circle with a deadbeat wasn't, and it wouldn't be worth the lender's effort to find out.

Dubious Credit Criteria

[MyLongNickName]

Dubious credit criteria and validation got us into a huge subprime mortgage mess and contributed to an economic downturn. Fortunately, this method doesn't appear to be widespread, but the same principle applies. Folks haven't learned the lessons of the last 100+ years and seem doomed to repeat the outcomes.

Facebook is the most expensive free service ever

[JoeyRox]

The personal and privacy costs of being a Facebook user are very high and increasing daily. No thanks.

I think the wider story here is

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

How using Facebook at all can bring harm to you in real life.

Case in point: a colleague's teenage daughter applied for a summer job at the local supermarket, got selected and went to a job interview. The interviewer asked her to "describe herself". She did, and the interviewer then said "that's not what your Facebook says. Thank you, we'll call you." She's only 16 and she wasn't doing anything particularly public or outrageous on Facebook. It hit her hard and my colleague says she's been kind of depressed by the rejection she's faced.

As for me, I've learned the hard way 13 years ago (before Facebook but after Google) that the internet never forgets, and whatever you say will come back to haunt you eventually. As a result, I've learned to shut my trap online whenever possible.

"Deal with it." Seriously?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You are judged by the company you keep. Deal with it.

If we had just "dealt with it" every time those with power abused their position, black people would still be slaves, women would still not have the vote, children would still be down in the mines, and manual labourers would still barely earn enough wages to live while working crazy hours under conditions that would seriously damage their health.

We have a long way to go, even in the first world, in terms of respecting each other as human beings. We aren't going to get much further if we adopt your attitude every time essential services that make society work start taking advantage of asymmetric power relationships with the ultimate goal of making more money no matter what.