Slashdot Mirror
British Startup Strip Mines Renters' Private Social Media For Landlords (washingtonpost.com)
Rick Zeman writes: Creepy British startup Score Assured has brought the power of "big data" to plumb new depths. In order to rent from landlords who use their services, potential renters are "...required to grant it full access to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and/or Instagram profiles. From there, Tenant Assured scrapes your site activity, including entire conversation threads and private messages; runs it through natural language processing and other analytic software; and finally, spits out a report that catalogs everything from your personality to your 'financial stress level.'" This "stress level" is a deep dive to (allegedly) determine whether the potential renter will pay their bills using vague indicators like "online retail social logins and frequency of social logins used for leisure activities." To make it worse, the company turns over to the landlords' indicators that the landlords aren't legally allowed to consider (age, race, pregnancy status), counting on the landlords to "do the right thing." As if this isn't abusive enough, the candidates are not allowed to see nor challenge their report, unlike with credit reports. Landlords first, employers next...and then? As the co-founder says, "People will give up their privacy to get something they want" and, evidently, that includes a place to live and a job. In late May, an apartment building in Salt Lake City told tenants living in the complex to "like" its Facebook page or they will be in breach of their lease.
What does that mean? A landlord can't turn someone down without having to give a legal and adequate reason? Could a landlord have to defend a rejection of a tenant, in court?
Don't give it to them, let the landlords that use the service become bankrupt if they insist. It's only because of weaklings that the privacy invasion happens.
I don't know if if I've got my old man hat on, or what, but this seems normal. The data is there. Some people would like to get to it. Of course this kind of thing is going to happen. Technically speaking, that is. That submitting to it could somehow be a requirement for getting a job/apartment though is a different story, of course. Hopefully something that can be regulated or managed a bit better, this is a scary road to be going down. There's no stopping technology from getting all up in our lives though. If it's possible, it will likely happen. I'm curious as to when we'll have a real-time view of how many people are alive on the planet at any given moment, with my old man-hat on, I proclaim that moment to be the moment when technology can do so much, we're screwed.
“If you’re living a normal life,” Thornhill reassures me, “then, frankly, you have nothing to worry about.”"
The definition of "normal" is not for this company, or my landlord, to decide.
"Tenant Assured doesn’t give users any way to view their ratings or dispute misleading data."
I think Tenant Assured might find that European law has quite a different view on that.
But I am happy to create an empty Facebook profile and share it with my landlord. I'll even put a post up there about paying my bills on time, and getting an early night. No other data in there? I'm sorry, I don't use Facebook that much, and it's not compulsory to use Twitter, so I don't have anything to share with you there.
Wow. I'm not on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, but I do have a twitter account. Which I only use for following porn stars and for trolling. Guess I won't be renting via any agency that uses this service ;).
In all honesty, I highly doubt this will stand up. In connection with employers asking for social media passwords of employees;
A spokesman for the ICO [Information Commissioner's Office] said: "The UK Data Protection Act clearly says that organisations shouldn't hold excessive information about individuals, and it's questionable why they would need that information in the first place." [...] "In the UK, however, it would potentially put employers in breach of the Data Protection Act because it would constitute "excessive" information about an individual, the ICO indicated. "We would have very serious concerns if this practice was to become the norm in the UK," (article).
If that's true for employers, I'd say it's way more true for landlords and letting agencies, so I'd expect the ICO to have a few things to say on this. Seems like a probable violation of the Data Protection Act.
Oh no... it's the future.
Has this startup started up?? (or is it just crap at rendering itself in Chrome?) - to quote it's website: Clever Tenant Referencing "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum at consectetur sem, eget tempus lacus. Curabitur at cursus est. Suspendisse lectus lorem, porttitor sodales porttitor ac, dapibus eu lorem. Nullam in sodales dolor."
and that will have them running far, far away.
Here's a list of all my Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and/or Instagram profiles:
You're free to inspect them all and subject to the deepest scrutiny you can afford. I will be paying the rent by bank wire.
We might need to invent new insults for these bootlickers. And that's what they really are: Bootlickers. They're facilitating the worst sort of landlord and employer abuse to grub some money for themselves. "Swine" does not seem a strong enough word.
Who did what now?
To rent this flat you must own an Amazon Echo and grant us access to everything you've said to Alexa?
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
If Millenials weren't so damn eager to tell the whole world and his dog about their tedious lives on social media in the first place this company couldn't exist. Reap what you sow kiddies.
Glad I no-longer rent. But my experience with bad landlords left me wondering why there isnt something like this but in favour of tennants who wish to check if their prospective landlord isnt an arse.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I wonder if it's time to look at legislation to prevent discrimination by social media. Housing is too important to be allocated on whether you were a dick on Twatterbook a decade ago. It's not even like you can withdraw.
"No social media presence? Well, I'm sorry sir, but we just don't know who you are..."
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
Fuck that. My tenants lives are their own business.
Who though facebook was private? They make their money on the arbitrage between your illusion of privacy and your actual privacy.
All that the (prospective) tenant needs to do is to submit a Subject access request (possibly paying £10) and they have to give all of the information within 40 days. Certainly for people in England (and it is a British company), I don't know what happens if someone from the USA would try it.
Trouble is that many people will just hand over their passwords and forget about it.
I don't. Nor do I have most of the others.
"I'm sorry, I do not have a social networking account." Now, prove otherwise.
The fact that this is even remotely legal is problematic at best. It should be immediately challenged and put down.
I admit, I do have a facebook account but only so family members can message me through it. I have made exactly one post as a status update which reads, "Please do not put things on my 'wall'. If you do, it, and you, will be removed. Thank you for your cooperation. If you need to contact me, message me or if you have my phone number call or text me."
I don't have any commentary on the subject matter, but I can say it took me a full minute to parse this awful headline. First off, I've never heard, nor can I easily find, reference to "strip mine" with regard to data. After that it isn't clear which nouns and adjectives go together. For instance, I was surprised to hear that there is specialized "Social Media For Landlords" until after a few seconds I realised that wasn't what they were getting at. I tend to give a lot of leeway to typos and grammar mistakes as they are easy to make, hard to catch, and usually have so little negative impact. But in this case the headline was put together in such a way as to make it extremely difficult to parse. "British Startup Strip Mines Renters' Private Social Media For Landlords "
No, it's probably in a museum.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Just tell them you don't have any social media accounts. Done. If everyone does this, that just renders them powerless.
... Maybe? Perhaps?
Honestly, I don't get it.
I once had a landlord who specifically required a key to have access to the appartment in case I left a candle burning or something. Apparently he'd had some experience along those lines in the past that had resulted in a fire. if, so, btw., that would've been entirely the fault of the tenant and the tenants liability to pay damages and whatnot.
I stroke out those lines in the contract. He said no way would he sign it that way. I respectfully declined and he had to find himself another tenant.
I'm pretty sure that part of the contract would've been invalid here in Germany but I just didn't want the hassle. If a guy is so pesky about is 1 room apartment, god knows what trouble he would cause in the long run.
Bottom line: Don't put up with shitty/ilegal contracts. It's that simple.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Shut it down.
If the landlord thinks this is a good idea, be thankful. Why? Because you don't want to rent from such a jerk.
This Gangster UK Tech Startup made possible solely by Internet law enforcement weapons for Cloud Control, leveraging thermostatic social media 'social climate controls' to make Landlord Brainwash Radio. All people have slippery spongy social media brain, this is a REAL MOIST PINK BRAIN attached to Credit Score to indicate slovenly wall-punching muddy footprint poodle pooping Tenant measure that Computer God Landlords can use to Score them --- from the length of a single blade of lawn-grass!
Cloud Analytics and algorithmic intellectual property housed in a Frankenstein Cabinet in the Cloud, a neural net made with chicken-wire and carpet tacks, will feed on the voluntary output of yourself and persons whose names are similar to yours, solving your life like a crossword or Soduku puzzle and writing the results into your REAL BRAIN as you lay in their Operating Cabinet. You ARE a cog in their machine as surely as the fetus surfing the web from a Brave New World Jar on a conveyor belt.
Contemplate this future as you lay in your briny pool of social media. And you thought banks were bad.
This Gangster Computer God *IS* as *WAS* foretold by Francis E. Dec, but we did not listen.
"Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy made possible solely by Worldwide Computer God Frankenstein Controls. Especially lifelong constant-threshold Brainwash Radio. Quiet and motionless, I can slightly hear it. Repeatedly this has saved my life on the streets. Especially lifelong, constant-threshold Brainwash Radio. Four billion worldwide population - all living - have a Computer God Containment Policy Brain Bank Brain, a real brain, in the Brain Bank Cities on the far side of the moon we never see. Primarily based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, especially your Eyesight TV sight-and-sound recorded by your brain, your moon-brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold Brain-wash Radio - lifelong inculcating conformist propaganda. Even frightening you and mixing you up and the usual "Don't worry about it" for your setbacks, mistakes - even when you receive deadly injuries! THIS is the Worldwide Computer God Secret Containment Policy!
" Worldwide as a Frankenstein slave, usually at night, you go to the nearby hospital or camouflaged miniature-hospital van trucks. You strip naked, lay on the operating table, which slides into the sealed Computer God Robot Operating Cabinet. Intravenous tubes are connected. The slimy, vicious Jew doctor simply pushes the starting button. Based upon your Computer God brain on the moon, which records progress in your systematic butchery, your butchery is continued. Exactly. Systematically. The Computer God Operating Cabinet has many robot arms, with electrical and laser beam knife robot arms. With fly-eye TV cameras watching your whole body, every part of you is monitored - even through your Frankenstein Controls! Synthetic blood; synthetic instant-sealing flesh and skin, even synthetic electrical heartbeat to keep you alive are some of the unbelievable Computer God Instant Plastic Surgery Secretsâ.
"You are the highest, most intelligent electrical MACHINE in the Universe!"
~From the output of Francis E. Dec
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
What part of "British Startup" made you think that the USA's constitutional amendments would have any relevance whatsoever?
I think we need governments to step in and make such intrusion illegal. It's not just a matter of expecting people to be canny enough to give snoops a fake profile.
Yes, big government, nanny state and all that with such a move to protect the kiddies from the cold winds of capitalism unfettered by the morality we've relied on to make capitalism work.
Hey libertarians out there, you are getting the world you wanted. How's it looking?
Just open a some social media accounts through thousand proxies, use their pictures and names start writing posts like "oh man, another collection agency letter", "why my marijuana doesn't grow, is the lighting insufficient?" and "gambled the rent money again, maybe I should return to prostitution" and watch them not getting an apartment or a job ever again. Even if the accounts are eventually closed, the company probably still has the old reports.
Soo... I believe I have pointed out a slight problem with this little data gathering.
How hard can it be...
More like "British idiots with a website haven't considered even the first thing about the legality of what they are proposing".
I have Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, but there is absolutely nothing on there that does not need to be on there. These exist purely so that I have something that I can put down on forms for job applications etc.
Job applications? Who requires such a thing? There is no way I would give an employer this information.
Director: Benjamin William Stubbs
https://www.linkedin.com/in/be...
https://www.facebook.com/ben.s...
Born 7 November 1991 and is 24 years old
Mother : Andrea Stubbs
Father : Graham Stubbs
Siblings : Lucy https://www.facebook.com/lucy.... and Jessica https://www.facebook.com/xXStu....
Home Address: Yew Tree Farm, Wetton, Ashbourne, Derbyshire, DE6 2AF
United Kingdom
https://www.google.com/maps/@5...
Director: STEPHEN PAUL THORNHILL
Born October 1964 and is 51 years old
https://www.linkedin.com/in/st...
https://www.facebook.com/steve...
Father: Roger Thornhill
Mother: Zandra Knight https://www.facebook.com/zandr...
Children: Alice Thornhill, Emily Thornhill https://www.facebook.com/emily...
Company Secretary: VICTORIA LOUISE EVANS
Born February 1966 and is 50 years old
66 Allport Road, Cannock, United Kingdom, WS11 1DY
https://www.facebook.com/vicky...
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/...
What part of "British Startup" made you think that the USA's constitutional amendments would have any relevance whatsoever?
If you look at the heading of the article it says. "In late May, an apartment building in Salt Lake City told tenants living in the complex to "like" its Facebook page or they will be in breach of their lease. If you don't know Salt Lake City is in the USA so the main article has relevance.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Breach of the Data Protection Act. Even employers cannot ask you to do this, and not providing service if the user refuses to allow it will see you in court too.
Honestly, that's a business with a life expectancy of precisely one lawsuit threat.
No, this isn't going on in Britain.
No, it's nothing to do with Big Brother.
It's a company being stupid and knowingly doing illegal stuff that, when the Data Controller finds out, he'll nail them to the wall for. It has absolutely no basis is reality, even if some people were stupid enough to give them access.
Freedom of speech can only be affected by the government
The SJW's who say "A private company isn't obligated to respect your civil rights" whenever some social site censors "hate speech" see no irony at all in the fact that this is the exact same argument that restaurants and landlords used in the 1960's to exclude minorities.
Another favorite is "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences." My grandfather and uncle used to say that exact same phrase when they talked about beating up Vietnam-protesting hippies.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Finally, here are the real world consequences so many of us have been trying to warn others about for years, ever since it was revealed just exactly what companies like Google and Facebook were doing to our privacy. If their behavior and business practices are allowed to continue unchecked, it will get much, much worse, and currently our lawmakers are more on board with sharing in the profits than they are with protecting our liberties. We have done this to ourselves with our own laziness and addiction to instant gratification.
Anyone find that to be super creepy, wrong and just gross. BigData makes this possible, but don't be a dick or creepy ass fuckwad. Some people just have no sense of personal space or being a decent human being.
As evil as this idea seems, one must temper the outrage with an understanding of landlords' motivation to do such a thing. The reason is clear: tenants can be very difficult to evict in case of non-payment. This sort of thing is just the natural consequence of laws that over-protect tenants, leading landlords to seek their own means of protecting their interests. Idem for employers.
Might makes right irrelevant.
I'm surprised lawyers aren't all over this. Granting anyone else access to your FaceBook, InstaGram, or worse, SlashDot account login information is against the Terms-of-Service, as is using it in an insecure way (known hazardous friends). FB lawyers actually have a cause-of-action as someone is inducing their customers to break their contracts.
No different from employers, landlords could easily face discrimination lawsuits. But more likely to fear FB who can marshall endless legions of lawyers. I'm somewhat surprised they have not to protect their userbase and reputation.
> The SJW's who say [...]
Whiney-whiney-whine.
Why do most of the texts containing the string "SJW" have the intellectual level of three-year-olds?
Very strangely their site is full of Lorem ipsum, got the feeling this is either deliberately creating a faux controversy for farming inbound links or perhaps just a massive troll.
fuck the world
I have had potential employers ask for that info. I turned them down, I have personal conversations on those media. Personal issues of family members have been discussed. NO you don't get to crawl through that.
WTF is going on with these criminal scumbags? Enough, kill the landlords demanding this of tenants. Break out the torches, pitchforks, and guillotines already.
An extra link to another /. post that the editors tacked onto a vaguely related story in order to try and get more page views is not a heading. A heading is a title. The title is "British Startup Strip Mines Renters' Private Social Media For Landlords".
The SJW's who say "A private company isn't obligated to respect your civil rights"
Oddly, in the past it's been the libertarians and conservatives who have been most loudly shouting that private companies aren't allowed to respect your civil rights.
The regulator is called the information commissioner, not the data controller, who is the person at the company legally responsible for compliance. The data subject is well, the subject of the data.
The Data Protection Act applies were either the data controller or the data subject are UK entities. So the personal data of Americans or any anybody is legal protected when held by a UK company.
This company is clearly acting illegally and subject to a £6k fine per person per breach.
No, the SJWs point out, rightly, that the 1st Amendment doesn't cover private companies. This only happens because the libertards brought up the 1st Amendment in the first place, because they love to scream about it even though they don't quite understand what it says or means (see also the 2nd Amendment).
Civil rights laws do affect private companies and private landlords. They do not grant freedom of expression though.
You're very very confused about this whole issue.
And they are too stupid to know it.
The privacy laws make it illegal for the landlords to ask AND also illegal for the anyone working for the land lords to ask those things.
No company is allowed to break the law merely because they have a contract from their victims saying they can.
Otherwise landlords would have you sign such a contract before you rent a place.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Where do you get the idea that freedom of speech means there are no consequences for what you say.
If you are going to mess with your public image with social media, then you will probably get screwed by it too.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Depends on where you live. In some places, a squatter is simply removed by law enforcement. In others, a squatter may be removed in a body bag as the homeowner comes back to find someone "burglarizing" their home. Don't try that in Stand Your Ground states!
HexaByte - he's a square and a half!
Whether SJWs see the irony or not, both groups were/are correct:
Once you step away from liberty, you lose...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Could they write a more confusing subject line? For a while, I thought the story was about some startup that was trying to rent out space in an old strip mine in Britain, using Facebook or something. "AirBnB for strip mines" maybe.
"As if this isn't abusive enough, the candidates are not allowed to see nor challenge their report"
The data protection act, 1988, says they are.
You can naively write whatever you feel like into a ToS. But it won't hold us to the first even cursory legal challenge.
The ToS can say, "You grant the landlord the right to enter your apartment and invoke droit de signeur whenever you are passed out drunk." It doesn't make it true or remotely enforceable.
The cost of brown field site development is one issue, but not really the major one. My wife has worked on a number of building refurbishments (they are extremely common in London), and they are not that difficult, expensive, or slow to complete vs new builds. Indeed, the cost of land is so high in London now, that it shouldn't make a difference anyway. Provided the cost of cleaning up the brownfield site is less than the greenfield equivalent value, the development still makes economic sense.
Rather, the main problem is that there is virtually no cost to just sitting on land in the UK. Property rates are incredibly low, and there is no land tax. For many properties now, rent would barely cover depreciation and management fees, so it is simpler to just leave the property empty. Similarly, why go to all the risk of building housing on an empty site when this makes you maybe 1/10 of the money you are making from annual capital gains. Doing actual construction has much more risk than doing nothing, and the returns are unlikely to be worth having to deal with contractors and suppliers.
Just visit the ghost streets of the west end, or Stratford (which 3 years on from the olympics is still releasing housing at a glacial pace) to see how this all works.
The London market is fundamentally being squeezed by land banking. The way to fix it would be with a tax on the unimproved value of land, with the proceeds used to build social housing, but the trouble the govt has now is that enough middle class people are tangled up in potential negative equity situations that they cannot let the bubble collapse.
My pick is a sterling crisis, and the BoE being forced to raise rates to defend the currency. This will wipe out all the middle class hanger-ons, clearing the way for a democratic re-adjustment of the land usage system.
You tell us! It appears multiple times in your text.
And still flashing 12:00:00.
My grandfather and uncle used to say that exact same phrase when they talked about beating up Vietnam-protesting hippies.
So if they protested *for* the war your grandfather and uncle may have never left vietnam? Maybe they hadn't fully though it through?
Because that's about the intellectual level that most SJW's can understand...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yeah, that was my point. They're adopting the very same arguments their traditional opponents have used with no sense of irony.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
No, the SJWs point out, rightly, that the 1st Amendment doesn't cover private companies. This only happens because the libertards brought up the 1st Amendment in the first place, because they love to scream about it even though they don't quite understand what it says or means (see also the 2nd Amendment).
Your post taught me several things I didn't know, including:
1) Freedom of speech is the only one of the constitutional rights that's not considered a civil right
2) It's okay for a restaurant or any other business to post signs saying "Blacks and Jews may not talk in this place of business."
Have you considered lecturing at law schools?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Their thinking was that they hated hippies and liked kicking the shit of them. I think that's about as far as they thought it through.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Wow. The most powerful review on these landlords is in their policy, not on social media.
Oh, sure. Only they can afford to get huge machines with a giant stainless steel blade.
All I have is this small steak knife.
I don't think you have fully grasped the meaning of "the heading of the article".
Hint: The heading is the big text at the top. Not the unrelated link at the bottom.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Ah, another user snared by /.'s new AppendVaguelyRelatedLinkBot.
/. article.
Because it's included with the summary text, a reader might reasonably believe one of these href dingleberries has something to do with the summary or article. But instead, it's a link to another, semi-random Slashdot article that is only vaguely related to the subject matter. It is most likely a tool to increase internal pageviews, recirculating readers (like greywater going from your shower to your toilet) into barely on-topic posts from the recent past.
You can recognize this phenomenon by these hallmarks:
- The link is always to another
- The dangler always feels awkwardly tacked on, like a person who doesn't understand the topic trying to chime in and sound smart. Or like the textual uncanny valley of a chat bot giving you a close-but-weirdly-off non sequitur.
Nothing posted to
Quit acting like newbies and let your readers add the word creepy by themselves. Just the facts, man. So it will remain "news" and not "opinion" for nerds who believe it or not can grok an opinion for themselves
The SJW's who say "A private company isn't obligated to respect your civil rights" whenever some social site censors "hate speech" see no irony at all in the fact that this is the exact same argument that restaurants and landlords used in the 1960's to exclude minorities.
No, the SJW point out that there isn't a law restricting such activity, unlike how there is with renting and public commerce. Commerce isn't speech, and more importantly, asking the police to remove persons necessarily involves the state. As such, it's the same issue as restrictive covenants, you want the state to enforce your contracts, you have the problem of contracts that the state will be asked to enforce.
If you want the private companies to be forced to carry your speech, set up the laws to make that happen.
Another favorite is "Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences." My grandfather and uncle used to say that exact same phrase when they talked about beating up Vietnam-protesting hippies.
Oh my, somebody likes to appear as if they were tough by proxy, don't they? Can your dad beat up my dad too?
Of course, the irony of you taking on the cloak of violence yourself while trying to appear sanctimonious is amusing.
Why don't you just try to secede while you're at it? You're basically a caricature of the right-wing, so you might as well go all the way.
Simple matter of which side you want your bread buttered on. Example: They can protest that a local magazine should remove all references to X. It's not government censorship of X, it's a private company.
They'll deny they're throttling civil rights, though. They HAD to remove the references to protect the victim'd civil rights of X. Or the adjacent Y or something.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-thornhill-204a4813
"I am a highly experienced entrepreneur who runs a corporate finance business alongside launching 3 really exciting new ventures. With my CF hat on, I advise SME's who want to effect change in their business: acquiring, selling, restructuring (positive more than negative), fund raising and also provide non exec services. My 3 business interests are U18Connect, which is an online family community business enabling financial education for our younger members of society. Hello Soda Asia is an Asia based business which provides a new social media profiling product into a variety of industry verticals and for a variety of use cases. ScoreAssured is a UK business providing interpretation and reporting of social media based information to aid decision making processes in letting, recruiting, dating, gaming. see these businesses on www.u18connect.com; www.hellosoda.asia and www.tenantassured.com. This keeps me busy..."
Why on earth would anyone volunteer information to their landlords about which social media services they use?
"List your active social media accounts: 'I have no accounts to which I can grant you the requested access.'"
This doesn't even constitute lying on the application. What are they going to do - manually scan popular social media platforms for accounts that appear similar to you?
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum at consectetur sem, eget tempus lacus. Curabitur at cursus est. Suspendisse lectus lorem, porttitor sodales porttitor ac, dapibus eu lorem. Nullam in sodales dolor.
As a landlord/employer I would be totally sold by that irresistible sales pitch!
And i thought landlords entering an apartment without consent or appointment were violating the law.
Actually i dont see a point in this other than to move social media accounts into a protected section by coming up with the proper law.
On the other hand... any tenant is a problem to a landlord, because unfortunately they tend to use what they pay for instead of solely paying.
Die spinnen, die Briten!
> Business owners should not be forced into providing business to anyone.
Certain classes of businesses absolutely *should* be forced to providing services to *all* paying customers. Specifically, those businesses which provide basic levels of essential services to individuals; food, water, shelter, clothing, transportation, education, health care.
Does this reduce a liberty? Yes. Is that reduction in liberty a net positive for society? Fuck yes.
When people know that regardless of how society perceives them they can purchase all the *essential* items that they can afford, this greatly increases *their* personal liberty by guaranteeing that they can behave in ways that are entirely legal, but not condoned by the community in which they live. This freedom makes society more vibrant and healthy.
Certain classes of businesses that can be forced to "provide to all" have a name.
"Public Utilities".
In such cases, they generally are the only provider of that particular good or service.
If there are multiple providers, market forces will tend to eliminate those that refuse to provide to all paying customers. . .
As much as I hate people/companies intruding into anothers personal life, landlords do have more than a little reasoning to be careful about their tenants. I've known a few people who rented out an old family home, lake house, etc and virtually all of them came back with horror stories. People cutting holes in walls for a TV, letting their pets use the whole house as a bathroom, ripping out parts of the floor to run some random electrical wiring, the list goes on and on. The regulations generally "protecting tenants rights" don't help much either (at least from the landlords perspective) as even if you know a tenant is doing horrible things to your property you often have no legal recourse to stop as kicking them out can take months. Yes, tenants need to be protected from abusive landlords. But landlords need protections from abusive tenants as well.
The way it works in Britain is that if you want to run a business that caters to the public, you can't be choosy.
Run a cafe? Can't discriminate. Paint portraits for friends? Do what you like.
It gets a bit woolly in commission work. It's illegal for a business to refuse to bake a cake for a wedding they don't approve of, but I think you'd be hard pressed to make a discrimination case against (say) a fundamentalist Christian photographer who declined to take snaps at an orgy, but I think that's largely the difference between work-for-hire and retail.
The law is there to balance my rights and yours; I have a right not to be discriminated against when I'm shopping; you have a right to deny service to people out who are causing actual harm (rather than just making you uncomfortable). We both have the right to believe what we want, and act on those believes, right up to the point it starts to harm someone else. If I can't get a god damn cup of coffee because of the colour of my skin, then something is messed up.
There's no liberty vs security/fairness angle here; it's one person's liberty vs another's, and we have collectively decided we're fine with the line where it is.
My new startup automatically creates picture perfect fake profiles over time to give to future employers, landlords etc.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
We need a new startup that creates fake profiles for everyone to use for this purpose.
So, in the USA, I'm curious to know why the poster doesn't think the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) wouldn't apply in this case? If this entity pieces together an "ability to pay" score, based on something I wrote ("oh, I can't pay my bills this month because my pregnant wife & I were boozing way too much!"), wouldn't that data be a credit report? And, the FCRA is written in a way that if any part of a report contains a credit report or score, which may also include ancillary data points like employment, statements by others, medical tidbits, etc., the whole thing is a credit report... Which means, for a denial, the landlord has to provide the credit reporting agency info: "Score Assured". In addition, Score Assured has to provide a free report, once a year, to any US resident who asks, or whenever their data is used in a denial action...
Kinda makes me want to rock the boat, send them a letter containing an FCRA free credit report request, and see what happens...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
You have to admit though, a guillotine would be useful for cutting the watermelon...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
It is also the intellectual capacity of those who complain about the title SJW as if it has anything at all to do with the content of the message.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
This is very disturbing, and I see no way to prevent it. I guess you can close all your social media accounts, and re-open under pseudonyms and then lie and say you don't use social media, but really, why should I have to do this just to rent?
And how useful is a pseudonymed account anyway? You can't prove it's actually 'you' and you can't friend someone who isn't using a pseudonym for fear of the link being made, and the pictures you post could be used to identify you anyway.
Plus, deleting your current 'real' account doesn't help. The internet never forgets.
Frankly, I think we should be able to post using real information, without having to fear that information will be used against us. Automated systems to scrape and analyze that information should really be banned outright, but I don't know how you would enforce it, especially when companies like facebook are selling the data anyways.
This is beyond creepy. My tenants are my customers, not people to be squeezed for every dollar that they have, and poke my nose into their lives. I offer slightly below market rents (to undercut the competition), and I only care about them taking care of the property like mowing the grass, and not putting holes in the walls, and paying their rent in full and on time each month.
What they do outside of that, isn't my business, and I don't want it to be.
This of course, is why I have 100% occupancy, and I'm easily able to renew a lease with a slight increase of rents without issue.
Uhm... "allowed" and "obligated" are two different words with distinctly different meanings.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Business owners should not be forced into providing business to anyone.
And they're not; they just can't refuse service for specific reasons. If you want that black guy out of your place, find something he's doing that you don't like, other than being black. If you can't find something he's doing wrong, you have no legitimate reason to not serve him.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Of course, the irony of you taking on the cloak of violence yourself while trying to appear sanctimonious is amusing.
I think he meant to demonstrate how that argument was used to justify the unjustifiable, you merely missed the point.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
If there are multiple providers, market forces will tend to eliminate those that refuse to provide to all paying customers. . .
Except in the segregated places that made the Civil Rights Act necessary. Why would it work now when it didn't then?
So if they do this to you where you live, just create a new profile on FB, or Twitter or whatever, do only whatever it is they demand with your fake account, and then never touch it again. Anyone who views it will know it's a BS fake FB account, and so you'll have complied with the requirements, and you won't ACTUALLY have to comply. If, for example, your name is Joseph Q. Public, make the new account Joe Q. Public, or Jo Que Public, etc., write a honey-dripping, glowing review, make sure it's obvious that you're being deliberately smarmy, like this:
"I have lived for 6 years now at Shi Thole Flats, and I've got to say OMG this is just the BEST accommodations the British Isles have to offer! You couldn't PAY me to move from here to Buckingham bloody Palace, so much do I adore this place, even if you tossed in a complementary set of crown jewels, and declared me King for Life of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales! The paint on the walls is just the perfect color, the wallpaper is without flaw! The 389 square feet of useable floor-space far exceed my tiny, insignificant space needs, while the draftiness of the place offers plenty of fresh air year-round!"
In truth though, such requirements would give-away to anyone who can see your profile, where you live, which by itself should make this utter ballocks illegal for them to pull.
I hope they get sued, shut down, and while I'm at it, that the people responsible for this get Lou Gehrig's Disease.
Things like this will be the gradual death knell of Facebook in the same way that the Snowden leaks impacted US-based data centers.
When people realize that their social media is being used against them, surprise....no more social media. Like most folks, once you stop logging on, cut the cord, whatever you find that the world still turns, and that aspect of your (online) life that you thought was so critical...really isn't. Zuck better get on this
Why? Should a girl be required to explain to government, why she spurned two Black would-be suitors, but accepted the affections of an Asian?
The government must not be allowed to discriminate between citizens. Private parties should be free to do and be whatever they wish — including being bigots.
Sure. That's the rationale. My point is, it is still a violation of my freedom. I should not have to even have a reason — much less have one somebody else finds satisfactory.
The idea was sold to us 50 years ago on the promise of racial harmony. It failed to deliver that — as do most things, for which the price is liberty. It not only did not bring about racial harmony, it gave the government a heavy club to use against businesses and corporations. How about you just give us your customers' data, and we would not have to look into why your workforce is so disproportionally White?
The natural next step of that decades-old failed proposal you keep believing in is ensuring people do not reject not just customers, but would-be friends and partners for the "wrong" reasons. Are you prepared to defend this too?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If the posts are public then you have no expectation or right to privacy.
And who wouldn't like to know exactly what kind of tenant they're getting? This is a no-brainer!
IMO this is a good thing. There are a lot of trashy tenants out there who will put on a good face, move in, and then destroy the place and either be late with rent or not even pay it, and they are way too fucking hard to get rid of for landlords to go around blindly trusting them.
I'm one of those who don't think right to be forgotten laws should apply to criminal cases and newspapers.
It should, however, apply to social media.
Why not just tell them you don't have any social media accounts? Unless you're one of those fools who keeps your FB open to the entire world, the best they can do is say "well what about this page with your name on it?" and you say "must be somebody else!" How are they going to prove otherwise?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If you're going to imply that others are below your "intellectual level", you might want to learn how to use an apostrophe first.
In 1998 the UK Government enacted national legislation in support of an EU directive regarding data privacy. Whilst data privacy is being reviewed by the EU, the DPA (1998) still applies in this instance. Among the provisions of the Act are a series of Data Protection Principles, including this one:-
"Personal data shall be obtained only for one or more specified and lawful purposes, and shall not be further processed in any manner incompatible with that purpose or those purposes."
Now the only problem here is that the provision exists as a relationship between the private individual and the company that is given their data. In this case that would be, for example Facebook. The data, however, was given for the expressed purpose of "social networking" [for example]. Unfortunately, there is no clear indication of how the law would read this: "Score Assured" are going to argue that any information made publicly available, with the consent of the user, is therefore "fair game". I'm not aware of a legal test case that challenges this, but in addition to principle #2, how about principle 7:-
"Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data."
The question is: would the actions of "Score Assured" amount to unauthorised or unlawful processing? Even if a Court were to rule that this was the case and adjudge the actions of "Score Assured" to be unlawful, the private individual is likely to only have a grievance against whichever social network posted the data.
However, one possible avenue that the social networking site could take to protect against this might be the simple addition of language on their site that says, "Individual Users of this site post information which is offered with strict terms and conditions applied. Viewers are cautioned to check the terms and conditions associated with each user profile before attempting to extract, reproduce, store, transmit, process, re-use, sell or otherwise attempt to manipulate data from this site..."
This - or something similar - if placed on a social network site, would be sufficient to make it clear to parasitic companies like this that they can't simply harvest data and use it any way they like.
"Private Social Media" is an oxymoron.
If you're putting your life up for display on social media for the whole world to see, then you're just a moron. Shit like this is why.
He was thinking about it but he's a black Jew so he's not allowed to speak in class...
Business owners should not be forced into providing business to anyone. We surrendered an important freedom back in the 1960s in exchange for temporary (feeling of) fairness — and still do not have either.
Once you step away from liberty, you lose...
Uh-huh. Let's say the SJWs ascend to political and economic supremacy, and in a fit of vengeful pique declare you and yours to be the new underclass. Your "liberty" would let them throw you and yours into the gutter by refusing to let you participate in the economy. This is, of course, exactly what happened to the black people in the past and why the Civil Rights Act was written to take your precious "liberty". I suppose you think losing the ability to own slaves was also some horrid blow to "liberty"? You're only sanguine about the ability to boot the weirdos from society because you don't see the possiblity of being declared weird, subhuman and inferior and facing exile or serfdom as a result.
Shop elsewhere then or make a fictitious FB page that's in YOUR favour :)
Algorithms can be manipulated too.
I'm sure if a landlord sees that a potential renter is in a dispute with his/her former landlord and talked about it on social media or simply said that they disliked their former landlord, their new landlord may decide against renting to them even if they have great credit and have never had troubles with renters in the past.