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.

Comments

Re: It's simple

[jonnyj]

So here's the issue.

Landlords face real financial costs from tenants who don't pay their rent, who damage the rental property, or who are a problem to their neighbours. The vast majority of well behaved tenants subsidise the bad guys.

If you're a decent tenant and you can demonstrate that you're unlikely to cause problems to the landlord, you should be able to procure higher quality housing, have more choice of properties, enjoy lower costs or maybe a mixture of all three. If you are unable or unwilling to demonstrate good character, you'll have to continue to subsidise the bad guys.

There's a price to pay for privacy. Some people will pay it - and it's not your or my right to cast moral judgement on their decision.