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 okay, it's not a freedom of speech issue

[NotDrWho]

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.