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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.
Tricky in the uk the current government has engeineered an intentional housing and renting bubble over 10% faster than wages. Which has been exaggerated by Chinese/russian magnates buying property just as an investment. If enough landlords like it you wont have a choice
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.
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No, it's probably in a museum.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Yes, simply put, what this organisation is claiming to do is illegal, however, judging by the amount of Lorem Ipsum on the site, the lack of any pricing et. al. I think it's highly likely that this whole thing is a scam, or just a snake oil peddler.
I work in the fraud/credit industry and can categorically state that you cannot simply just do what these people are claiming to do without undergoing serious compliance efforts. First and foremost is the fact that they're engaging in financial services by including credit risk worthiness, and this would require them to register with the UK's Financial Conduct Authority, however there is no registration at the address on the website as a financial services company:
https://register.fca.org.uk/sh...
This is despite the fact that they MUST acquire permission to operate in this industry from the FCA and undergo necessary compliance checks, see here:
https://www.the-fca.org.uk/aut...
The relevant listing is "providing credit information services".
The company is however genuinely registered so isn't a complete hoax:
https://beta.companieshouse.go...
Beyond the financial aspect of professing to evaluate people's financial worthiness amongst other criteria the amount of detail they're collecting would appear to place them in clear breach of the data protection act in general also.
In recent years the reality is that there is actually a lot of oversight in the UK of companies providing financial services, in large part as a result of the excesses of the 00s and the mis-selling, the financial crisis et. al., the predatory payday loans companies that profited from people etc. For precisely this reason you cannot simply start a company and start bandying about financial data like credit risk as these guys profess to with absolutely no oversight.
Anyone in their right mind would steer clear of this company both as an investor, and as a customer. Again, if it is doing what it says it is doing, then it is operating outside the law.
"Our planning system mostly dates from the late 1960s and was designed to limit urban sprawl. That's getting very painful in light of the population growth we've seen over the last two decades, but the system has a powerful NIMBY lobby that defends it from any attempts at reform."
I don't think that's entirely fair, part the problem is that there are massive amounts of disused brownfield territory, but developers, despite making absolutely massive profits given the money in the housing market currently, have been lobbying to destroy greenfield natural sites to build upon, because it's cheaper for them than knocking down old disused buildings, or ripping up old foundations, pipework etc. from disused ex-industrial sites.
The fact is that there is more than enough disused brownfield land to solve for the UK's housing crisis many times over. People aren't rejecting building on greenfield sites because of NIMBYism, they're rejecting it because it's simply unnecessary and because people would rather see ghastly unused ex-industrial areas turned into shiny new housing developments than they would pristine natural areas turned into shiny new housing developments.
I don't think we should be destroying our argicultural and natural landscapes just because it's cheaper for property developers to build on fresh land than it is to tidy up old industrial areas. If we allow them to do that then we still end up with tatty old industrial areas that look awful, bring down the value of an area, and increase crime as a result whilst destroying nice argicultural or recreational area needlessly.
I think most people would be more than happy with building on these old sites, because it raises the value of an area for people already living around. It's win-win for everyone except property developers who make on slightly less massive profits.
This isn't to say that there aren't legislative changes that can be made to improve the housing situation, there are, an obvious one being that anyone not using land they own that is disused but could be regenerated sould be forced to sell it of or regenerate it themselves rather than sit on it simply in the hope of profiting off the increases in land value at some arbitrary point in the future even though it adds to the artificial land scarcity and brings down the value of an area, but we don't need to make it easier to build on green belt, we already have way more than enough unprotected land to satisfy the country's building needs long into the future. We just need to make sure it's used sensibly.
"What is worrying me is that I can't immediately see why this would be illegal under current data protection law in England and Wales"
There are two reasons, first, that I have covered elsewhere, is that they're providing a credit score. This is a regulated industry by the FCA, and they're not registered as a financial services company with the FCA for this purpose. Registering imposes certain requirements on them, such as being able to justify how they came to a credit score. If they're using artificial intelligence/statistical techniques as they claim to determine credit score from social media data then it's near impossible to fulfil this obligation because retracing how and why such systems came up with the score they did on an individual basis is damn near impossible, it just doesn't give the auditability required for FCA compliance, and they're not FCA registered anyway.
From a non-financial aspect in terms of the DPA, the DPA states that an organisation cannot capture more data than is necessary for the purposes of their business. Given that their business is effectively evaluating people by capturing social media data, and that some of that data will be inherently irrelevant to determining trust, but that they're relying on statistical algorithms to figure out which data is and isn't valid, as well as including data that they're simply not even legally allowed to use as a determination (gender, sex, sexuality) then it seems pretty clear that they're not in compliance with the DPA. Perhaps most damingly is the fact that upon loading a post onto their own systems, or a picture, they may be capturing data of other people. If a person being evaluated posts "£50k to blow at Joe Bloggs 30th Birthday on Friday!" then they've already taken data illegaly about Joe Bloggs - his name, his birthday, and his age. No individual can ever give permission to a company to harvest another individual's data in this way.
The reason the big boys in this industry haven't done any of this is precisely because it's an unnavigable minefield. When you start introducing non-deterministic algorithms into the fray, with data that can be so arbitrary such as social media posts, there is absolutely no way whatsoever you can guarantee that your system is not going to discriminate based on sex, race, religion, and so on and so forth. It only takes one case where someone suggests that their race, or sex, or sexuality or similar has been taken into account creating bias in the outcome, for that data to be stored on the company's system (which it is, see the example profile) and for the company not to be able to prove otherwise for the whole system to be shut down as non-compliant and for a fine to be issued.
You're right in that there's nothing to stop an organisation harvesting data about an individual that they've been given permission to harvest by that individual, but as soon as you start doing evaluation on that data in a non, or effectively non-deterministic manner, and when that data can include personal information about others then you're going to cross the line.
But again, in this case, they've outright failed on their FCA obligations alone before you even factor that in so regardless this company is not fulfilling their legal obligations.
And still flashing 12:00:00.
Once a criminal serves their time in prison, or more likely are simply released with a caution or ASBO, they are Reformed. They will be good for their entire life, so landlords and the like have no right to know whether their would-be tenant blew up his last two apartments and left meth-lab chemicals saturating the walls to neighboring units.
So your preferred alternative is that once released, this person should be marked for life, and no one will ever rent to them again? You enjoy having a large homeless population in your city, do you?
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