Our social media life and actual “real” life are getting intertwined more and more each day. Online activism nowadays leads to changes in real life, people meet each other on social media and end up getting married & in some cases some people end up losing their jobs by posting opinions which are deemed insensitive.
Now in another case of social media affecting our daily offline lives, Facebook apparently has secured a patent where your credit worthiness would be determined from your online activities. That section that highlights those intentions says:
“In a fourth embodiment of the invention, the service provider is a lender. When an individual applies for a loan, the lender examines the credit ratings of members of the individual’s social network who are connected to the individual through authorized nodes. If the average credit rating of these members is at least a minimum credit score, the lender continues to process the loan application. Otherwise, the loan application is rejected.”
In 2013, CNN money had posted an article about Lenddo , a company that determines if you were friends with someone on Facebook who had defaulted on a loan to Lenddo. The co-founder of Lenndo was quoted as saying “It turns out humans are really good at knowing who is trustworthy and reliable in their community“. Also, a company called Kreditech used data from Facebook, Amazon or eBay when assessing an applicant’s request for a loan.
In the same way, lenders will use this Facebook technology to decide if they’ll give a loan to someone based on their connections in the social networking site. This will favour those people who are connected with people who have high credit scores on Facebook.
It will be paramount from now on to vet your current Facebook friends or any other friend requests before accepting because in the future, they may lower or increase your chance of securing a loan. Excuse me as I go to check on my friends list.
Source: Social Media Today
