Sophos Cloud Optix
How many times does the word “wasted” show up in your social media profiles and posts?
What?! You don’t know?
Even if you’re not sure of the answer, if you are in the US, looking for credit, there’s now a chance that the companies who assess your creditworthiness will.
If you’re planning to get a car loan anytime soon with a sketchy credit history, you might want to check up on your online posts. US credit analytics companies may well be taking a look at your online self to gauge your language and other things they consider indicative of your ability to pay off a credit card or loan, including whether you’ve frequently changed addresses – an indicator that you may have had problems paying rent.
The news comes from the Financial Times, which reports that two of the top credit analytics companies in the US are exploring new ways to assess consumer’s credit worthiness.
One of the companies, FICO, has been working with a dozen US credit card companies on a pilot project that it claims can be used to reliably price loans to millions of people who’ve historically been seen as too risky.
That includes poring over would-be borrowers’ phone and utility bills, change-of-address records, and their histories of DVD rentals and furniture rental.
FICO CEO Will Lansing told the news outlet that those data points are located on a spectrum of consumer data.
On one end of that spectrum is a history of credit card repayment, which is the gold standard of assessing creditworthiness.
On the other end is where they can find our slimy social media trails, which lead to things like posts about how much we hate our jobs; how happy we are to have, say, robbed a bank; our plans for an epic burglary spree; or, then again, all about our drunken binges.
Lansing:
If you look at how many times a person says ‘wasted’ in their profile, it has some value in predicting whether they’re going to repay their debt.
It’s not much, but it’s more than zero.
Subprime loans – those for people who have a higher credit risk – are big business for banks.
Both FICO and TransUnion – another credit analytics company – are turning over rocks to find reasons to make subprime loans.
Jim Wehmann, executive vice-president for scores at FICO:
The market was absolutely hungry for a solution.
For consumers, the new model could translate into better loan terms for people with low credit scores.
There are already scads of reasons to clean up your social media profiles: your employability is one.
Our Facebook profiles, Twitter feeds, LinkedIn pages, or Flickr photostreams are extensions of our resumes and job applications.
We can build them into resources that present us as perfect employees, or we can get fired before we even start a job by a boneheaded tweet.
Now, there’s one more reason: we want a loan. We want to trade in that sputtering lemon we’ve been driving around and get something that doesn’t shed parts like a bad case of metallic dandruff.
Been getting wasted a lot lately? You might want to keep it to yourself!
If you’ve been oversharing, seek out the delete button.
Get in every nook and cranny – of which there are many – where credit-unworthy posts may hide.
Here’s a good article about how to clean up our slime trails for a job application; it’s the same advice for what looks to be coming down the pike for loan seekers.
Image of woman at computer courtesy of Shutterstock.
or just get rid of social media and live a real life.
unless of course having no social media is a negative score
on the contrary, it ain’t social media that’s the issue.
the issue may be not understanding that you don’t need to post everything, OR maybe someone needs to investigate privacy options….
It’s a personal choice to swear off social media and avoid that part. But there are other really juicy parts to this article, such as how a credit agency wants to tie a person to bills, DVD rentals, and other things you do with your credit card.
Usually we just worry about advertisers stitching together this information to just be more annoying. But to stitch all of that information about our private endeavors and interests to make really important decisions about us as people?
Interesting, to say the least. It’s one thing also to have access to this through a specific partnership, but sharing this data on the back end is a really scary grey area. You don’t always need partnerships; you just need enough data to *suggest* that you have an interest (like a phone number and name that matches your bill) and a tacit out-in to share your call usage to another party…
Lenders are looking for a way to offer subprime loans? Yeah, cos that worked out so well last time.
Why do you think FB only allows you to use the name on your legal identification? Because they allow extra access to law enforcement and businesses to use facial recognition to identify you from surveillance footage, and gain detailed location data. Why do you think the FB & Instagram user agreements both tell you that you no longer own or control images uploaded to their services. It’s so third parties can search and use those images in any manner they wish without any possible recourse from you.
Just another reason that not only you should never reuse password, but you should never reuse usernames as well.
It’s rather simple create a new email address, then create new sanitized social media accounts that match that email. Their search algorithms will goto the decoy accounts that have matching usernames and/or emails, especially if you have a somewhat common name.
The more username or email matches you provide the more accurately they can pursue you.
This does raise the question of how well the company are able to match the person against the social media profile, unless they are asking from a persons social media profile details on the application. Most names are far from unique and there could be a danger of finding the wrong person! Even with a relatively unusual name for the country I am in there are a few of us..