Facebook friends could change your credit score

This is the first I&#x27;m hearing of it, but assessing credit risk based on social profiles is almost definitely illegal. Conclusions based on friends or location rather than actual history will have a disparate impact on minorities.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Disparate_impact</a>

<i>This</i> is what I&#x27;m worried about way more than NSA spying: the potential for companies using Facebook data and data in your GMail, and the like, to screw you. This is where the real money is. I&#x27;ve had several friends who had trouble with background checks for jobs because they had collections on their credit score and the like. The ridiculousness of it: people hindered from improving their financial situation because of their past financial situation.

&gt; Kreditech can determines your location and considers creditworthiness based upon whether your computer is located where you said you live or work.<p>Um... How does it determine your location? Your IP address? Cause that&#x27;s really a good indication of where your computer is physically located. Hint, our work traffic is routed through company headquarters halfway across the world before reaching Kreditech&#x27;s website. Now Kreditech thinks I am lying about where I am located. Great.

This is more to do with people who don&#x27;t have traditional indicators for credit scores, rather than throwing away everything else.<p>The Economist covered it a while back in developing nations - if your credit score suffers because of a friend you can exert social pressure on them to pay back the loan. You don&#x27;t want to be known as a deadbeat to your friends so you are less likely to take out a loan you can&#x27;t afford.<p>Though in that example the social network is an explicit opt-in I believe.

Cool, cool. Cool, cool, cool. So now who gets to build a facebook-based credit score optimization app. Buy and sell your friends so you can buy a house&#x2F;get a job.

If ever there was a time for the HN mods to change a title, I would think this sort of article would be a good choice. That said, even the original article title (&quot;Facebook friends could change your credit score&quot;) is just flat out wrong. Your &quot;credit score&quot; - as in your FICO score, for example, has nothing to do with Facebook&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;etc. The article is a good expose on what other data that companies are using in addition to your credit score. The title is just for link-bait reasons, nothing else.

So? Why shouldn&#x27;t someone be able to use public information to publish their own ratings of your credit worthiness?<p>Nobody has to trust the popular credit rating agencies, and people are free to make their own ratings&#x2F;certifications or start their own companies that do so (unless the government prevents that... which if so, is a problem with government not the rating agencies.)

All sensationalism, little substance. Particularly regarding the topic of the link-baity title.<p>&gt; &quot;One such company, Lenddo, determines if you&#x27;re friends on Facebook (FB) with someone who was late paying back a loan to Lenddo....<p>No explanation of the what the mechanism for collecting this is. Likely it&#x27;s a matter of opting in to share your data through a Facebook app, an act whose culpability lies with the consumer.<p>&gt; &quot;Lenddo has about 250,000 members, but it only operates in the Philippines, Columbia and Mexico.&quot;<p>Um. Ok. Three sem-developed nations. It&#x27;s journalistically incompetent not to explain what the relevance of those nations are to the operation of Lenddo, and why any of that is relevant to the American general public.<p>The only thing I learned from this was that CNN Money articles can be remarkably content-farmy and AOL-like, and HN readers can subdue their analytical spirit when it comes to piling on the criticism of an already-hated company (e.g. Facebook).

The only thing mentioned in the article that I agree with them using is penalising people who submit applications in all caps.

Title is linkbait. This has nothing to do with your FICO score (what credit score tends to imply here in the US). Only some small startup lenders are doing this.<p>What a relief, since I deleted most of my facebook friends and left only two people on it. Although, from what I&#x27;m seeing, that could be a plus for some of these lenders!

What&#x27;s interesting here is that they would Facebook rather than LinkedIn. Perhaps the LinkedIn network will suggest &quot;Can you afford to pay?&quot; while Facebook is &quot;Are you inclined to?&quot; Or perhaps they&#x27;re targeting low income folks who aren&#x27;t on LinkedIn?

I&#x27;m wondering how many of the factors are based on things that can be identified from photos. You can probably get some very strong (and useful to lenders) criteria from photos, and yet be treading very dangerous water with regards to discrimination.

I think it&#x27;s awesome they are knocking down applications IN ALL CAPS. Finally someone is punishing internet shouters in their pocketbooks.

People will likely freak out about this but I don&#x27;t see anything wrong with it. Making more accurate predictions is a good thing. Why does it matter what the data used was?<p>Unfortunately I expect this to become another &quot;illegal datapoint&quot; that is illegal to take into account. People hate the idea of being judged for seemingly arbitrary things. Which makes sense. But if it actually does correlate with the truth, if it actually makes predictions more accurate on average, why shouldn&#x27;t it be used?

How do the credit scoring agencies link one&#x27;s identity to their Facebook profile?

When I finally get a handle on my credit score, they have to come in and make my facebook profile another factor.... Next it will be my sleeping patterns, because some article somewhere said that sleeping patterns determine your likeliness of paying your bills on time.

Wow. Just... wow. Speechless, another reason not to use Facebook.

&quot;When you run with dogs, you pick up fleas.&quot;