Being ‘wasted’ on Facebook may damage your credit score

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d6daedee-706a-11e5-9b9e-690fdae72044.html

by jackgavigan • 11 years ago

28 48 11 years ago

ft.com

bentpins• 11 years ago

Google cache link to get around paywall

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

mschuster91• 11 years ago

How does a credit score service know which of the dozens of John Does you are on Facebook?

The only ways in which this can work is a) you have a pretty unique name on FB or b) you have to give your FB name on your credit application (if I'd see this on a form, I'd just tell the bank guy to forget everything and walk out).

Of course, this opens a possibility for manipulation - either you use someone else's clean FB page, or a malevolent entity creates a profile in your name, or you yourself have one "clean" profile and one "real" profile which many people already do to hide their pot smoke pics from potential employers.

riskneural• 11 years ago

I'm findable on facebook with my name and the name of the city I live it. It's not so hard.

visakanv• 11 years ago

Also I think things like who's in your friends list, etc.

rogeryu• 11 years ago

The credit score service doesn't know, but FB does.

Can you imagine that FB sells this information anywhere in the near future? I bet they can make great profiles of you, and compared to a big pile of people with similar profiles, the bank can see what profiles predict risk.

adrianN• 11 years ago

First, the bank might not care whether it's really you. If there is someone with "bad behavior signs" who is sufficiently similar to you the prudent thing to do if you want to minimize loan risk is to assume that it's you. Secondly, it's really simple to deanonymize data. Check for example

http://33bits.org/2011/03/09/link-prediction-by-de-anonymiza...

As the site name implies, you need just 33 bits of good information to distinguish every person on Earth. It's not hard to get enough bits from your Facebook timeline to cross-correlate it with other stuff the bank might know about you.

maaku2• 11 years ago

I am one of three people in the entire world with my firstname, lastname combination. One of the other two goes by a different name, and the other is Portuguese.

It must be nice to have a common name.

treerock• 11 years ago

I'm curious. How do you know this?

pdkl953• 11 years ago

1) That would be why they are trying to push their irresponsible "real names" policy.

2) Let's not forget they have more than your name. They can geolocate your IP, for example, to get an approximate location. If I remember correctly, name and zip alone has something like an 85% chance of uniquely identifying someone. If you tell them your birthday, that chance goes up into the high 90s.

3) Once you have their cookie, they have many other sources of information thanks to "beacon"[1]. Identification becomes significantly easier when they have other businesses adding data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon

crwll• 11 years ago

Why would you keep your FB posts public and not limited to your friends or to some subset of those (depending on what you are posting)?

Comments here seem to once again indicate as if everything posted to Facebook was automatically and irrevocably public. I don't really see that going on at least on my group of friends.

jackgavigan• 11 years ago

What if it becomes a prerequisite to grant your bank or FICO access to your Facebook posts, as part of the loan application?

PMan74• 11 years ago

Or what if FB just decide to sell access to all posts (regardless of privacy setting on that post) to certain companies.

Could they do that? You'd probably have to read (and keep up with) the T&Cs.

chrsstrm• 11 years ago

A: "What Facebook profile?"

Sephr• 11 years ago

Then you simply tell them that you don't have a Facebook account. If they find a private account with your name, you can tell them that it's not you.

p8donald• 11 years ago

You can create user groups or G+ style circles on FB. For instance, I've got posts that only my friends see, most of them are also visible to my parents and very few are visible to acquaintances.

Add the representative of the bank to one of the limited visibility groups.

Not sure how that works when FB API is used.

johnpowell• 11 years ago

Wasn't this a big thing years ago? Employers asking for your Facebook username and password during the interview process?

I seem to remember a lot of articles about that and then it just stopped.

Loque• 11 years ago

Because _everyone_ has a facebook account? Bank/work somewhere else if the prerequisite is to have a facebook account that is accessible to people who are not your friends.

Alternatively, if you are genuinely worried about being able to do this, I would advise setting up a public profile separate from a personal one (cpt obvious).

I remember when it was a faux pas to put your real name on the internet - long live the days of having an alias that you can make a whole bunch of mistakes to a private group of friends without being publicly remembered for it.

venomsnake• 11 years ago

You will be surprised how easy is to create second facebook profile.

scintill76• 11 years ago

I could see this starting as an opt-in for a little bump (of rate, score, etc.) in your favor, like how the car insurance companies give you a discount if you let them log your driving and it shows safe behavior (e.g. https://www.progressive.com/auto/snapshot/)

ionised• 11 years ago

I'd rather just close my Facebook account.

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

A lot of people have all their posts public and either do not realise this, or don't know the implications of being fully public.

TeMPOraL6• 11 years ago

Why wouldn't you?

I post default-public, on purpose. I welcome everyone to stalk me on Facebook as much as they like and to comment on anything that's interesting for them. I have very little personal secrets I want to limit access to, and generally live a single life. I understand it's a privileged position, as I'm just a pretty average straight, white, male, cisgendered, neuro-sort-of-typical Western geek, but I see no reason to post private when I don't need it.

I understand most people limit posts to friends or friends-of-friends (the latter is I think the default setting on Facebook now), though this kind of annoys me when I want to learn something about a person I'm not friends with and see an empty profile, or when I want to share a post from one friend to another friend (usually in a private message, in the form of "look at this insightful post or funny picture I saw on my timeline"), but the former has the post visible to his friends only, and the latter isn't friend with them. There are trivial workarounds for last case though.

EDIT: I'm not telling anyone that they should go full-public. But OP seems to be bewildered by the fact that some people do in fact keep full-public profiles on purpose.

maaku2• 11 years ago

You are lucky.

dennisnedry• 11 years ago

It's people like you who are telling the US government that it's ok to surveillance citizens. With your logic, you are saying you have no reason to hide anything, so the government can keep tabs on you. Just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean you can become a victim of an error as well. Take this story http://www.wired.com/2015/10/familial-dna-evidence-turns-inn... where a man who "has nothing to hide" and innocent became the suspect in a murder due to him sharing similar DNA It could be you one day, you don't know.

pjc502• 11 years ago

You can also be tagged in other people's posts, which you have to actively remove from photos (and I don't think it's possible to remove name-references in text at all).

Your group of friends is not a representative sample, and neither is mine.

TeMPOraL6• 11 years ago

There's a setting that makes tagging require you verify and accept the post/photo. I.e. when I turn it on, you can type the letters making up my name, but without my explicit consent given on a case-by-case basis, the name won't turn into a link to my profile. Not everyone enables it, but it's not an obscure feature either. Also, some combinations of privacy settings make you disappear from the tagging suggestion lists completely, but I haven't figured out how it works yet.

Fluid_Mechanics• 11 years ago

Thankfully I deleted my Facebook account back in 2007. Paranoia pays off.

psykovsky2• 11 years ago

You did, did you? Try logging in again into that Facebook account you "deleted" and see what awaits you...

szatkus• 11 years ago

After two weeks from deactivation an account is removed completely. At least it was that way in 2011.

tedunangst• 11 years ago

I suppose that's a catchier summary than "Facebook history may allow people without credit scores to get loans".

spacemanmatt2• 11 years ago

Having worked for a subprime lender for several years, screw you.

mirimir• 11 years ago

Also people with subprime credit scores. But not if they publicly mention being wasted ;)

joosters• 11 years ago

There's so much potential for mis-scoring here. Take the 'wasted' example. You can't just grep for the word, it depends on the context. e.g. What if someone is a big fan of the GTA games? The game uses the phrase 'wasted' when you die - so if you happen to be posting GTA videoe, your descriptions might end up lowering your credit score!

Credit scores at the moment at least can be queried and mistakes corrected. This new kind of scoring will be opaque and unaccountable.

Being ‘wasted’ on Facebook may damage your credit score

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