I’d Love To ‘friend’ You, But It Could Wreck My Credit.
Our individual credit rating can have a dramatic impact on our lives. Our credit is checked for everything from auto loans to rental applications. This is why it was alarming when Facebook recently filed for a patent that would use your online social network as a source of checking your credit worthiness. An article from psmag.com claims that this recent action by Facebook is most likely the reason for Facebook’s defense of their policy that users utilize their real name. Facebook is hoping to capitalize on it’s vast amount of social networking data in order to generate more revenue via credit checks, which would be based on the credit worthiness of your friends on Facebook. There are, however, some major stumbling blocks which Facebook would have to overcome for this to see the light of day.
First, this could lead to discrimination against the poor, since many of their friends are also likely to be poor. This would, in effect, decrease social mobility by making it naturally harder for those at a disadvantage to acquire loans and such.
Second, let’s just suppose that Facebook’s algorithm turned out to be fairly accurate at predicting a person’s credit, based on their online social network (which I don’t believe it will. To be explained shortly). How would this change the way in which people interact on Facebook? It would alter the very way in which Facebook works. People could game the system. They would no longer accept friend requests from people they otherwise would, simply because of the potential damage to their credit, and furthermore, they could simply unfriend those friends who are suspected of having bad credit. By employing this sort of technology, Facebook risks changing the very essence of who they are.
Lastly, Facebook is forgetting one crucial point: Our social networks in real life are typically much different than our online social networks. Many of the friends I interact with the most on Facebook are either old high school friends who I haven’t see in decades, old co-workers, or even some people who I only met a few times through a mutual friend. They would be attempting to model my real life based on my online life, yet many of my strongest links on Facebook are people that would actually be considered weak links, or acquaintances, in real life if it weren’t for Facebook. If however, Facebook were able to somehow derive a user’s real-world social network from their online social network using something like text analysis, then they might be in business. I suppose it’s also possible that the inherent difference between a person’s real-life network and their online network is irrelevant; either one could work for predicting credit worthiness. If this is the case, I need to finish this blog and start unfriending people.