Want a bank loan? Get yourself more Facebook friends -- but make sure they pay their bills on time.
Banks are beginning to look at user accounts on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites to determine if an applicant is loan-worthy, raising privacy concerns as well as questions over whether a person's online friends, likes and dislikes can actually measure their financial stability.
Everything a person does publicly on their social-networking accounts can be found by market researchers if the user's privacy settings allow it. Researchers are now looking at a person's online conversations, the groups they join, products they look at and even who their friends are to determine loan-worthiness.
"The presumption is that if your friends are responsible credit cardholders and pay their bills on time, you could be a good credit customer," reports WTOP News in Washington, DC.
"Lenders say having a wide network of friends can expedite getting a loan, while discrepancies between your loan application and your Facebook wall information can raise red flags. Negative comments about your business also can impact your creditworthiness," WTOP reports.
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http://rawstory.com/2010/01/banks-tracking-borrowers-facebook-twitter-report/The company
http://www.rapleaf.com/companyRapleaf's founder and CEO is Auren Hoffman, a prolific Silicon Valley entrepreneur who in 2001 co-founded Lead21, a conservative business advocacy group with links to the Republican Party, particularly to Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration in California. He writes an occasional column for the Huffington Post.
Someone created "Virtual Suicide" software...
Fed Up With Facebook Privacy Issues? Here's How To End It All
There isn't a mass exodus from Facebook over the privacy settings, but it is responding with messages like this sent to users to assuage their fears: "Worried about search engines? Your information is safe. There have been misleading rumors about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. This is not true..."
Several thoughtful Web 2.0 users have blogged about their decision in the last week to leave Facebook and two different "suicide" sites exist.
This guest post was written by Kaliya Hamlin, also known as Identity Woman, who has been working on cultivating open standards for user-centric identity since 2004. She co-founded, co-produces and facilitates the Internet Identity Workshop, the primary venue for collaboration on identity standards amongst large Internet portals, large enterprise IT companies and small innovators.
This thoughtful post written by Nick Barron, who is based in the Washington D.C. area, talks about meeting Facebook in college and falling in love and understanding this new form of communication in social networks would be transformative for people and business. He believed, "at the end of the day, that Facebook was here for you and me. It was our social network, and while technically being a large company, it was a company of people just like us who wanted a more advanced way of building and maintaining relationships.
"I feel there are no good alternatives for me, except going along with whatever scraps of privacy Facebook is graciously willing to hand me from their table... Facebook has me by the balls. They have you, too, and they know it. They know you have too many friends and family, photos and videos, games and other applications on Facebook for you to leave now. And where would you go? Where would I go?... I am not committed to Facebook anymore. I am looking for a way out, while still being able to do my job. Can a social media pro leave Facebook? We may soon find out."
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/fed_up_with_facebook_privacy_issues_how_to_end_it.php
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