Can the people you count among your Facebook friends actually affect whether or not you’re able to get a loan? The answer seems to be “no” – according to this article from Bankrate (thank goodness). But there are financial reasons to be careful about information you share on social media.
Reports surfaced last week that Facebook had secured a patent that could allow creditors to use your social media connections to determine your creditworthiness. Facebook declined to comment on the patent, but there’s very little to suggest it has an underwriting solution in the works. For starters, the patent is actually old – it was filed in 2012, 2 years after the social network bought it as part of a bundle of patents from the now-defunct Friendster.
As the patent reads: “When an individual applies for a loan, the lender examines the credit ratings of members of the individual’s social network who are connected to the individual through authorized nodes. If the average credit rating of these members is at least a minimum credit score, the lender continues to process the loan application. Otherwise, the loan application is rejected.”
But even if the social network did launch this, it’s highly unlikely that many (or really any) lenders would use it. Your friend’s credit score would be of no interest – or use – to a lender, unless said friend was co-signing on the loan in question.
While you probably don’t need to watch who you friend on Facebook from a credit scoring perspective, that doesn’t mean you should be careless about what you share on social networks. Employers are getting in the habit of Googling prospective employees, so you want to make sure that nothing too risque or polarizing pops up in their search results.
Fraudsters also have been known to use social media profiles to guess passwords or learn the answers to a financial account’s security questions. They also can use the info you share online to complete identity packages, known as Fullz, that get sold on the black market. Mysterious line items, like fake addresses or unfamiliar trade lines, are a sign that identity theft is occurring.
