Social Media plays a huge part in our day to day activities. From staying connected with friends to finding an activity on a Saturday night. With the popularity of Facebook growing every single day, it's no surprise that the Social Media giant is finding new ways to monetize their site in order to generate an annual revenue. Filing a patent is one of the ways the company has to earn additional capital. Social media credit approval
According to an article on The Next Web, On August 4th, 2015 Facebook filed a social media patent that could help filter spam emails and offensive content, improve searches and allow lenders to use your social habits to determine a credit approval. We are already use to the idea of making social media tool more adaptive to daily use, but allowing lenders to use your social media accounts to determine a social media credit approval is absolutely terrifying.
The patent filed by Facebook is fairly simple to understand. Lenders would have direct access to your friends list and they would factor in all of your friends credit scores to determine an average credit rating that could factor into your social media credit approval. There are already a huge number of determining factors that play into the credit approval process. Now Facebook wants to make their way into this process. This has the potential to deny millions of Americans the chance to purchase their dream home.
We mentioned in a previous blog post that less than 50% of the American population is saving less than 5% of their monthly income. What would a social media credit approval process do to that statistic? Probably cause that number to drop down to 2.5%.
Facebook hasn’t made it clear how this patent will be used and there are laws in place that determine the criteria lenders can use when deciding your creditworthiness. However, if this social media credit approval process is added into the loan process, it could ruin the way we use social media every day. SO we have to ask, is Facebook trying to make the world a better place, as they have claimed in the past, or are they just trying to make a quick profit for the next quarterly report?
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