The thought of a tweet affecting someone’s credit score sounds upsurd. But the thoughts, are definitely becoming realities in some parts of the world. Hit the jump to see if you will be effected..
Forget the euro crisis. There’s another credit storm brewing in Germany that hits much closer to the heart. It’s on Twitter and Facebook.
Last week, Germany’s wired population and business press freaked out when a broadcast news agency revealed confidential documents that showed that the country’s largest credit agency, SCHUFA, plans to scrape data from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to determine an individual’s risk to lenders and ability to pay bills, according to Der Spiegel.
Can we say big brother yet? The United States may not be far behind. As The Huffington Post reported earlier this year, lenders and credit reporting agencies are not yet at the point of scraping social media sites to help determine credit-worthiness–but not because they don’t want to. In fact, they would love to, experts told us.
For now lending laws have put some roadblocks in place. Under federal fair lending laws, American banks and lenders must follow regulations about what kind of information they use to make lending decisions. Consumer protections prohibit discrimination based on race, religion, sex, marital status, age or physical disabilities. In short, that covers a lot of what a person might put on a Facebook page.
As of last April, the big three credit reporting agencies in the U.S. said they did not use data from Facebook for credit scoring.However, that doesn’t mean credit reporting agencies are not digging deep into other areas of life to glean information about you.
Read the rest of the story @Huffington
