Can the friends you keep on social networks like Facebook and Twitter determine your credit risk?
A data-mining company called Rapleaf believes they can measure your credit risk simply by simply reviewing your friend lists on social networks and without hacking into any personal accounts or violating any laws.
Rapleaf is considered a social media monitoring; data mining and business intelligence leader. Social media monitoring businesses use complex algorithms to gather and analyze the large amount of personal information that people post online.
Rapleaf’s algorithms analyze your words and save them in your “social graph”, which they believe can be used to measure a person’s credit risk.
Most of this personal information is collected from social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.
Rapleaf claims that they only collect personal data that is public and people can opt out or register to see what their internet “footprint” consists of.
Rapleaf currently has a database of 378,968,953 internet profiles that is used by banks, anti-fraud companies and other businesses.
Source: Fast Company