Being ‘wasted’ on Facebook may damage your credit score
ft.com
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http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
The only ways in which this can work is a) you have a pretty unique name on FB or b) you have to give your FB name on your credit application (if I'd see this on a form, I'd just tell the bank guy to forget everything and walk out).
Of course, this opens a possibility for manipulation - either you use someone else's clean FB page, or a malevolent entity creates a profile in your name, or you yourself have one "clean" profile and one "real" profile which many people already do to hide their pot smoke pics from potential employers.
Can you imagine that FB sells this information anywhere in the near future? I bet they can make great profiles of you, and compared to a big pile of people with similar profiles, the bank can see what profiles predict risk.
http://33bits.org/2011/03/09/link-prediction-by-de-anonymiza...
As the site name implies, you need just 33 bits of good information to distinguish every person on Earth. It's not hard to get enough bits from your Facebook timeline to cross-correlate it with other stuff the bank might know about you.
2) Let's not forget they have more than your name. They can geolocate your IP, for example, to get an approximate location. If I remember correctly, name and zip alone has something like an 85% chance of uniquely identifying someone. If you tell them your birthday, that chance goes up into the high 90s.
3) Once you have their cookie, they have many other sources of information thanks to "beacon"[1]. Identification becomes significantly easier when they have other businesses adding data.
It must be nice to have a common name.
Comments here seem to once again indicate as if everything posted to Facebook was automatically and irrevocably public. I don't really see that going on at least on my group of friends.
Your group of friends is not a representative sample, and neither is mine.
> Putting the responsibility on the named person is just another form of victim blaming.
Victim blaming is quickly becoming a term for "I don't like how the reality works, so I'll just throw a temper tantrum".
I have no idea if that's true now. Historically, this was encouraged. I know my name has been added on pictures by my sister, at a minimum. I've never had an account at FB and never will. I'm assuming it is common knowledge on HN that just because you haven't registered an account with facebook doesn't mean your account doesn't exist.[1]
> That typing someone's name without their consent should not be allowed?
Obviously not. This thread is about credit scores, which facebook shouldn't be influencing based on hearsay. The bigger point is that "failure to opt-out" is not consent.
> Victim blaming is quickly becoming a term for "I don't like how the reality works, so I'll just throw a temper tantrum".
Absolutely not. Just because technology has allowed a power shift away from individual rights doesn't mean that's the way "reality works". The entire point of law is that we shape these aspects of society. It is not a "temper tantrum" to point out that responsibility doesn't fall upon the individual just because a rent-seeking corporation framed the discussion in that manner.
An easier to understand variant of this problem is so-called "identity theft". Nobody can steal your identity. They can impersonate you, but you still are the same person. The actual problem is e.g. banks giving loans to people without properly verifying the identity of the person. As a 3rd party, the bank has no valid reason to involve you in their, but by calling it "identity theft" they re-frame the situation as if was the your responsibility to keep your identity from being stolen (which is basically impossible).
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/report-facebook-t...
That's probably not legal in EU.
Where is that?
1) The second option on Settings/Privacy page controls how things you're tagged in end up on your timeline. On my account there's a link that to the Timeline Review page[0], on which you can enable or disable reviewing things before they become visible on your timeline.
2) There's a whole Settings page for Timeline and Tagging[1]. There you can control who can post on your timeline, how tagging you will work, whether your friends will see posts you get tagged in and whether or not you appear in tag suggestions. The tagging options work across Facebook, not just for your timeline.
[0] - https://www.facebook.com/INSERT_PROFILE_NAME/allactivity?log...
Could they do that? You'd probably have to read (and keep up with) the T&Cs.
Or worse. They get access to those Facebook Messages?
Add the representative of the bank to one of the limited visibility groups.
Not sure how that works when FB API is used.
Alternatively, if you are genuinely worried about being able to do this, I would advise setting up a public profile separate from a personal one (cpt obvious).
I remember when it was a faux pas to put your real name on the internet - long live the days of having an alias that you can make a whole bunch of mistakes to a private group of friends without being publicly remembered for it.
I seem to remember a lot of articles about that and then it just stopped.
A rare outbreak of common sense in US labour law, although I suspect Facebook also lobbied for it - it's against their TOS to give your credentials to the interviewer.
Same as for us foreigners who don't have any credit rating records valid in US. Meaning you get the crappiest deals and worst apartments.
I post default-public, on purpose. I welcome everyone to stalk me on Facebook as much as they like and to comment on anything that's interesting for them. I have very little personal secrets I want to limit access to, and generally live a single life. I understand it's a privileged position, as I'm just a pretty average straight, white, male, cisgendered, neuro-sort-of-typical Western geek, but I see no reason to post private when I don't need it.
I understand most people limit posts to friends or friends-of-friends (the latter is I think the default setting on Facebook now), though this kind of annoys me when I want to learn something about a person I'm not friends with and see an empty profile, or when I want to share a post from one friend to another friend (usually in a private message, in the form of "look at this insightful post or funny picture I saw on my timeline"), but the former has the post visible to his friends only, and the latter isn't friend with them. There are trivial workarounds for last case though.
EDIT: I'm not telling anyone that they should go full-public. But OP seems to be bewildered by the fact that some people do in fact keep full-public profiles on purpose.
I support you keeping whatever privacy level you like, but don't force me to hide things if I consciously, in full physical and mental capacity, decide I don't want to.
In threads about Facebook I see people so focused on various minorities and corner cases that they act surprised by behaviour of people on Facebook, even though said behaviour is perfectly ok for the vast majority of Facebook's users. I think it's good to remind everyone that not everyone wants everything they do to be as private as possible, or has a reason to. In fact, most users don't.
Credit scores at the moment at least can be queried and mistakes corrected. This new kind of scoring will be opaque and unaccountable.