This startup wants to help landlords check tenants’ facebook to know if they can pay…
The founder(s) will give up lol
Before you get an apartment in the US (at least in California), the landlords collect enough information to run a proper credit check on you. Making inferences from social data would only help to make the pool of data points larger and assist decision making.
Payday loan companies like Wonga are known for their extensive use of data points including seemingly absurd ones (like how fast did you drag the slider to the max) to help with the automated decision to grant you loans. Startups such as Lenddo and Friendly Score have sprung up to help payday loan providers harness the power of social credit checks in their decision making.
Paylater.ng started out by harnessing some of these providers and have now moved to solely rely on the mobile app in order to gather more data points, including factoring in your location at the point of requesting the loan (plus periodic location history checks), reading your contacts and call logs (you may be friends with a lot of known defaulters, you know), determine the tone of your text messages, and above all, run in the background on device startup but guess who is complaining, no one.
That said, you don’t have to be cynical.
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I get your point, but they need to experiment and prove me wrong. Since they may violate privacy of social network users, I think they must be prepared for many lawsuits. Anyway they are dealing not in Nigeria. Nigeria is another planet in this case.
It’s not violation of privacy they have been granted permission by the account holder.
Landlords use the company’s Tenant Assured program to send requests for profiles to would-be tenants. These then grant the program access to data from one or more social media networks (including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram), which it uses to create a one-time report on the individual.
Emphasis, mine.
I see… I did not pay rapt attention to the news. Anyway, let’s keep waiting
Paylater.ng reading your call logs, messages and contacts - isn’t that a privacy invasion?
If the app asks for permissions and you allow it, that’s not an invasion of privacy.
That is correct…