
Facebook wants to redline your friends list - anigbrowl
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/mo-friends-mo-problems-might-have-to-defriend-joey-with-the-jet-ski-bankruptcy
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yAnonymous
Two sentence summary from the actual patent:

>When an individual applies for a loan, the lender examines the credit ratings
of members of the individual's social network who are connected to the
individual through authorized nodes. If the average credit rating of these
members is at least a minimum credit score, the lender continues to process
the loan application. Otherwise, the loan application is rejected.

[[http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=9100400.PN.&OS=PN/9100400&RS=PN/9100400)]

That could really help divide society even more. Thanks Facebook?

On a second thought, shouldn't it be easy to dismiss this patent as prior art?
Certainly someone somewhere has done filtering based on a friend list before.

~~~
brianclements
Technology is superb at remembering everything and helping us sort and cherry
pick and focus on whatever segment of data we like. And an unintended
consequence is things like this where it becomes even easier for us to
segregate ourselves, which is a natural human tendency. What did we do as a
society when we only had limited data on a person with which to judge them? We
took more chances and went with the flow. That leads to serendipity and
opportunities for potential that is sitting on the sidelines. I'd argue that
this is a better methodology for society as a whole; a little bit of
chance/risk. It promotes patience and normalizes the act of mingling with
different peoples. The merit of Facebook's premise here I think is a bit
flawed to begin with (that you can predict ones credit rating based on their
friends. Are there even studies saying such?), but the real point is the
consequences of a system like this being widespread. I feel that most peoples
Facebook friends are close to their age and their geographic location. This
could have a biasing effect based on ones age and socioeconomic status thereby
exaggerating the negative or positive aspects of the group you associate with.
What little edge you worked to have above your peers with your credit score
could be normalized away just because of who your friends are.

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ousta
Hence quoting McAfee from his AMA "Be aware that everything that is free is
not free! There is nothing free in this world. People don't spend $1M on an
application to give it to you for free. They have a reason, and it's not good
for you, I promise that."

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extrapolate
From a link[0] in the article:

> Facebook bought the patent from Friendster in 2010.

[0] [https://venturebeat.com/2015/08/04/facebook-patents-
technolo...](https://venturebeat.com/2015/08/04/facebook-patents-technology-
to-help-lenders-discriminate-against-borrowers-based-on-social-connections/)

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spacemanmatt
When I briefly worked in payday lending, I learned there were certain credit
approval methods that were categorically illegal. And we had to be auditable,
so wasn't like we could just bury the crime in algorithms.

Address information, e.g. living in a poor neighborhood or living near
defaulters could not be used in credit scoring. Race could not be used in
credit scoring. I forget what else, but there were some regulations in place.
Watch for Facebook to lobby to have those eliminated, or pursue technology
that somehow allows them to hide or skirt use of unlawful scoring methods.

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Fede_V
Ugh, this is a terribly click-baity article.

Facebook has really, really good people working on machine learning. What
Facebook wants to do is use whatever features it can scrape from your profile
to accurately price your odds of defaulting on a loan.

It's very unlikely that removing a few 'poor' friends will improve your credit
score. There's likely to be many features that will be highly correlated all
of which will enter a statistical model.

Keep in mind - actuaries already use all sorts of information about you in
order to price a loan. This will just make the pricing more accurate, making
(on average) cheaper loans.

The downside of more accurate loan pricing is that it might lead to de-facto
discrimination against groups that are classified as high risk. I believe the
government has a role there to provide high risk pools, because the
alternative will be to push those people towards black market loans.

~~~
NumberCruncher
>> actuaries already use all sorts of information about you in order to price
a loan

That is totally true and that is not the problem. The problem is that after
they used all the available data to estimate your probability of default with
an accuracy of 0.0001% and based on that they refuse to give you a loan, you,
as a tax payer, still have to save their and the shareholders' ass once in a
decade because they lost all of their and your money on the stock market...

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zamalek
I finally have a logical reason to refuse to reactivate my Facebook account.
Thanks, Facebook!

