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” And if my friends on Facebook would prevent me of getting a loan ? “. This is the title of a piece last August 8, published in the pages of economy the French newspaper Liberation which, in Italy, echoed the next day The Republic with a piece, published in the pages of economy & amp; finance, and entitled: “You have debts? Facebook will know it. “
Subject alarm launched in two pieces, the deposit by Facebook at the US Patent Office of an application for the grant of a patent that should serve to measure the creditworthiness of social network users and, therefore, to enable banks and financial institutions to assess whether or not to grant a loan . That was enough to turn on, the Net – and perhaps even out of the network – a lively discussion that has a heated August already boiling, climatically and not only on the imminent risk that the popular social network white and blue, is planning to extend its already sprawling sector activities of financial reliability, selling to the industry a real gold mine personal information extraordinarily valuable to decide which clients to trust and which not, and, therefore, such as credit applications, mortgage financing or accept and which to reject.
With the crisis that has increased dramatically the use of loans and consumer credit, and the awareness that, now, you can lie to parents , the husband, the wife and, perhaps, even her friend’s heart but not to Facebook , is easy to imagine that, for many, hearing the news we have foreshadowed an autumn darkness in which they would have seen close the doors of banks and finance even more than – in many cases – they are long.
In fact the risk – even though no one can rule out that sooner or later, you look down on the horizon – not so imminent . To begin with is no longer a secret to anyone that, in the days of the Internet, digital technologies and the potential to revolutionize the world, especially the giants like Facebook, patent – or trying to patent – much more than then do not use the seriously and, therefore, the fact that Facebook has filed a patent application which, if successful, would make it the “owner” of an effective method of measuring the reliability of its financial over one billion users, does not mean that the giant social networks have really decided to take the field in this area.
But, even apart from any exercise prognostic relative to what Facebook will do or will not do its patent – assuming it will acquire for real – to navigate in reverse the current information, reaching back to the patent application at the origin of the alarm launched by the columns of Liberation, it turns out that, in reality, this application relates to a method – though apparently not all that Original – filter junk e-mail or to manage access to digital content for a fee that, among the many possible applications, is presented as usable also to enable banks and financial companies to control the ‘ access to credit.
The system, whether to block spam, stop at the door of those who try to access content that is covered by copyright without permission or, if necessary, also to take funding despite not being a “good payer”, is based on the analysis of the social network in which each of us is placed and on a number of factors on which depending who “attend” we are or we are not reliable because there is open the mailbox of someone to whom we sent an email, because you leave access to a movie or, even, because there is grant funding. A sort of reinterpretation of 2.0 old proverb that “ tell me your company and I’ll tell you who you are “. Woe to deny that a scenario in which our bank, before grant us a loan, as well as interrogate dozens of databases that already are used in the field and cross it results, “ask” an assessment even Facebook is, to say the least little disturbing but is a Orwellian scenario not closer or farther than those with which, rightly or wrongly, out of ignorance or unconsciousness or, simply, because it is an ongoing process anthropological change the way we interpret our privacy, we seem, in most cases, be resigned to live with.
We live on the other hand – and a fact which in the coming years have to remember often – in a country remained almost indifferent to the discovery of having given birth to one of the spy software more pervasive history and before the certainty that hundreds of thousands of citizens have been subject to investigations by digital law enforcement and, perhaps, even private individuals.
The reference is, of course, the infamous story of Hacking Team.
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