Social Media Snooping Site Emerges for Landlord and Employers
September 2, 2016
The promise of unlocking the insights in big data is one that many search and analytics companies make. CNet shares the scoop on a new company: Disturbing new site scrapes your private Facebook and informs landlords, employers. Their website is Score Assured and it provides a service as an intermediary between your social media accounts and your landlord. Through scanning every word you have typed on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or even Tinder, this service will then filter all the words through a neuro-linguistic programming tool to provide a report on your reputation. We learned,
There’s no reason to believe that Score Assured’s “analysis” will offer in any way an accurate portrayal of who you are or your financial wherewithal. States across the country are already preparing or enacting legislation to ensure that potential employers have no right to ask for your password to Facebook or other social media. In Washington, for example, it’s illegal for an employer to ask for your password. Score Assured offers landlords and employers (the employer service isn’t live yet) the chance to ask for such passwords slightly more indirectly. Psychologically, the company is preying on a weakness humans have been displaying for some time now: the willingness to give up their privacy to get something they think they really want.
Scraping and finding tools are not new, but could this application be any more 2016? The author of this piece is onto the zeitgeist of “I’ve got nothing to hide.” Consequently, data — even social data — becomes a commodity. Users’ willingness to consent is the sociologically interesting piece here. It remains to be seen whether the data mining technology is anything special.
Megan Feil, September 2, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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