Could Your Facebook Friends Actually Affect Your Credit?

Traditionally, your credit score is determined by things like steady employment, paying bills on time,

outstanding loans and number of inquiries into your credit history. But one lending firm is addingFacebook friends to the list.

How can your Facebook friends affect you’re ability to get a loan? Lenddo, a microlending firm based in Hong Kong, believes that the likelihood of your friends to pay back loans or not could be indicative of your habits as well.

The New York Observer’s Beta Beat has more on what the company says is “the world’s first credit scoring service that uses your online social network to assess credit”:

The company’s algorithm is proprietary and secret, said CEO Jeff Stewart, but the primary metric is what Lenddo knows about the people you’re friends with. “We think that in the age of the internet you should be able to establish your reputation and your identity through your social graph, through your on- and offline community, and use that to get access to financial products and information,” he said.

If Lenddo sees one of your best Facebook buddies took out a loan and paid it back, there’s a good chance you will too. “Our backgrounds are in machine learning and pattern recognition,” Mr. Stewart said. “It’s some serious math.

Beta Beat tested out getting a loan and was asked for its Facebook account, as well as Gmail, Twitter,Yahoo and Windows Live. It was then given a credit score. To apply for an actual loan, it would need to have at least three friends with connections to Lenddo and a decent credit history themselves.

What’s more, Beta Beat reports that if you default on your loan, the company reserves the right to broadcast this information to your friends. After all, they could be affected by your credit score as well:

“I think Mark Zuckerberg said it best,” Mr. Stewart said. “Every industry will be in fact impacted by social.”

Banks have been curious about using social media to gauge risk for at least a year, said Matt Thomson, VP of platform at Klout, which calculates “influence” based on a user’s social media activity. Determining creditworthiness is not a core product of Klout’s, he said, but banks have approached the startup to ask about it. He wouldn’t name names. “It’s really like the who’s who of banking,” he said.

While some may consider this an extreme invasion of privacy, others like media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, Beta Beat reports, don’t consider such a thing as private anymore:

 “We’re already in the nightmare scenario,” he wrote in an email. “They already know everything about you—more than most of us realize. If anything, the addition of social networking information to this data mining will help us come to some understanding of how much more these companies know about us than we know about ourselves.”

As of right now, loans are only offered in the Philippines, but Beta Beat reports that the company recently hired an ex-Google employee to begin on in America.

Carrier IQ

Holy data privacy scandal! Over the last week the news that Carrier IQ has been tracking millions of smartphone users without their knowledge has ballooned into a full-blown clusternut. Carrier IQ, huh? Sounds nefarious. But what exactly does it do? And why should you care?
Carrier IQ is a third-party metrics service…

Smartphone manufacturers and carriers alike are dying to know how you use their products in the real world. They want this information to help them to study performance, make business decisions, and improve products. Carrier IQ is an “embedded analytics company” that serves that information up to its clients on a silver, snooping platter.

…that, unbeknownst to customers, possibly installed software on millions of Android, BlackBerry, and iOS handsets…

Until yesterday, most people probably didn’t even realize they had Carrier IQ installed on their phones. The software isn’t part of Android, iOS, or BlackBerry OS. It’s installed independently by either your carrier or your phone manufacturer. A rolling counter on the Carrier IQ website claims more than 140 million devices. But which ones? It’s not entirely clear at this time, although several companies have stepped forward to say they don’t have the software. It’s off by default in iOS but activates, in a limited way, when you put your phone in Diagnostics mode. Android owners can also test their handsets to see if they’re affected.

…to collect swaths of “performance data”…

What data the software collects depends on what entity installed it on your phone, because Carrier IQ is customized to meet the desires of the client that uses it. In corporate marketing materials, Carrier IQ says that includes relatively benign info like data speed and app usage. But Trevor Eckhart, the developer who first outed Carrier IQ, has demonstrated that the software can log virtually anything you do on your phone: calls, location, even keystrokes. That means it could in theory log all your passwords and credit card numbers when you punch them in.

…which is definitely creepy…

If we’ve learned anything about privacy from Facebook it’s that this level of granular data collection freaks people out even when they know about it. And when you think about what it does when it’s done with spying, tracking, logging—pick a term—it’s downright sickening. What’s being collected and what do they know about me? What are they going to do with that information and who has access? Those are all still open questions.

…and it’s possibly illegal…

Well, Carrier IQ has already been hit with a Senate investigation, and as Forbes reports, since we didn’t know about the service it might actually violate the Wiretap Act millions of times over. Is it possible that you signed off on some terms and conditions agreement that had Carrier IQ buried deep? Sure. But it’s still not unreasonable to expect a class action lawsuit and other legal action.

…despite Carrier IQ claims that it’s actually benign…

According to a statement by Carrier IQ, it’s besides the point that they can log keystrokes because the software is “counting and summarizing performance, not recording keystrokes or providing tracking tools.”

…which are demonstrably untrue.

The company claims it’s not logging keystrokes or anything else, and even if it was, it’s all processed before it ever goes back to the clients. But that stance was largely disproven by Eckhart, who demonstrates on film that keystrokes submit unique key codes to Carrier IQ on affected phones, and that even secure connections are vulnerable.

There’s going to be a lot more information coming as this story unfolds, but in the meantime: either the carrier/handset manufacturers associated with Carrier IQ didn’t know exactly what was going on, or they did and thought they wouldn’t get caught. And either way, this is repulsive stuff. Hopefully a reckoning is on its way.

Netflix whiplash stirs angry mobs — again. FAIL

Image via Wikipedia

Angry Netflix mobs aren’t putting away the pitchforks yet.

The company said Monday that it would kill its spinoff, Qwikster, only a month after it was announced.

That did little to placate consumers who are still fuming about price increases the company announced in July and who are starting to see Netflix as a once-innovative service that’s lost its way.

“Netflix does more flip-flopping than a fish on a hot dock,” a Twitter user named Steve Harrison wrote.

“Netflix’s approval rating is so low right now it could run for president,” another said.

“I don’t think this fixes anything,” said Ann Marie Blodgett, a 37-year-old in Utah. “This will make people realize how right they were to leave them. Now they’re just back-pedaling.”

“I don’t feel the need to go back when they’ve already made too many changes too fast,” said Adam Britten, a 21-year-old in London.

The company’s public relations nightmare began in July, when Netflix announced that it would stop offering free streaming video services to households that paid for its DVD-by-mail service. That raised monthly prices by 60% for some customers, without any improvement in the service.

Then Netflix said in September that it was spitting its DVD and streaming services into two companies: Qwikster and Netflix. That incensed some already-angry customers, since they now would have to deal with two corporations instead of one.

And, finally, on Monday the company pulled a 180-degree-turn.

“It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs,” CEO Reed Hastings said in a blog post. “This means no change: one website, one account, one password … in other words, no Qwikster.”

Actually, that puts Netflix back at square two — before the Qwikster fiasco, but with price hikes.

Since all of the whiplash changes started, Netflix has lost an estimated 1 million customers — possibly more. An earnings call on October 24 is expected to reveal details about how Monday’s changes affected the company’s customer base.

It’s clear investors don’t like all this back-and-forth.

The company’s stock closed down nearly 5% by the end of Monday. Since mid-July, it’s fallen about 60%.

Not all consumer reaction to Netflix’s decision to kill Qwikster was negative, however.

Kyle Wegner, a 26-year-old in Fayetteville, Arkansas, said he was going to quit the service until he heard about Monday’s announcement.

“It’s the right move, not only because of the silly name of Qwikster, but it was just going to be such a huge pain to manage two separate companies that were doing the same thing,” he said. “Nobody wants to have to manage two different queues and pay two different bills for something that we’re doing all together now.”

The company does seem to have lost its way, he said.

“They’re being really reactionary at this point, and that’s not very comforting.”

Others cut the company a bit more slack.

“As long as Netflix continues to function for a reasonable price I don’t have reason 2 abandon it,” a Twitter user named@Nitesh_Arora wrote. “Wish they’d focus though.”

gScreen SpaceBook: Fail

gScreen SpaceBook

I can understand needing the extra screen real estate to accomplish more visually-intensive work, but I can’t understand anyone who’d lug this behemoth anywhere. Because the gScreen SpaceBook is too much size and not enough Space Age to do you any good.

The SpaceBook’s claim to glory is its massive dual 17.3-inch screen setup, which earns it brownie points for being the first of its kind. Certainly not the most graceful of beasts. And she’s not built for comfort either, weighing about ten pounds. But, doomed to your desktop as it would be, it doesn’t push the envelope with what’s under the hood. Surprising, since you’d expect it to right? The high-end model packs a quad-core Intel Core i7-740M processor, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250M video card. But no Sandy Bridge. No Thunderbolt. No Blu-Ray XL. Nothing really to justify its $2795 price tag. While gScreen just made it available for pre-order, this old girl is already dead in the water

Related articles

• The gScreen SpaceBook Is Too Big and Tired to Launch You Anywhere [Laptops] (gizmodo.com)

The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace

In 2006, Jeremy Jackson—the buff, bronzed formerBaywatch child star—couldn’t imagine a world without Myspace. He was a single, underemployed actor in Los Angeles, an exhibitionist in need of an audience, and Myspace filled almost every need. He spent hours every day on the edgy social network, which was known as a pop music hub where artists such as Lily Allen and My Chemical Romance helped launch their careers. Jackson had more than a thousand “friends.” He sold trucker hats and flirted with women. His profile page was decorated with Trojan Magnum XL condoms. He was the poster child for the Myspace lifestyle.

But things changed.

“I tried to cling to Myspace for a long time, hoping that someone there would come up with some idea to keep it alive,” says Jackson, 30. “But my assistants and business partners finally beat it into my head that it was a dead horse. It’s done. It’s a joke. If you do stuff on Myspace, you just look sad.”

Jackson still hustles for attention on the lower rungs of fame—he currently stars in season five of Celebrity Rehab, in which he battles his addiction to growth hormones for cable television viewers. But he now does his digital communing on Facebook and Twitter. He hasn’t checked his Myspace page since 2009.

At its December 2008 peak, Myspace attracted 75.9 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S., according to ComScore (SCOR). By May of this year that number had dropped to 34.8 million. Over the past two years, Myspace has lost, on average, more than a million U.S. users a month. Because Myspace makes nearly all its money from advertising, the exodus has a direct correlation to its revenue. In 2009 the site brought in $470 million in advertising dollars, according to EMarketer. In 2011, it’s projected to generate $184 million.

In February, News Corp. (NWS), which bought Myspace and its parent company, Intermix, in 2005 for $580 million, started officially looking for a potential buyer at an asking price of $100 million, according to a person familiar with the sale process. Yet even in the midst of a frenzy for social media that has seen LinkedIn (LNKD) valued at $6.4 billion and Groupon rebuff a $6 billion takeover offer from Google (GOOG), barely anyone wants to buy Myspace. On June 9 the News Corp.-owned tech blog AllThingsD.com reported that a group of investors led by Activision Blizzard (ATVI) chief Robert Kotick was closing in on a deal. “Getting people to come back to something that in their minds has become less useful is an incredible challenge on the Web—just ask AOL,” says Richard Greenfield, an analyst with BTIG. “Myspace has become an eyesore for News Corp.”

It’s an eyesore for users, too. Many Myspace pages appear to be host bodies for the worst kinds of advertising parasites. On the upper right-hand corner of the page for Zaiko Langa Langa, an African band Googled at random, a photo of a blonde in a tight T-shirt appears, asking, “Want a Girlfriend? View Hundreds of Pics HERE!” (It’s an ad for a dating site called True.) Farther down, someone has posted footage of nearly naked jiggling buttocks. There hasn’t been an update from the musicians in weeks.

Mismanagement, a flawed merger, and countless strategic blunders have accelerated Myspace’s fall from being one of the most popular websites on earth—one that promised to redefine music, politics, dating, and pop culture—to an afterthought. But Myspace’s fate may not be an anomaly. It turns out that fast-moving technology, fickle user behavior, and swirling public perception are an extremely volatile mix. Add in the sense of arrogance that comes when hundreds of millions of people around the world are living on your platform, and social networks appear to be a very peculiar business—one in which companies might serially rise, fall, and disappear.

Danah Boyd, a senior researcher who studies social networks at Microsoft Research (MSFT), attributes their instability to the way users can bind themselves by race and class, taste and aesthetics. Influential peers pull others in on the climb up—and signal to flee when it’s time to get out. “The thing about user adoption and user departure is that it’s not a steady flow,” says Boyd. “Think of it as, you’re knitting a beautiful scarf, and you’re knitting and knitting, and you get a bigger and bigger scarf. Then someone pulls a loose thread at the bottom. And it all unravels.”

More here: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_27/b4235053917570_page_2.htm