Could Consumer’s Activity on Social Media Sites Impact Their Credit?

This guest post provided by Sensa.

Are banks gleaning your personal information from Social Media Sites like Facebook and Twitter to determine loan eligibility or set interest rates? Recently, this question has been raised as reports have raised questions; There are marketing companies based in California that uses social-networking information to gather information about certain firm’s customers (their customers include firms like banks, businesses and financial services,) to direct advertising for that firm. These companie maintains this information is used exclusively for marketing purposes only.

It may be a surprise to some, but in recent times other industries have utilized information gathered from their customers on social media sites. For example, “Creditors have been known to utilize information taken from Social Media sites- the more active their creditee on social media sites, the more likely to pay back what they owe.”

For now, due to their large customer base, it would be next to impossible for large lenders to extract sound information or trends from social media sites that could be used against a customer, say one seeking bad credit repair after bankruptcy. Most importantly, this practice could violate the Fair Credit Reporting Act.