Report: Facebook Is Judging Your Trustworthiness

Facebook possesses a ton of information about you that it uses in all sorts of creepy ways, from guessing your income to determining whether or not you’re looking for a relationship. And according to a report from The Washington Post, the company has even assigned a score to users based on their trustworthiness.

According to Facebook itself, it introduced the new rating system because users often flag information as false just because they don’t agree with it. As a result, the company says it won’t reveal how it determines a user’s trustworthiness score in order to prevent gaming the system. Still, many privacy advocates and experts expressed dismay that Facebook is using our data in such an uncomfortable way.

“This is yet another example of Facebook using people’s data in ways they would not expect their data to be used, which further undermines people’s trust in Facebook,” Ailidh Callander, a solicitor at Privacy International, told the BBC. “Facebook simply must learn some hard lessons, and start being transparent and accountable about how they use people’s data to profile and take decisions.”

Even though this bit of data collection by Facebook may be well-intentioned, it still comes across as troubling because of the company’s many other scandals in the privacy space. The bottom line is, Facebook knows far too much about its users — and wants to learn even more.