According to CNN, some smaller and tech-savvy financial companies are now using social media to determine if individuals seeking loans should be approved for the money.  One such company, Lenddo, analyzes users’ Facebook friends to see if any of them are late paying back loans. The algorithm that the company uses can even determine if you interact frequently with a person with poor loan payment habits, which can dramatically impact your chances of receiving a loan of your own.

“It turns out humans are really good at knowing who is trustworthy and reliable in their community,” Jeff Stewart, CEO of Lenddo, told CNN. “What’s new is that we’re now able to measure through massive computing power.”

Some other companies have programs that can determine if you’re telling the truth about where you live or work based on your computer’s IP address, while others take a look at your spending habits at large ecommerce sites like Amazon and EBay. A  German financial company, Kreditech, even analyzes how much time online users spend reading information about the loan, and you can even lose points for improper punctuation.

Readers: do you think financial loans should be determined using this seemingly unrelated data? Should these companies even have the right to see that information?

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