Be careful on Facebook!

If you are residing in USA, you had better be doubly careful about what you post on your Facebook or Twitter. These social media platforms are now being used increasing by prospective employees and even your lending companies to check your creditworthiness.

They check the status on these networks, to verify whether information provided by you in genuine, whether you had been fired, whether you have a job intact. Even eBay is used – if you the owner of a small business and you have got negative feedback from customers, it is then very likely that your loan application could get rejected. In fact these companies judge your character and sense of community before lending, an important tool for judging behavior patterns. So if on your Facebook, you have 500 friends but none are close or if you have 15 and you are close to all of them, the chances are the latter one will receive the loan as it is judged as a person having strong “community ties”. Even things like whether you are using an iPhone to make an entry, whether most of your friends on Facebook are those whom you befriended in a bar or even the numbers of “likes” your status could get your scores up or down.

So better be careful next time you decide to vent out your frustration. In the world of digitization, nothing is private. This trend might not yet have come to India; but employees already check your social network so it wont be long before banks too follow suit.