“It seemed straight out of the evil-tech-company playbook.
In August, Facebook secured an otherwise innocuous U.S. patent about how to analyze a user’s friend network to let them do something. Most of the patent discusses the fairly mundane technicalities of running a social network—until, last in a list of examples, there appeared the following paragraph:
When an individual applies for a loan, the lender examines the credit ratings of members of the individual’s social network who are connected to the individual […]. If the average credit rating of these members is at least a minimum credit score, the lender continues to process the loan application. Otherwise, the loan application is rejected.”
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