A UK startup has developed software for landlords that lets them analyze potential tenants using data from their social media accounts. Score Assured claims its service is simply another way for renters to secure a house in competitive markets, but following coverage of the business by The Washington Post this week — and negative reaction from many users on social media — the company now says it may reconsider how its software operate.
Landlords use the company’s Tenant Assured program to send requests for profiles to would-be tenants. These then grant the program access to data from one or more social media networks (including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram), which it uses to create a one-time report on the individual. This process scans private conversations and public posts to record information about the user’s personality, life events (like giving birth or getting married), and even their “financial stress level” — a measure of how easy it is for them to pay their rent, based on the frequency with which keywords like “no money,” “poor,” and “staying in,” appear in their posts.
Understandably, the reaction to this sort of analysis being used as a tool by landlords has not been positive. Simply scanning for keywords is a pretty crude measure of anything, especially something as fluctuating and relative and “financial stress.” The Post noted out that some information collected by the startup has a protected status under US housing discrimination law, and a lawyer specializing in this topic told Gawker: “The designer of [Tenant Assured] may be legally exposed, despite the claim that it is only passing information along.”
continue reading
