New Service Sends Summaries of Your Social Media to Landlords, Employers to ‘Assess’ You

Here’s a shout out to all of you who said “If I’ve got nothing to hide I’ve got nothing to fear” after the Snowden revelations. And this little gem deals only with publicly available information about you. Imagine what it’s like when it gets into the good stuff you think is private.

An Orwellian startup called Tenant Assured will to take a deep dive into your social media, including chats, check-ins, how many times you’ve posted words like pregnant, wasted, busted, no money, broke, moving back in with the parents, weed, or loan, and deliver to potential landlords and employers a “personality score.”

While many people already Google folks they might rent to or hire, this new service aggregates a mountain of information and then evaluates it. At the end, someone gets some numbers that describe you (see sample reports, below,) with little idea how those numbers came to be determined.

How many times did you check-in at a bar? Are you a drunk who’ll screw up at work? How often does your relationship status change? Same sex relationships? Evidence of drug use? Political affiliation?

The report will also assess your “financial stress level” as a breakdown of five personality traits: extraversion, neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

The company says it is aware that some of the information it gathers cannot legally be used to decline a loan, lease or job, but nicely covers itself. “All we do is give them the information,” a spokesperson said. “It’s up to landlords to do the right thing.”

The company states its goal as “you won’t hire a dog sitter or book an Airbnb without first viewing a social media dossier,” as compiled by the company.

Welcome to your future. We’ll soon be looking back on the Snowden revelations as quaint.

A sample report:

vb-report

Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. Reprinted from the his blog with permission.

13 thoughts on “New Service Sends Summaries of Your Social Media to Landlords, Employers to ‘Assess’ You”

    1. Please note: Your “picky” index has been updated.
      Tenant Assured.
      Turning people into data, one person at a
      time.

  1. They did not. In terms of personality profiles, the “extravert” spelling is common, and dates back at least to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and possibly further back to Carl Jung’s archetype theories.

    1. That’s why I never made it in corporate ‘Murica, I guess. That leads me to one of my many rants on Bid’nes. Too much looking at results on paper such as M-BTI and GPA’s and not enough looking at the actual results. And, yes, that’s sour grapes on my part for being fired from a job after posting a 35% increase in sales($7M-10M) and 45% increase in profits but, the new management team brought in after the merger demanded anyone in my position have a 4-year degree which I did not possess.

      1. Orwellian maybe. Definitely more Huxley. O brave new world, to have such creatures in it.

        1. You know, I rode up from Texas last time in chains. The cops who were escorting me to an invitation-only court proceeding were bitching about how one of their fellow officers had a job where he matched faces to mugshots. not just on Facebook, although that’s where they weed out the dumb ones. The traffic light cameras for instance. Facial recognition software is all over us. Works for animals, plants and inanimate devices too. Bet you a dollar your front door has been put on Google Earth by now. So a picture of you in a “photo-bomb” incident, while somebody else was the real subject of the picture, you just happened to be in the background… and the house behind you happens to be where you’re living… and you have a warrant… OR just happen to be an obnoxious f… like myself who makes lots of establishment zeroes wish I was dead (and they will get that eventually, happens to everybody, and mayhaps they’ll be the ones to squeeze thetrigger) Well, at that point you can no longer claim virginity because you just got f…ed. What profanity? I meant Fool and fooled… They get a picture of your house or the tree out in front, or your dog… Caution is good but you and me have to work harder.

          1. The po-po were bitching about the fact their Comrade sat around all day visiting porn sites and using automated searches, and getting more arrests than the whole rest of their squad. With bonus pay for performance. Let the puter do the work, play all the (ahem) “games” you want and still get the the triple P… Pay, Promotion and Praise.

            Real fast FYI… The cops do really stupid things with their computers and if they’re not careful while downloading porn, online shopping and online gambling (I have so witnessed… amen..) it won’t be long before some sharper yet more radicalized elements will be taking over the Root accounts of their Citrix loaded Windows 8 computers. Not that anybody within reading distance of this would ever consider doing such disruptive and possibly lucrative things so we’re safe, for now.

  2. This is what happens when you force hundreds of thousands of IT workers to get security clearances just to reboot your stupid computer and tell you how big of an idiot you are for not knowing right click from left. They get bored and come up with crap like this.

    1. This is also what happens when you fire hundreds of thousands of American IT workers and replace them with dimwitted foreigners who will eat manure for lunch if they are told to, lest their H-1B visas be revoked and they are sent back to Elbonia. No Dilberts, Alices or Wallys came up with this — it was 100% the pointy-hairs’ idea. Most likely a test run for a lucrative FBI or NSA contract later on.

      And by now everyone should know a right-click from a left. ;-)

  3. It would be interesting to do a poll asking those who first and foolishly labeled Snowden a ‘Traitor’ if they still hold those wayward feelings?

  4. Since I barely use Facebook and have no Twitter account, this gang of dirtbags would have virtually nothing to aggregate. And I do all searches through StartPage, which is 100% private.

    In a backhanded way, this will be beneficial in the long run as airheads who simply must share every moment of their lives with the world find out the hard way that stupidity has consequences. Then they might wise up, dump FB and make Mark Sugarmountain destitute.

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