A patent proposed denying loans based on one’s social network’s credit ratings.

Evidence

44. Christopher Lunt, United States Patent: 9100400—Authorization and authentication based on an individual’s social network, issued August 4, 2015, http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d =PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1 =9100400.PN.&OS=PN/9100400&RS=PN/9100400. The critical paragraph in the patent reads as follows: “In a fourth embodiment of the invention, the service provider is a lender. 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 through authorized nodes. 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.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2615

Categorization

• CANDY: A great dinner-party fact: an actual patent proposed judging your creditworthiness by your friends’ credit scores.
• XREF: Connects to surveillance-capitalism’s logic of using behavioral data to sort people before they act — parallels the credit-screening chapters earlier in the book and to The Social Control of Impersonal Trust’s discussion of trust substitution.
• SEED: Angle: how predictive social-network scoring recodes trust from personal judgment into computed average of acquaintances — an essay on friendship as collateral.