A system where you’re entitled to financial services based on your Uber rating and data pulled from your Facebook or Twitter sounds like the plot for an episode of the Netflix series Black Mirror, but it’s an actual service being rolled out in Australia.

The speculative sci-fi show Black Mirror presents worst-case scenarios based on real world technologies.

The concept for Trustbond has similarities to the episode “Nosedive” where citizens are rated on their social interactions, and a low score means the loss of access to certain services and social ostracisation. The episode has made headlines recently when China began trialling a similar program for its citizens.

Trustbond is a little more tame than that. Country manager for Traity, Trustbond’s parent company, Will Souter said the project was well in the works before “Nosedive” was released, and that the social score was more a force for good than portrayed in the show.

“I love Black Mirror and their approach to technology is to project it into the future,” he said. “We really see it as being the opposite, to empower people who are locked out at the moment.”

Trustbond replaces the traditional cash bond by giving tenants a trust score. They then pay a fee for each period of the lease. It ends up being less that the entire bond would have been, provided there are no issues with the property.

So far the service is only available in Adelaide. One of the first customers, Jaquie Lamont, said she recently found a rental property while using Trustbond because she couldn’t afford to have bond tied up in two properties simultaneously.

“It worked well for me so I didn’t miss out on this property,” she said. “I thought it’s probably too good to be true.”

“Quite often people might want to move somewhere but the thought of trying to get six to eight week’s bond money can be quite daunting.”

Ms Lamont said the service would help cash-poor renters get an upper hand.

“I think it’s really good as far as closing the gap on people would have had more access to a particular property,” she said. “[You can be] a perfectly good applicant that’s just as good as any other who may just not have the cash on them at the time.”

She wasn’t fussed about giving up her social media data to secure the service for her tenure.

“I don’t do anything I don’t want anyone to know about. Most places compile data now anyway,” Ms Lamont said.

Suncorp partnered with Traity to build Trustbond, which customer marketplace chief executive Pip Marlow says is a great opportunity to reach more customers that were more time- and cash-poor than older generations.

“Now generationally people don’t want to be constrained by the traditional ways of working, so many products aren’t conducive to that lifestyle,” Ms Marlow said. “Actually we saw our customers needs were changing. There was an opportunity to think innovatively.”

Suncorp didn’t have plans to extend the technology to mortgages and other financial products yet but Ms Marlow wouldn’t rule it out.

“There’s an opportunity to say later that we can extend that out,” she said. “If it came to a mortgage we’d take a blend of traditional credit ratings and digital reputation.”

However, renters’ rights advocates have said the Trustbond system, and other cash-free bond solutions, aren’t the best for the consumer.

Tenants Union of NSW policy officer Leo Patterson-Ross said he was concerned by the growing trend of non-traditional bonds.

“It’s coming up and there’s been a number of organisations and companies sniffing around this space,” he said. “There’s a real question mark on whether it’s a good deal for renters.”

He suggested that the type of renter that would opt for a similar system would be those in insecure working situations and those with lower incomes.

In NSW a state government program was already in place to cater to those renters.

“For people on lower incomes, the state government provides interest free bond loans, that would probably be a better model to look at. To expand the eligibility for bond loans,” Mr Patterson-Ross said. “The problem is that people who are in a tight bolt financial position are often taken advantage of.”