Facebook users may soon have a reason to purge their friends’ lists other than bad breakups and incessant Candy Crush invitations: the company now has a patent that could give lenders access to your Facebook friends’ credit scores when deciding whether or not to give you a loan.

Secured by the social media giant on Tuesday, the patent helps Facebook filter unwanted SPAM e-mails and improve search functions.

It also could give lenders the chance to examine credit scores across a user’s Facebook network before granting a loan.

“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,” the patent reads.

“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.”

The company acquired the patent as part of a portfolio bought from Friendster for $40 million in 2010, Fortune reported.

In an email, Facebook Canada told the Star it was not commenting on the issue. It is unclear how Facebook intends to use the patent, if at all.

“We are not aware of any plans by Facebook to launch an initiative related to this patent in Canada,” Valerie Lawton, senior communications advisor at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, told the Star in an email.

Credit scores are traditionally determined by how much debt you owe, and your credit and payment histories. But increasingly, lenders are using information gleaned online to determine a potential borrowers’ trustworthiness, and some companies have specialized in granting loans based on social media profiles.

Julia Horwitz, director of the consumer privacy project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, D.C., said that if it uses the patent Facebook could be violating U.S. laws.

“It’s possible that this is not legal,” Horwitz told the Star. “It seems that the current thinking among creditors and debt collectors is that if somebody borrows money or wishes to borrow money or needs to repay money that has been borrowed, that person’s entire life gets to be exposed.”

The lack of information about the parameters for the patent’s use — how many friends will be polled and how, for example — also leaves many privacy questions unanswered, she said.

It could also have a “chilling effect on friendship.”

“We don’t want people to make friendships and associations with that level of suspicion. There’s a real threat to peoples’ interpersonal relationships if one of the means by which they conduct their friendships . . . is going to be monitored for things like credit worthiness,” Horwitz said.

Pinar Yildirim, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, co-authored a recent study on how social media is used to determine credit scores.

In an interview with the Star, Yildirim said that the practice is beneficial to individuals in developing countries where financial credit checks, like those used in Canada and the U.S., are often unavailable.

“(Lenders) are not necessarily clearly identifying who is the better candidate than the other, so there is a need to use different types of data . . . that can say something about the person’s character and risk profile,” she said, adding that this is where social media comes in.

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Yildirim said that despite a “stigma” around the practice and privacy concerns, social media is a largely helpful tool to allocate credit and can actually better determine who will be able to pay back loans.

“In some experiments, it’s been shown . . . that these systems can detect the people who are eventually going to default better than the current, existing, traditional systems which we rely on,” she said.

“There are a lot of benefits about this practice that can help individuals who are currently having a hard time obtaining loans financially.”

But will Facebook actually use the patent?

“Major tech companies (Facebook and Google, specifically) secure patents for weird ideas all the time — that doesn’t mean they’ll ever be implemented,” wrote journalist Adam Epstein at Quartz.

“Facebook could decide to use just part of the patent, while disregarding the lending portion. Or it could just be a superfluous part of the patent bundle Facebook bought from Friendster that was never intended to be used. Or the patent could be an asset to be sold on to someone else.”

Still, Horwitz said this argument is not convincing because the company has not explained why it would not use the patent.

“Is it, ‘We haven’t figured out how to implement it?’ Or . . . ‘We were trying to make sure that no one else could use it because it’s such an invasive practice?’ . . . which is what I doubt they’re thinking.”

Andrew Currier, a patent lawyer at PCK, a Toronto-based intellectual property firm, explained that patents give companies “a right to exclude, not a license to do something.”

Facebook has the exclusive right to use this specific technology in the U.S. But the company can also apply it, non-exclusively, in other countries, including Canada, Currier said.

“It means that they can do it here, but it means that anybody can do it here,” Currier told the Star.

“It’s definitely unchartered territory.”

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