Is This Part Of Your Social Media Training For Kids?

2 min read

While the fact that a variety of data brokers engage in digital redlining is old news, and Facebook's patent on assessing credit via friends could theoretically be dismissed as a future plan, we now have reports that credit rating agencies are using social media to assess credit ratings:

FICO is working with credit card companies to use several different methods for deciding what size loans people can handle, and using non-traditional sources like social media allows them to collect information on people who don't have an in-depth credit history

As educators, if you steer kids towards social media use, how do you prepare them for the reality that their posts are being archived by companies that will use their interactions to judge and sort them for the indeterminate future? Does your social media training and digital citizenship for kids cover how to create an online persona that is as creditworthy as possible? And how do we reconcile the needs for "authentic conversation" against a backdrop where for-profit companies invisibly mine these "authentic" interactions looking for predictors of future behavior? How many of us could withstand the actions of our youth weighted alongside our adult choices? How many parents consider these realities when they share information about their kids online?