Facebook has acquired a new patent that may make it difficult for you to receive a loan based off of the credit of your online friends

You may need to be more selective about which Facebook friend requests you accept from now on. Facebook has acquired a patent that could allow users to be denied a loan based off of the credit of their online friends.

The patent itself is actually for a program to help prevent spam, but the following paragraph was also included:

"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."

Facebook has dealt with issues of user privacy since it launched. Surprisingly, those issues have not kept Facebook from being worth $245 billion.

-Saher K: OTG Team

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ora Media, LLC its affiliates, or its employees.

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