{"id":1270,"date":"2016-06-23T10:29:05","date_gmt":"2016-06-23T17:29:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/?p=1270"},"modified":"2016-06-23T10:29:05","modified_gmt":"2016-06-23T17:29:05","slug":"rental-detectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/2016\/06\/23\/rental-detectives\/","title":{"rendered":"Rental detectives"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m pretty much an open book to my building manager. If I ever have to move into another rental, though, the services provided by a British\u00a0data-mining company\u00a0might unnerve me. Writes\u00a0Stanley Q. Woodvine<\/a>\u00a0in Vancouver, BC’s Georgia Straight<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Tenant Assured<\/a> is a web-based service first made available two weeks ago to landlords around the world. The service essentially forces people to open up their social media accounts to the prying eyes of landlords as part of the process of applying to rent an apartment. …<\/p>\n

This is how Tenant Assured works:<\/p>\n

A landlord who’s signed-up\u00a0with Tenant Assured sends all of their rental applicants to a special link on the Tenant Assured website. They are then asked\u00a0 to provide full access to up to four of their social media profiles\u2014on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. These are then thoroughly crawled, scraped, and analyzed by Score Assured. The scrutiny includes conversation threads, private messages, and contact lists. …<\/p>\n

Concerns that the service is a gross violation of personal privacy were brushed off by the company, which trotted out the oldest authoritarian assurance about surveillance in the book, namely,\u00a0“If you\u2019ve got nothing to hide, you\u2019ve got nothing to fear<\/a>“. Or, as [the company’s]\u00a0cofounder Steve Thornhill put it … “If you\u2019re living a normal life then, frankly, you have nothing to worry about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thornhill further pointed out that people had to give their consent to the Tenant Assured process and that it was really not much different from a background check or credit rating.<\/p>\n

Of course it\u2019s very different\u00a0…\u00a0. There are long-standing laws governing credit and background checks and there are processes in place to allow people to see their credit reports and correct inaccuracies.<\/p>\n

Although landlords anywhere in the world can sign up for the service\u2014including right here in Vancouver\u2014it\u2019s is not clear what laws in any given jurisdiction could hold such an online service to account.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a professional communicator, I take great pains not to post anything at all controversial online: very little politics or religion\u00a0… or\u00a0anger. (I always ask myself, “What would my students think? My future clients? My Mom?”) The persona\u00a0I therefore project is a good deal sunnier and more welcoming than the real thing. Last year a girlfriend from high school wrote me, “Bob, I like you so much better online.” Good to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m pretty much an open book to my building manager. If I ever have to move into another rental, though, the services provided by a British\u00a0data-mining company\u00a0might unnerve me. Writes\u00a0Stanley Q. Woodvine\u00a0in Vancouver, BC’s Georgia Straight, Tenant Assured is a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[88,89,105],"class_list":["post-1270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roberts-posts","tag-research","tag-resources-3","tag-vancouver"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}