My neighbor's kid got a college rejection letter that felt way too personal

I was helping him move some stuff last month in Chicago, and he showed me a letter that basically said 'based on your online activity, we feel you wouldn't fit our campus culture.' He'd never even visited their site, but he used their app. It means they bought his info from somewhere else and judged him on it. Has anyone else seen something like this happen?

3 comments

3 Comments

max2236d ago

Honestly that's wild they'd do that. Tbh it reminds me of when my buddy got his car insurance quote jacked up. They said it was because of his "digital footprint", which just meant some dumb tweets from like 2012. Felt super invasive.

anna4916d agoMost Upvoted

Ugh, that digital footprint thing is a nightmare. My friend tried to rent an apartment and they pulled some "lifestyle score" that tracked if she ever ordered groceries for delivery after 10pm. Apparently being a night owl who wants cereal at midnight makes you a risk. Max223, your buddy's old tweets getting dug up is the same creepy energy. They're just making up new scores from our trash data.

davidkim6d ago

My cousin in Austin got a weirdly low credit limit on her first card last year. The letter cited her "financial responsibility score" which turned out to be based on her Netflix subscription history and some food delivery app data. She only orders pizza like once a month, so it made zero sense. Makes you wonder what else they're scraping without telling us, right?