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Tenant Assured Controversy

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There is a fine line between just enough information and too much information. Score Assured, a British startup, crosses that line so far that the line is no longer visible. Tenant Assured, a software created by Score Assured, gives landlords the power access to prospective tenants social media accounts by sending them a link to the software. When a tenant "opts in", the software goes through all their social media accounts from public posts to private chats and scans through them to compile a report about the tentant that would help predict whether they would make a good tenant or not. Whether this practice ethical or not is the question that needs to be addressed. I would argue from a deontological perspective that it is indeed unethical not only because of its social effects but because it does not take into account the startup's duties to not discriminate and protect people's privacy. …show more content…

According to CNET and Washington Post, score assured scrapes for keywords such as "loan" and "pregnant". It also gives information on your supposed personality, your activity time on social media, your age, "financial stress", crime, social proximity, and more. By accessing your social media accounts, Tenant Assured basically has access to all of ones personl identifying information. However, deciding on whether one makes a good informant based on information that are not accurate or as pertinant such as pregnancy and age is social bias and discrimination. While the US has laws against this kind of discrimination according to the Verge, the UK apparently does not, an example of a policy vacuum of which this software is taking advantage. This is deontologically unethical because the creators of Tenant Assured have a duty to not discriminate against other people. Yet in creating this software they are morally in the

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