Ugh, this is a terribly click-baity article.<p>Facebook has really, really good people working on machine learning.  What Facebook wants to do is use whatever features it can scrape from your profile to accurately price your odds of defaulting on a loan.<p>It&#x27;s very unlikely that removing a few &#x27;poor&#x27; friends will improve your credit score.  There&#x27;s likely to be many features that will be highly correlated all of which will enter a statistical model.<p>Keep in mind - actuaries already use all sorts of information about you in order to price a loan.  This will just make the pricing more accurate, making (on average) cheaper loans.<p>The downside of more accurate loan pricing is that it might lead to de-facto discrimination against groups that are classified as high risk.  I believe the government has a role there to provide high risk pools, because the alternative will be to push those people towards black market loans.