Coronavirus-related debt will live in digital profiles for years – hurting Americans’ ability to get jobs, apartments and credit
Long after the COVID-19 health emergency ends, many Americans will still suffer from the long tail of the pandemic’s economic devastation. For people on the country’s economic fringes, the proliferation of data analytics tools to monitor consumer life – driven by companies that profit from gathering personal data – will magnify today’s financial hardship.
These companies scrape data from your public records, social media interactions, purchase history and smartphone location tracking. Using powerful technologies, they fuse your data into digital profiles that landlords, employers, lenders and other gatekeepers to life’s necessities use to sort and screen people.
As a clinical law professor who represents low-income people in consumer cases, I’m concerned that the pandemic’s economic fall...