> Housing lawyer Benjamin Ries, with the University of Toronto's Downtown Legal Services, said his organization has sent a letter to Naborly seeking clarification of the company's intentions, because it seems like it's building an illegal "blacklist.
Is such a blacklist actually illegal or did they mistype “immoral”?
It violates privacy laws so it's illegal. And like the article also says, credit rating agencies need to be registered through the government and consumers need to give their consent for a credit check.
Where I live (Calgary, AB) I've literally never had a landlord ask for a reference. Been renting for nearly 20 years. Simply cutting a cheque is always enough around here. My current landlord never even bothered to check if my roomate/SO actually existed when we signed the lease (she wasn't available to view the apartment, literally the only time I met my landlord).
Landlords need tenants more than tenants need landlords. At the end of the day, you can always find somewhere to live even if it's shared tenancy or crashing with friends or family, an empty apartment just costs the landlord money.
I am not so sure. Do you have to give consent for a bank to submit a charge-off report to the various credit bureaus in case of negative balance or other delinquency?
This sounds like the initial data collection which is a massive grey area IMO. The use of that data to make an approve/decline decision is where the regulations start to take effect.
> I am not so sure. Do you have to give consent for a bank to submit a charge-off report to the various credit bureaus in case of negative balance or other delinquency?
No, but you need to give permission for anyone to run a credit check on you. Literally no one can legally see that info without you giving them permission to do so. Whereas anyone can sign up for this service and see info about you.
Edit - also, banks won't give you a bad score as long as you keep paying the minimum on all your credit products. And in my experience, their willingness to give you a mortgage or extend credit has more to do with your income and assets than a credit score.
> No, but you need to give permission for anyone to run a credit check on you.
Whether that is true will depend on your jurisdiction. In the U.S. at least, it is not true. In the U.S., a consumer report needs to be for a permissible purpose, but it does not always require explicit permission of the consumer. See 15 U.S. Code § 1681b, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1681b.
When you buy a car, you have to give them permission to check with the credit agencies. If you miss a loan payment, the bank can then report to the agencies they used to vet you.
There is a level of transparency. It's not perfect but it;s something. This Company is obfuscating every layer, the tenants don't even know it's going on. The biggest issue here with the obfuscation is, Who is keeping the landlords honest?
There are already associations in the US that legally track tenant and landlord issues. This company is just bypassing all the regulations involved in that and pretending it's ok.
If so, then asking for references from a previous landlord must also be illegal. It's the same private information: where you lived and whether you paid rent on time.
Yeah, but "opt out" means buggering off to go look elsewhere, where references aren't required.
Whoever ends up moving into that place must have given the reference. So it's not optional, right?
It's the same "opt out" as opting out of paying $30K for that SUV at the car dealership. Oh, and not driving out with it either; that's done by the next buyer who coughs up $30K.
If it legal to ask for a reference, it means that, in the eyes of the law, the situation would be acceptable if every landlord in the country required one. In such a case it would still optional in the sense that one can emigrate, or go sleep on some friend's or family member's sofa.
The point is that people who don't want to give the reference will do so anyway because the circumstances force them to.
Yes, though exactly why depends on the jurisdiction. In some areas a tenant blacklists is explicitly illegal; in others this would fall afoul of credit monitoring registration laws. Additionally the fact that they're using AI opens the door for a lot of issues; for example, if it turns out that their blacklist flags a disproportionately large share of African-American renters they're on the wrong side of fair housing and anti-redlining laws.
> "It seems like this is a blacklist that Naborly is hoping that landlords will help create by just informing on every single tenant, whether they've paid or not," he added. "It does not seem legal."
> Also, allowing landlords access to tenants' past paying habits meant the company in question was "acting as a credit reporting agency, without a requisite licence," he said.
> The process has also raised concerns from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), which noted that property managers in Canada are not allowed to publish "bad tenants" lists.
IANAL but anyone who uses that list will likely get sued for housing discrimination by opportunistic lawyers. All it takes is a sympathetic jury in a low income area with lots of protected classes and a subpoena to show them that the list is disproportionately made up of those protected classes - which it almost certainly will be because socioeconomics.
And given their general attitude of hoping to keep things secret instead of working within the law discovery would probably find quite a few incriminating emails & IMs talking about the best ways to hide their dirty laundry. They seem to have the same kind of arrogance about legal matters that's brought down literally hundreds (or possibly thousands) of startups over the decades. I'm not sure why they thought this wasn't going to turn into news, but it's a pretty common mindset.
Proving use will be damn near impossible.
Getting the list shutdown is more likely if a lawyer can prove they are acting as an unlicensed credit reporting service.
That's easy. The servers are going to record who accessed the api, what data they retrieved, and when. I wouldnt be surprised if we receive and anonymous data dump soon.
that only proves that someone looked at the list - not that they made a decision based on it... PROVING that someone based their decision on something they read on the internet is basically impossible, especially if you have even a half intelligent lawyer
Calling this a blacklist is misleading. It's not a blacklist because it doesn't prevent anyone from extending credit to any reported person, as far as I can tell.
Is such a blacklist actually illegal or did they mistype “immoral”?