Watch What You Say on Social Media: Banks Are Listening

Social media sites are a great place to vent. For example, let's say you're pissed off about the $500,000 mortgage on your now $200,000 Orlando, Fla., tract home and one night after a few beers you send out a Tweet wondering why you don't just walk away from the whole mess.

Bad move. Because even though you wake up the next morning and decide with a clear head that bailing on your mortgage is not a good idea, your Tweet has been launched into the Internet universe and the financial industry has seen it, recorded it, and placed it in a file with your name on it.

Ken Lin, chief executive officer of credit-management service Credit Karma, wrote recently at Mashable that banks and other lenders are now monitoring social media, collecting messages relevant to consumers' creditworthiness and storing them for future reference.

"Many Americans may be unaware that their social media conversations and posts are providing banks and lenders with a treasure trove of information," Lin says. "In fact, a growing number of banks and lenders are currently building a data repository -- collecting, storing, and analyzing data -- in the hopes that one day it could help them determine your potential credit risk."

Five-Year Plan

It won't happen right away. Lin estimates that the soonest banks will be able to act on all of the information they're collecting is five years from now, after they've had time to crunch the data and correlate your social media behavior to your credit risk.

"Tweeting about walking away from your home may translate as an indicator that you may be delinquent on a future loan," he says. "Now banks are doing the math to determine whether these kinds of comments or Tweets actually prove true down the road. If banks and lenders can prove that using social media data as a business tool is successful in assessing behavioral patterns and preventing future losses, then why wouldn't they?"

There are steps you can take to mitigate the risk of your social media messages damaging your credit score, Lin says.

The most obvious is to think before you Tweet or post anything. Even innocuous messages, such as a rave review of that cool new secondhand store you discovered, might be considered credit-relevant by a bank.

Tighten your privacy settings as far as they'll go, which, granted, isn't all that far. But every little bit of caution helps.

Remember that everything you put online can be traced back to your keyboard. That includes wall comments, photos, and even "anonymous" comments on blogs.