Defaulting on a loan. Paying medical bills late. Being friends with Suzie on Facebook (News - Alert). What do these have in common? They’re all bad for your credit. No, that last one is not a mistake.

According to BetaBeat, Lenddo, a Hong Kong-based microlending startup, is working on algorithms gathering data for banks from the Web using people and their associations on social networks to gather information about them, and yes that includes their credit worthiness.

“There is this concept of ‘birds of a feather flock together,’” Ken Lin, CEO of credit scoring startup Credit Karma, told BetaBeat “If you are a profitable customer for a bank, it suggests that a lot of your friends are going to be the same credit profile. So they’ll look through the social network and see if they can identify your friends online and then maybe they send more marketing to them. That definitely exists today.”

The first thing Lenddo asks for is a Facebook account; then it wants access to Gmail, Twitter (News - Alert), Yahoo, and Windows Live. The company’s algorithm is proprietary, said CEO Jeff Stewart, but the primary metric is what Lenddo knows about the friends of customers.

“We think that in the age of the Internet you should be able to establish your reputation and your identity through your social graph, through your on- and offline community, and use that to get access to financial products and information,” he said to BetaBeat.

One wonders if American banks will be next in line to use this social media algorithm factor to make their decisions on whether to give out loans or not.

If this program does continue to grow, it could change social media and online friends as we know it.

This is, of course, not the first time institutions have looked to social networking as a means to get an idea of how people really are.

Smart and savvy job hunters know that the vast majority of potential bosses use social media to find suitable candidates and dig for dirt. Social networking sites have gained popularity among hiring managers because of their convenience and a growing anxiety about hiring the right people, researchers say.

Though social media can undoubtedly be used to a company’s advantage, employers must also be aware of some inherent risks that come with exploring this new terrain. Because social media and the so-called “blogosphere” are relatively uncharted territory for the workplace, the law is currently racing to keep pace with what is and isn’t legal when it comes to screening, while large companies are hurrying to develop written employee policies pertaining to social media.

All that aside, checking credit worthiness based on your friendly interactions online seems like something the fair credit reporting people need to look into.