If you re among the millions of Americans who use Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social-networking platforms, you probably already know that there are companies out there using the heaps of data you broadcast to create better-targeted marketing and advertising campaigns.

One particular issue that has recently made headlines is whether and how information collected from social networks is used by banks and other financial institutions. And if that s the case, how will what you tweet, or who you friend on Facebook affect your credit?

Last week, reports that one company is crunching data gleaned from consumers Facebook networks and providing it to lenders fired up blogs and traditional media outlets. The company, San Francisco-based RapLeaf, takes a firm s email database and uses social-networking information to extract more details about that firm s customers. This helps businesses banks and financial services included to further decide which advertising may be the best to show to you and which mailing may be the best to mail to you, says Joel Jewitt, RapLeaf s vice president of business development.

Jewitt says that RapLeaf works strictly with marketing departments as opposed to those charged with making credit and lending decisions -- to help with offer sorting. Banks spend a lot of money every month on sending out offers, he says. And with someone like us, they have a higher chance of getting the right person.

So if you were worried that updating your Facebook status to reflect a recent layoff or Tweeting about a foreclosure next door may cause your credit-card company to reduce your credit limit or affect your ability to get a loan, rest assured that the chances are slim (at this juncture).

Mining the Internet for information about people has been experimented with for a decade, says Tom Crooks, a general manager at Global Analytics, a San Diego-based company that develops fraud-detection and risk-management analytics solutions for various industries. But no one s using it in a big way.

One area where social-networking activity may come into play is collections, Crooks says. Collections agents scour the Internet to find out as much as possible about an individual debtors financial situation, and finding out that they are active social networkers may only make them push harder in asking for payment. The people who are connected into their community and highly visible tend to be people who have both the support and the ability to cope with financial setbacks, Crooks says. Their debts are easier to collect.

Small, niche lenders may also look into social-networking information, as long as their portfolios are small enough to afford the ability to look at applications on a case-by-case basis. Say you re trying to get a second mortgage on a house and a private investor is providing the financing, says Crooks. The investor may use any publicly available information to supplement their loan decision. And they have the right to. People forget that the Internet is public.

But the stakes are higher when it comes to big lenders with millions of customers and a lending process that is almost entirely automated. To begin with, if big banks started to routinely use social-networking information in credit decisions, it would be a call to arms for scammers to start creating and manipulating social-networking profiles in order to get approved for loans, Crooks says.

In addition, slicing and dicing social-networking data to create consumer profiles is nowhere nearly as reliable as doing the same with credit-report information to calculate FICO scores. A large lender with hundreds of thousands of customers, for example, will have difficulty extracting statistically sound information from social-networking activity because the information will be highly variable from one individual to another, Crooks says. Some people will have provided a lot of information while others will have none.

The process could also cause more trouble than it s worth. By bringing social networking into credit decisions, lenders could be running too high a risk of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

If lenders really use the information they pull from any of those sites to make an adverse decision against a customer and applicant, and don t disclose that, then they are violating the FCRA, says John Ulzheimer, the president of consumer education for Credit.com, an advocacy group.

However, even if banks are using social networking data in their marketing efforts alone, their activities are not entirely kosher, says Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a San Diego-based nonprofit group that studies the accessibility of personal information. If they re making a special offer that is in any way better or worse than what is offered to another person based on their social profile, that s where you get into trouble, she says.

Just as redlining denying or increasing the cost of loans to people based on where they live was banned in the late 1960s and 1970s, the practice of targeting customers based on their social-networking activities is likely to draw Congress s interest if it becomes too widespread, Dixon says.

To have your profile deleted from RapLeaf s database, use its opt-out form here