Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, June 20

• Phone Tracking, Nude Selfie IOUs See Chinese Bare All for Credit: Talkative people pay back loans. The very talkative default. Too taciturn is no good either. Also, don’t take out a loan at 4 a.m. Those are lessons from online lenders in China that are tracking people’s behavior -- via apps on their mobile phones -- and taking it into account when deciding what their credit ratings should be. Chinese consumers don’t mind handing over personal details that would spark outrage in the West, in exchange for lower interest rates. WeLab Ltd., a Hong Kong-based online lender that makes loans in China, looks at what apps people have downloaded, where they go using the phone’s GPS tracker, their social networks and their school records. It offers discounted interest rates for each extra piece of personal information that helps profile customers for credit ratings. In Hong Kong, for example, giving WeLab access to a Facebook account gets a 5 percent discount on the cost of a loan, and access to LinkedIn gets you 10 percent off, on loans with interest rates that otherwise reach as high as 20 percent. "Chinese people have no issue handing over their personal data, giving you their credit card number, giving you their bank account," said GGV Capital’s Shanghai-based managing partner Jenny Lee, whose Silicon Valley venture capital firm has invested in data-hungry tech giants such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. "Look at the whole internet finance sector, people are giving you their bank statement so you can do profiling." Some are perhaps over-sharing. University students desperate for cash have been sending nude photos of themselves as collateral to several online lending platforms, according to the official People’s Daily. Typically they get loans of 15,000 yuan ($2,280) -- more if they’re doctoral students or enrolled at a famous university, the report said, and at least one loan had a weekly interest rate of 30 percent. Delinquent borrowers face the threat of their naked selfies being sent to family if they don’t pay.

• Apple says iPhones still available for sale in China: Apple  said its iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were still available for sale in China after Beijing's intellectual property regulators barred their sales saying the designs had infringed a patent held by a Chinese company. "We appealed an administrative order from a regional patent tribunal in Beijing last month and as a result the order has been stayed pending review by the Beijing IP Court," Apple said in a statement on Friday. The notice, dated May 19, banning sales of certain iPhone models in Beijing was posted on a Chinese government website. The Chinese market is vital to Apple, driving more of its sales than any other region outside the United States. But the tech giant has faced greater scrutiny there in recent months, with its online book and film services blocked by Chinese regulators earlier this year. Apple historically had enjoyed favorable treatment in China, but Beijing’s crackdown on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus is a reminder that the tech giant is not immune to the scrutiny that other U.S. tech firms have long faced in the country, said analyst Colin Gillis of BGC Partners.