How Goldman Sachs Made More Than $1B with Credit Scores
wsj.com
wsj.com
In the EU country I was, when i get a job/flat/whatever, I give a copy of my national ID and tax statement, and that's alright.
In the USA/UK, when I get a job/flat/whatever, noone trusts me or the government. I have to give plenty of documents and 5 years of history to a 3rd party shady check agency, that's gonna resell the data and spam me.
You can be sure that after a few years of your life, everything about you have been resold by these agencies and is available to the world: all your addresses, jobs, income, family situation, etc...
You American guys have hundreds of private big brothers incentivized against you, all because you wanted to avoid trusting a government. That didn't go well.
I'm not so sure considering the current administration.
You're not hiding anything from them and you're not helping yourself by duplicating that to shady agencies.
The US has a such an anti-government attitude that the Republican Party becomes the majority party instead of being laughed out of Congress. A party whose members frequently advocate cutting healthcare for the poor, reducing education budgets, scaling back environmental policies, etc.
Self-fulfilling prophecies...
Our current problem is that under FDR the government got too big, but we didn't ever try to clear it up later. As a result we have a pretty shitty hybrid of big government and Republicans running around not doing their jobs of removing the root. This leads to a hodgepodge of restrictions and regulations that make it hard for big government to streamline/be efficient. It also makes it hard for small government to take root since everything has to be done in the bureaucratic manner.
Better techniques involve data / device triangulation, lighter weight Knowledge Based Authentication via data matching, and deeper fraud scoring to detect potentially stolen identities. It takes a real strategy and real time to implement something that actually works which is why many people just default back to OOQs but that will change.
On the topic of Big Brother, there was a law passed called The Patriot Act that required stringent KYC regulations.. Meaning financial institutions are required to ask these stupid questions and keep tabs on you. The government is forcing companies to keep tabs on you, along with telecom and other industries - so they can siphon this data..
But whatever. Stupid conspiracy theorists. Probably dumb libertarians or something.
Also, do you not think financial companies would naturally aggregate this data in this day and age even if not required by law? Facebook has no mandate by law to collect information on their users for advertisers, yet they do. I imagine that financial companies in the business of understanding users' spending and lending habits would naturally gravitate to compiling and selling this data even without that mandate since humans and their data are the commodity of the 21st Century.
> Facebook has no mandate by law to collect information on their users for advertisers, yet they do.
In the age of NSL requests let's just admit that you don't know that. We have secret laws and secret courts in our "post 9/11 era". It's entirely possible that FB is secretly considered a national security resource and is compelled by threat of law to collect and relay all their data. Considering an early backer of FB was an investment arm of the CIA and that FB tracking cookies are used by the NSA to target attack vectors on the internet.. who knows, maybe I'm officially nuts :P
I used YNAB for a bit, and I found it pretty stressful to do all the bookkeeping. I went back to my heuristic budgeting. I don't need to track every penny.
CreditKarma is really helpful for monitoring. I've gotten some good card recommendations from them and my credit score has gone up 60 points with little effort. I did my taxes through them this year (more data for them!), but I was disappointed when my state return was incorrect and I got less money back. Given that my financials are getting more complicated, I'll likely be using an accountant/attorney this year.
Most people, including myself, seem willing to give up their privacy and confidentiality in exchange for convenience. I try to play it as a zero-sum game. I've deleted all my social media accounts, because having that info plus my financials floating around seems like a bad idea. In regard to my financial data, I'll probably freak out in a few years and move all that to a professional to handle.
This whole "social" experiment with tech is, in my eyes, a frightening failure. Given how slipshod the security and data handling is at most companies (including my workplace), it's only a matter of time until there are millions of digital doppelgangers running around committing fraud.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13621072
I haven't tried it myself, and it may no longer work. Might be worth giving it a try.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xray/dgkdfehohjdbm...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075570 and marked it off-topic.
See "Are paywalls ok?" in the FAQ:
Even companies that started with noble goals like whatsapp ended up selling out to Facebook troves of private info.
The only way I see things change is a holocaust level fuck up because people think they have nothing to hide. I predict the next generation terrorism in the digital form
We already had that one and it does not seem to make much difference.
... that affects lawmakers and/or exposes national security secrets.
I imagine there's a lot of clandestine spending that can be correlated and will eventually bubble up inadvertently.