Hacker News Reader

Comment by FTA | Hacker News Reader

People are always terrified of the Big Brother from government, but any time I have to verify my identity with questions like "What street of the listed have you lived on?" or "Which of these banks do you have a loan with?" it makes me realize how much aggregated data private (especially financial) companies have. I can imagine these corporations selling that info for good money, like how many transactions you make at a fast food restaurant in a given month to health insurance providers.

View on HN

As an European who've tried the American way. I have to say that it is clearly worse.

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.

> all because you wanted to avoid trusting a government. That didn't go well.

I'm not so sure considering the current administration.

The administration already has all these information. You're registered for taxes, healthcare, criminal background, etc.

You're not hiding anything from them and you're not helping yourself by duplicating that to shady agencies.

Well, perhaps, but even the one thing we did trust them with (OPM data) all got pilfered away.

You trust people who sell your info to spammers not to sell or even give it to the gov?

I'd say that the two are connected.

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.

Ironically, the current administration is in power in no small part due to a constituency that doesn't trust the government.

Self-fulfilling prophecies...

It really seems that americans do not want a functioning government. But maybe its just the curse of large countries to have disfunctional governments, and it can't be fixed.

I would say that the United States does not want a functioning government and that is by design. Remember the Federalists? They argued for a better government than the US had under the Articles of Confederation (kinda EU like body before our current Constitution). Many Americans read these guys and agree. What we often forget is the AntiFederalists, amongst them was Jefferson. As a result of the Federalists and the AntiFederalists, the US has the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Guess which side brought what to the party.

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.

Americans distrust national ID. Several administrations have floated the idea and have quickly learned that fact. We do have a de facto national ID in drivers licenses. If we had a medicare for all health system we would than have a national ID and a lot of those problems would go away.

A recent HN post about four square is that they pivoted to an API that tells you who is shopping and where. They use Instagram data . https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14052444

I believe Instagram is using their data.

Check out companies like cardlytics and acxiom. Cardlytics basically provides the exact service you're wondering about.

You're very right, although that method of authentication (known as "Knowledge Based Authentication" or "Out of Wallet Questions" more specifically) is highly ineffective. Users can't answer the questions reliably, hackers can reliably steal the info. Look for that method to be entirely out of the industry within the next 5 years. There are better ways.

I'm curious. What are the better ways?

First of all, basically any way is better than Out of Wallet Questions because they don't work on both ends. They don't really prevent fraud and most legit people fail them.

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.

And the whole thing is effectively structured as a 4th amendment sidestepping initiative. Which is why it will never go away.

That's why one should rather pay cash and not donate them your data..

I don't say this often, but this observation is pure garbage. People who live in terror of "big brother" aren't in terror because they may be offered an unwanted credit card, or because it's their precious privacy that they value. They're in terror because their government wants to silence them and kill them. Maybe for who they associate with, their religious belief, sexual orientation or their political beliefs.

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.

A visit to many internet forums will yield people fearing that "big brother" will expose their emails or internet history--though not life-threatening, the damage of embarrassment or job loss is still a real fear in their eyes.

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.

It's just historically ignorant to lump people who fear an all knowing state with people who want privacy online. I know that you personally don't fear your government - but please, let's not write off the entirety of history because you can't personally relate.

> 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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com