EU agency advises against using search and browsing history for credit scores
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therecord.media
It’s hard to tell systematically but my YouTube ads became super douschey. And my iheartradio ads and Spotify ads were also related.
Is there a site of funny search poisoning? Or a practical joke set of how many times you have to search “domestic abuse defense attorney” a friend’s phone to surprise them?
The original list of terms can still be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/4nc763...
as far as practical jokes go, it would probably be a lot easier to sign up someone to an unsavory email list.
If I sell my startup in a few years, it would be worth 4-10m$, and I wonder what I might do with the money. I find it funny that you dismiss the idea of not knowing how to invest millions of dollars, but when you’ve worked all your life, you don’t have time to build a network of people who can receive your investment, and you’re not used to actually having this money outside of the startup vehicle. And given 86% of billionaires of this generation are first-generation, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the same for millionaires. I keep hearing stories of:
- Youtubers,
- Startup founded,
- Dropshipping, but not dropshippers, just people who sell services to gullible get-rich-quick dropshippers.
Having $10 mil in a bank account somewhere is pointless. No matter what philosophy you want to apply choices must be made. Investment, consumption or hedonism. The money will quickly vanish (decade or two) if the balance is wrong or the millionaire goes all-in on indexing at the peak of some bubble.
I suppose my valuing the health of an ecosystem of other lives is selfish, too. I’m writing to push for a broader sense of what it means to invest, as in increasing the carbon content of soil for the health of future life, and promoting regulation towards cleaner air and water.
Of course that too. It’s not exclusive with search poisoning.
> $2million
It seems that way in that it’s either stupid advertisers that think rich people Google that. Or people thinking there’s a mindset of get rich quick, crypto scams who Google that.
Not to say that it is, but email lists being sold around is table stakes for advertising and search, so that might be faster and easier than trying to change ad results via search queries.
He could never figure out why they just wouldn't stop calling him
21st-Century advice: "Google for the problems you want, not the problems you have."
It worked by opening 100s of tabs but I don’t remember if it issued any query to Google.
The tool is Track This: https://trackthis.link/
The 2008 Banking disaster happened because banks were happy to give out tons of loans to people who couldn't pay them back. The response was to tighten various parameters that should have made it harder for banks to give out bad loans.
I wonder if this is a way to break out of those handcuffs and allow banks to go back to giving out more loans. "Yeah this person has a terrible credit score, but look at their browsing history. They are looking at healthy diets, they are comparing prices and shopping cheap - all signs of a responsible adult. Why should we deny this upstanding member of the society access to credit and help them become homeowners?"
Update: Thinking about it some more, looking at browsing history is a fantastic way to identify vulnerable members of the society who can be talked into signing themselves up for new loans. History shows that bankers have loved to do this.
Oh god, that could be my browsing history but it's not me nor what I do and they would be in for a rude awakening.
Oh, you eat too much, or the wrong things. Oh, but smoke, drink. Oh, you're exercising enough. Oh, you're exercising too much. Oh, you're just exercising the right amount.
I've not even touched the browsing history yet. Surely the end goal here is not simply exploiting big data they have on everyone. Outrageous as that may be, that would also mean the very final end of any pretence of privacy online. Everything finally tied to our legal real personas. Ugh...
Is that really possible?
But has any entity (outside of the CCP in China) ever done this on a large-enough scale that it would even begin to make sense for a "customer" like a credit reporting agency?
From "other data brokers" maybe
Not sure how the heck would a single developer refuse to implement a system that earns boatload of money.
The other approach, which is employed by other specialties, is to have a professional trade accreditation group create certain standards that must be upheld by all people in that group. Doctors and lawyers are examples of how this works, and in what ways it fails too.
Anything else is at best correlation, which as we know is not the same as causation.
Some countries have individual systems, but others don't.
I had a friend at a startup trying to close some of that gap by reporting one-time rent payments to credit agencies, and the sheer scale of benefits they were trying to bring their users is hard to overstate.
I guess my point here is that there are in fact large portions of the population that are not well served by credit scores today, and just because you are not among them doesn't mean they don't exist.
People forget that all these big data schemes are rather inaccurate at the individual user level, and that doesn't matter to the companies that use the data.
I suppose I'm assuming rational actors though - downrating people for having casino payments on their card might still make statistical sense.
Someone who needed to game that system probably spends enough that it would be very hard to explain away those withdrawals.
Wasn't the GDPR introduced to prevent data sharing like this in the first place if I don't explicitly opt-in to this particular use case, like, as a separate toggle and not "by using our service you agree to our privacy policy".
I'm confused.
In their defense, they write: “Fintech resolves the dilemma by tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases.”
So it seems they’re not recommending this usage of data persee, but just say fintech is already doing this.
> Fintech resolves the dilemma by tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases. Recent research documents that, once powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, these alternative data sources are often superior than traditional credit assessment methods, and can advance financial inclusion, by, for example, enabling more credit to informal workers and households and firms in rural areas.
No research is linked, but assuming this kind of statistical data is roughly accurate in the first place for the sake of the argument, feeding that in some black box ML "AI" system is likely to produce a fair amount of inaccurate results, and since it's all a magical system you can't really argue with it; it's just "computer says no". Even employees high up the food chain (if you get that far) won't be able to really help you either, because insight in these systems is hard and deal poorly with exceptional situations (and turns out there are a lot of those, it's just that all of them are different).
Without going in to all the privacy aspects and other problems, it's a good example of the dehumanisation of our society. At the end of the day you just can't beat human judgement and "common sense", but the possibility for this is increasingly taken from us. Sure, humans are not perfect but just because a few mistakes are made doesn't mean taking away the entire human aspect is desirable.
- the outcome of all of your past debts,
- your current sources of income,
- likely future sources of income,
- and a valuation of (some) of your assets that I might be able to go after if you don't pay me.
To me, any other indicator used in some kind of correlation game is just laziness.
Let's just identify people we don't like and give them low credit scores, and give ourselves high credit scores. Right?
[edited for formatting]
In some countries credit score registries are restricted by law to only holding information on delinquent debt, so an average person has no entries in the credit score registries. This is the case here in Finland currently, though a national positive credit register is being planned for 2024 (https://www.vero.fi/en/positivecreditregister/).
I always get orwellian vibes from the US system. Some random big brotherish corporation looks at you in any way it can, then runs some completely untransparant system to produce an unreliable number, with no appeal. That number determines your chances in life.
Then again, my governement keeps track of how well I do on repaying my loans and tells that to lending orgs. I assume someone with a US style 'gubberment' thought process might recoil in horror even if I rather like it.
I never had a credit card. Among my friends who do well financially most don't have a credit card or just got it because their bank offered a crippled debit card that wasn't accepted at hotels and car rental. They never use the credit line. On the other have out of the financially irresponsible people I know most have multiple credit cards and use them as a credit line in regular basis.
It's monumentally stupid, though, and says nothing about my ability to pay off future debt.
IMO that says a lot about your willingness to pay off future debt.
https://www.myfico.com/credit-education/whats-in-your-credit...
>payment history (35%), amounts owed (30%), length of credit history (15%), new credit (10%) and credit mix (10%).
In the US we have positive credit score meaning you have to show you are a good lender to get a better score.
The european ones are mostly much less granular.
The Wikipedia article does not show that almost no European country has a credit score or credit reporting system. It simply provides examples from various countries and is obviously not exhaustive, like most lists in Wikipedia.
If you want to just see how many EU countries have any credit registries, these World Bank links have good data:
- Public registries: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.CRD.PUBL.ZS
- Private registries: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.CRD.PRVT.ZS
They show most EU countries have such registries. I did go through a dozen countries manually before finding the above handy links, though...
Of course one could argue whether or not those systems which only allow negative entries (and thus most people will have no data there) for a credit check should be considered credit score systems.
To rent in Germany, I had to have a SCHUFA check and a letter from my previous landlord saying I didn't have any outstanding debts, the "Mietschuldenfreiheitsbescheinigung."
> Mietschuldenfreiheitsbescheinigung
Also, that must be the most German word ever.
Ignore the media spin, it's the most capitalist country in Europe, where unequal contracts rule supreme and you get fines and prison time for nearly anything.
I'm surprised the socialist policies stuck around, although there's still time to get rid of them.
What, other than a contract that complies with the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, should be more supreme between two parties freely trading with each other?
The weather report? A poem?
Which is to say, most contracts.
The requirements and punishment for breach of contract are rather nutty even compared to the US.
Considering their socialist policies started with Bismarck, I think they'll remain. But I think perhaps US-centric media somewhat over-eggs "socialist Europe".
I also generally disagree that Germany is capitalist. Most markets are heavily regulated and full of subsidies, taxes are extremely high, and there's a fundamental mistrust of individualism.
Police beating up innocents also happens rarely in the US.
Again, it's rare. The state is financed via very high taxes in Germany, not by abusing fines as a money grab. Some local admins get overzealous with speeding + parking violations, but even that is pretty cheap. And what's the alternative? Would you prefer your car to be towed and your license invalidated? Paying 20€ is cheaper for everyone involved ... and if you're really allergic to paying money and the picture isn't perfect, you can usually get out of it by claiming "that person could be anyone".
Lenders get information about you from a Credit Reference Agency and will have their own internal systems to make decisions based on that. You can ask the reference agency for a copy of your credit report.
The "scores" are only loosely related to actual credit ratings, which are somewhat context/application dependent.
In reality the sites are mostly just marketing fronts for various consumer services - credit cards, loans, mobile and energy contracts, and so on.
They're notoriously aggressive about getting you to log in and keep checking your score. Partly because this looks good for partner engagement metrics, but also because it trains you to keep checking your score in an obsessive and gamified way.
The TV advertising for credit score checking was just about to start around then as far as I could tell.
Also, a credit checking association boasted that their members' data is 95% accurate - so that means that around 15 million Americans do have devastating errors on their credit score (through no fault of their own).
https://www.nbb.be/nl/kredietcentrales/centrale-voor-krediet...
They also keep a black list of people who should be denied credit.
That's a more intelligent solution to the problem, like in the rest of Europe.
- https://www.asiakastieto.fi/web/en/about-us/about-credit-dat...
- https://www.dnb.com/fi-fi/tuotteet/bisnode-risk-guardian/ (Finnish only)
Current legislation: https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2007/20070527 (Finnish and Swedish only, Google translate of Swedish text: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=se&tl=en&u=https:/... )
I'm not aware of a good English page describing the current system in detail, though. The Finnish pages of e.g. the Asiakastieto registry are more detailed.
Planned positive public registry: https://www.vero.fi/en/positivecreditregister/
“How to pay my bills on time”
“How to save more money for retirement”
well a bit too late for that