The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/eff-fincen-stop-pushin...
You can help financially, and contact each of your representatives and senators and request they act to stop this end run around the constitution.
They really are the heroes of digital time. And they stayed true to their mission amidst the woke wave other organizations have been swayed with.
Soon as I'm actually making money again, they'll get some.
Nothing looks particularly nefarious.
Further, I happen to monitor corporate funding to nonprofits (including the EFF) and public reporting suggests EFF only received $7500 from Google in 2018 and $25K from Facebook.
Whereas Center for Democracy and Technology, which was founded by the former Executive Director of the EFF in 1994, received $430K and $500K, respectively.
See https://news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/face...
Add up all the money they’ve accepted from these types of companies over the last 10 years. They shouldn’t be accepting $1 from Google.
Of course I agree that these orgs shouldn't accept money from tech giants, but any critique should be done accurately with citations.
But that's the thing, its not correct. You stated the EFF has accepted millions from Facebook and Google, as in multiple millions of dollars. $478k is significantly less than multiple millions. Its over a million dollars away from being correct.
The larger point is also unequivocally proved: the EFF has massive conflicts of interest that it apparently thinks are fine, which makes it untrustworthy. If they accepted $100,000 from Google that would be just as much of a problem — it’s a huge amount of money. Extrapolating out from the sample data that’s easy to find, it does look like millions. If you want to conduct some in-depth research to prove that wrong please do, I’d be interested to see a full qualification for their horrible conflict of interest.
Have you? You've provided evidence for less than half a million, yet you claim its at least $2M.
I do agree IMO they really shouldn't accept much money but you're claiming you've shared proof they've received multiple millions and yet you've only shared proof for less than half of that.
If I gave someone $1 today, $10 the next day, and $100 the day after, would you then assume at the end of the year I gave the person hundreds of millions of dollars? Clearly I'm increasing this by 10x every day, so obviously this should continue in perpituity, right? Or maybe these were three one-off things, and it would take further analysis to determine I only actually made these three contributions?
I don't know the EFF took millions from Facebook and Google. They might have! But the data given doesn't prove it, and extrapolating it is only a little less crazy than the extrapolation above. There's guesses, and there's facts.
“ Over the past years, EFF has taken millions in funds from Google and Facebook via straight donations and controversial court payouts that many see as under-the-radar contributions. Hell, Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s foundation gave EFF at least $1.2 million.” You can argue with that guy about his sources too. He’s also making an even bigger claim since I wasn’t limiting my assessment to those two companies.
Happen to know of a source for Yasha's claim?
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/472...
I don’t really understand why the species should put its faith in industrialist billionaires given the history.
We also need privacy protections so these companies wouldn’t exist in the first place.
The real solution is to not allow the data to be sold to anyone.
The idea that businesses (whether public or private) can't hurt me or my family is absurd.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher-Price#Rock_'n_Play_reca...
[2] https://www.consumerreports.org/water-contamination/how-frac...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family#Opioid_lawsuits
If the state actually managed to monopolize all violence that would be much better than what we have in practice, with plenty of non-state violence in addition to that instigated by the state, though calling any aggressive use of violence "legitimate" would remain a travesty.
Actually they do. See this for just one of the many ways they have that power:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/12/21/teen-dies-hours-after...
Statistically zero people make any effort, other than maybe saying the government should limit government data mining. Here is an idea, turn off mobile phone location tracking this weekend.
What, exactly, do you mean by "mobile phone location tracking"?
Your phone provider needs to be able to locate your device to provide voice and data services. You'd need to remove your battery to disable that "phone location tracking." In which case, it's just a lump of glass and plastic. Which might make a good paperweight.
As for "location services" and GPS, I never turn those on.
As I said, the data shouldn't be collected -- at all. That's a regulatory issue, not a technical one.
Making transactions (and even paying informants for information) are and should be within the power of the government.
Unlike private actors, governmental actors are publicly constrained in their actions and representatives of the will of our society.
If someone volunteers information, it is not a "circumvention" of the subpoena.
Breaking into Google and stealing information for a criminal investigation would be circumventing it.
Irrelevant. Gov wants data, Gov gets a narrowly targeted warrant first. Beyond this lies 4A violations.
No? What are you basing this off of?
Exclusively? That's a novel interpretation of 4A. Where did you get it?
I don't think there's any landmark decision contrary to the interpretation of 4A that I'm putting forth.
As it stands now, the interpretation I am putting forth is the one the government abides by - it can buy data from brokers without warrant if there is no compulsion.
There are tons of case law that have interpreted 4A out to it's currently upheld boundaries - boundaries that aren't well represented by the original wording.
> the interpretation I am putting forth is the one the government abides by - it can buy data from brokers without warrant if there is no compulsion.
You can believe that if you choose. It is curious tho, why you feel a compulsion to keep roping compulsion into it.
Because that is where the current boundaries are at? That is the DHS/DOJs interpretation of 4A, and so far there has not been any successful court challenge of it.
I don't think it is legal for banks to sell their balance information to other private entities either. But if it were, then I think it would be permissible for the government to be one of the buyers.
Your interpretation of 4A is not backed by any legal precedent.
Let's be realistic here.
They'll need a warrant for a wiretap, but tracing contact graph has been open season for as long as I've been around.
Are you aware of the term 'unelected bureaucrat', and do you know how many of them exist? They are accountable to no one. They continually prove to be significant problems.
Also, POTUS is in charge of most federal law enforcement agencies. So it might be possible to handle this at a federal level through an executive order. Obviously, this doesn't have the staying power of a proper law, but it's something.
It isn't unambiguous, though. It isn't hard to see how a lawyer could point out that "and to forever secure the people, their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against all unreasonable searches and seizures under the guise of law" says nothing about purchasing data from a 3rd party. This wasn't really something that would have come up in the 18th century.
Extending the letter to match the spirit is why reflection is built into the runtime of the current constitution.
They wouldn't go for a sensible modern reading but instead stick to gospel like dogma on how it was intended to be read 250 years ago I guess.
Purchasing "data" from a 3rd party is a modern Internet spin, but it's not like the concept is brand new to the law or the legal department.
In all likelihood, the amendments text would look something like:
> Section 1: The fourth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby extended to include information or detail held, owned, or otherwise under the custody of those other than the accused.
> Section 2: The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Which then necessitates some accompanying legislation to further clarify. But I'm pretty confident we can get there through legislation alone.
Sure, you’re probably right that it’d be more airtight. It’d also mean an almost herculean effort. It’s probably best to explore other options as well.
While there was issues that got escalated in the past - there was literally civil war over one, the data shows that amount of legislation passed has slowed down considerably recently.
If that's a comment about the bureaucracy working slowly as hell, that is reasonable. If it's about the makeup of the court, I disagree.
Kavanaugh and especially Gorsuch are two you want on the court in this case.
If you don’t put it into law/constitution then a new set of justices could reverse the ruling in the future.
What makes you say that? From what I can tell, Gorsuch doesn't seem keen on limiting law enforcement powers at all. Kavanaugh is a bit of a wild card, but I'd be curious to hear times when he's agreed on limited police powers.
> The new rule the Court seems to formulate puts needed, reasonable, accepted, lawful, and congressionally authorized criminal investigations at serious risk in serious cases, often when law enforcement seeks to prevent the threat of violent crimes. And it places undue restrictions on the lawful and necessary enforcement powers exercised not only by the Federal Government, but also by law enforcement in every State and locality throughout the Nation.
However, no one has gone as far as Utah in requiring warrants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
https://www.wired.com/story/utah-digital-privacy-legislation...
1. If Bob is selling data that he legally obtained about Alice and legally can sell, it is a search if the government buys that data from Bob, and
2. If the government interviews Bob and Bob gives them data about Alice, it is not a search.
I'm failing to see the distinction you are making.
Users must sign a consent statement to a terms of services agreement. That is a voluntary action where users erode their own privacy protections and surrender their contributions. Anything that happens later is completely incidental and solely between the data owner (which is not the user) and the third party.
This has been the case for decades. I remember before the internet publishers selling their users subscription and preference data to solicitors. People don’t gain new privacy protections where they never existed prior, especially if the absence of expectations is explicit and agreed upon by the user.
"Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Maybe it should be illegal?
Then Congress has to pass a law to make it illegal.
There’s obviously something very wrong here, but it’s a dead end to say no one can sell the government info about people. Need a different approach in the vein of outlawing crazy TOSs, keeping user ownership of their data even if used to make a service operate, right to be forgotten, etc.
Telcos are exempt for exactly the reason you mention: phones are really important to daily life and they collect tons of sensitive data as a side effect of normal use.
IMO this is one of the more viable routes to getting this behavior changed: expand Third Party Doctrine exemptions to a lot more services, but to do that we’d have to confront just how much data we’re choosing to share, and whether we’re actually choosing to share it.
Without data protection laws that data isn't your private data, that data is the company's data. And you are free to do whatever you want with your data, and since the company owns this data the company can sell it to the government, it doesn't matter if you consider it to be your private data the company still owns it. Europe has GDPR which clarifies this, the data is yours even if it is stored on company servers, I'm not aware of USA having anything similar except for health data.
So to me it sounds like you'd want USA to create something akin to GDPR.
Or maybe it's not, and we need new legislation specifically targeting this. That's where the Supreme Court comes in: their raison d'être is to resolve ambiguities in existing law.
Got any precedents for this? All examples given in this thread was about the government forcing companies to hand over data, not companies just plain selling it to the government. These companies are already selling this data to other companies, like credit score companies gets a lot of data from banks, so to them selling it to the government as well is just another buyer. Does the fourth amendment really apply to cases like this? My hunch is that it does not, and you wont find any such cases since it is so clear that it doesn't apply that it hasn't even reached a court.
The better solution would be to have laws legislated. However, unfortunately, there is so much gridlock because congress members are just chasing after Ws for their respective parties and minimizing Ls.
1. The data is not yours. It’s the company’s 2. The government is not “search or seizing” the data, they are purchasing it or a license to it. 3. The company is selling it voluntarily, the government is not compelling it.
The fourth does not apply.
It requires searches and seizures to be reasonable.
It also creates requirements for the basis of any warrants that are issued.
It is a series of Supreme Court rulings that infers a general warrant requirement with some exceptions from that text.
A person cannot sell themselves into slavery. Yet we allow the US government to endorse indentured servitude for immigrant labor, because corporations want indentured servitude.
Nor can a US citizen sign away workplace safety rights, legally. Yet we allow US construction companies to rampantly hire off-the-books undocumented labor so that they can freely ignore workplace safety rights, since no one will exist to make claims against them.
It would have been perfectly reasonable for a court to broadly ban surveillance of individuals by telecom companies back in the 1990s, based on the same principles that those courts have willfully violated on behalf of corporations in the other examples above.
Therefore, arguing precedent and consistency is relatively pointless. My point was an exercise in "anything goes, so make the law fit the argument." That's what Chevron would do.
In other words: What's the desired outcome? That corporations cannot wantonly create mass surveillance any more than the government can. So make the law fit the desired reality: extend the 4th amendment to say that privacy is a basic human right and people cannot contractually sign it away any more than they can contractually sign away themselves into forced labor. A clever judge could outlaw H1 visas in the same ruling and get 2 birds with 1 stone.
That’s the key here - these companies are already selling this information. The govt is just saying “cool, we’ll buy it too”.
I'm not going to pretend to know what the ruling would/should be according to the 4th amendment, though.
> Do you really want five unelected, unaccountable lawyers deciding this matter?
No but that's what happens when Congress is so split right now.
Also please note-- and I should have made this note in my original post-- I'm. It saying people can avoid data acquisition by 3rd parties. Merely that users frequently give away far, far more than they have to: whenever they install an app that asks for more permission than necessary to function. Whenever they agree to the popup in browsers that as for access to location data or to receive notifications from the site. (I say something about cookies and JavaScript, but many sites are useless without JavaScript and navigating the dark patterns for those sites that allow cookie preferences is ridiculous. A good ad blocker will at least catch some of that though./
It either shouldn't be collected or if it is then the sale should be prohibited.
The data broker selling your information is not committing a crime, so the situation is not at all comparable.
People say they want privacy, but people say a lot of things they don't mean. Instead I look at their actions. No one's willing to inconvenience themselves even slightly for privacy.
Where can you buy a SIM card with cash and not have to show any ID? And for bonus points: where you will also not be recorded on CCTV doing so.
>where you will also not be recorded on CCTV doing so
This begs the question on whether you are trying to avoid automated surveillance and correlation or whether you are trying to out-do Usama bin Laden at competitive hide and seek. The more important question is: how long is that CCTV data stored for?
The context of this story is data willingly given up by users through apps or websites that people give permission to use & resell. A decade ago or more there may have been more of an excuse for consumers: awareness of just what was tracked and how it was repackaged and sold on to other entities was not as well known. Now there is little excuse: If someone installs an app and hits "agree" to the data it wants to access, or clicks "okay" to the browser popups on sites that want their location, that's on them.
Data legally (if dubiously) collected explicitly for law enforcement purposes that still require a court order to access is a completely separate issue in terms of giving up 4th amendment rights.
Not sure how that exception is being handled in the Treasury case.
The easy way out would be to make such information not suitable as evidence. Perhaps exceptions will be made for cases when there's a clear risk to public safety. (such as prosecuting al capone)
Slavery itself is also somewhat of a special case because entering into a contract requires the ability for each party to seek redress or other appropriate methods of enforcement. But once a slave, all personal agency is lost and therefore the enslaved party is no longer on equal grounds with respect to having the contract honored. It is an inherently paradoxical contract.
Contrast this with selling your right to free speech with an NDA: you still have access to all the methods of enforcement and redress if disagreements about the terms arise while the contract is in effect.
The article specifically talks about apps as well, and that is a user choice. Web pages also ask for location data in popups: this can be denied to them, which limits (though only limit, not prevent) pinpoint location tracking. I never said all tracking can be prevented. I said that people give away their personal data. That is a true statement regardless of whether certain types of data are taken without their consent.
I think we're probably (mostly, or at least partly) on the same page here. But if you want to continue a discussion that's fine, but only if you review HN community guidelines on discourse and civility beforehand. Also not that I often go days without revisiting threads to see if further conversation on a topic would interest me, but I'll try to make a trip back to this one to check in.
I’m all for the 4th. But restraining law enforcement not to use public data?
Now should it be so easy to give up your rights to your data is a different question.
Legally, this is false, but obviously most people here would advocate for data ownership and control, even when it's transferred under a contract (regardless if it's via a checkbox, or signed and notarized).
Publish everything found, see if the laws are then changed...
Instead, collect it on every Congressperson and then see how fast things change. Most politicians don't have the means to scrub their backgrounds like multi-million dollar PR-vulnerable CEOs.
I don't imagine people with such amount of power and connections to just roll over because "they caught us with the hand in the cookie jar!"
I have serious doubts about this.
As of 2011, the average Senator had a net worth of $14 million and the average Representative had a net worth of $6.5 million.
Presumably it has only gone up in the decade since, given the long bull market in everything.
https://ballotpedia.org/Net_worth_of_United_States_Senators_...
I think a generation of people who believe the former statement have taken control of institutions, and we're watching it play out now. If you want to predict what this generation of bureaucracy will do, find the emergency exceptions and notwithstanding discretion to every law that protects the individual and limits the power of government, and then contrive the excuse that enables it, and this will be the policy and tactics of the people behind it. This Treasury collecting data story isn't about legalisms and principles, the people doing it really are nihilists, where language itself is just words that can mean anything, so it might as well mean whatever they want. Arguing under the false belief that principles and logic matters means doing nothing while they ratchet up controls and make themselves impossible to dislodge.
You aren't going to persuade the Treasury or other people involved in these plays with reason, as the prospect of total, permanent, tech-facilitated dominion means the stakes are too high for them not to make a play for it. Only the courts, or sadly, conflict can dislodge it I think. We need to seriously consider how much tech is causing our governments to metastasize, and what the options for mitigating it are.
There is no reason to believe your phone that tracks everything about you will not be used by people in government without accountability as leverage against you personally. This was paranoid ranting 20 years ago, and today it's just unpopular buzzkill. All that's left is to say "it was ever thus" and the only people who complained were the ones merely maladapted to the change and the inevitable progress of history.
I have one small revision: There is no reason to believe your phone that tracks everything about you will not be used by people without accountability as leverage against you personally.
The difference is that the government is, in some sense, unaccountable by fiat. At least with private actors we can have the possibility of accountability through legal recourse.
Steps:
* Allow (and encourage) private sector monopolies to form
* Use its leverage and influence to "encourage" those monopolies to do things which the US government is not allowed to do (examples: censorship, data collection)
The list of First Amendment precedents, for example, with respect to the government is long and detailed. On the other hand, private companies operate under fewer restrictions and can act much more freely.
So if we have a situation where there are a small number of monopolies and they, through personal relationships (marriage), lobbying, and the revolving door have a cozy relationship with the US government, then the government can effectively censor (for example) by more or less declaring "will no one rid me of these turbulent tweets" and have the monopolies jump to comply (or face increased risk of antitrust action for example).
This is a win-win for both: the monopolies avoid antitrust and other unwanted regulation by playing ball, and the government gets to ignore the Bill of Rights by "outsourcing" actions to what are in effect de facto quasi-governmental entities. It's only a loss for the people for whom the Bill of Rights was written to protect.
b) Finding evaders of sanctions seems like it should fall under a national security agency's purvue. We all take it for granted that the NSA could pinpoint our locations pretty easily, right? One thing that's particularly insane about the US government is how many departments have intelligence agencies. Obviously the ideal would be to have a small handful of well regulated intelligence agencies (emphasis on "well regulated", and you only have to look at the overreach by e.g. the CIA over the past 50 years to know that the US has had issues with that.)
c) The tax evasion contract looks at social media posts to find tax evaders. I wouldn't be particularly upset if the IRS had their own internal tech department doing this - if you're going to have a tax agency, you want it to be able to prevent cheating, otherwise the tax system falls apart. Finding people who have declared themselves to have beaten the system in a public forum is a cheap and easy way to go after cheaters.
There's a lot of pork in contracts that government agencies give out to private contractors, but this seems like a relatively low spend, and so it doesn't seem particularly bad that the IRS has decided that this is outside of their current expertise and given out a contract to chase it.
In the same way we take it for granted that a SWAT team could kill any of us pretty easily. They have (and probably should have) the ability, but the authority to use it should be very limited and subject to stringent oversight.
Sanctions are kind of like the tax agency situation - if you're going to wield them as a national security tool, then you want to be able to enforce them, otherwise they're relatively meaningless. And enforcing them necessarily involves watching to see if your country's citizens are evading them.
The type of oversight applied to military and foreign intelligence action is fundamentally political. Whether and how to impose sanctions against, spy on, or invade another country are questions for congress and the president in the US and rarely involve the courts.
The type of oversight applied to law enforcement is fundamentally legal. Courts apply existing law to the set of facts in a given case. Congress and the president do not get involved directly and any attempt by political officials to influence the outcome is scandalous, if not criminal.
So should the NSA hack Iran's immigration database to see who's been going there? Perhaps. Should anything discovered that way be admissible in a criminal trial? Almost certainly not. Should the NSA tip off the FBI about domestic crimes? Mostly no, I think, but perhaps in a very limited fashion when the crimes involve national security or foreign policy. Gathering evidence that can be used in a criminal trial would still be the responsibility of the FBI.
The original author said: "I don't want the NSA to perform domestic civilian law enforcement functions"
In other words, the FBI (and police, etc) perform domestic law enforcement, following criminal procedure. The NSA, CIA, etc handle non-domestic (foreign) threats, in whatever manner they see fit.
Really cannot trust centralized entities with the incentives in place now.
My understanding was that if a company has my personal data and is selling it, the CCPA requires that they allow me to put in a request to access that data or delete it. Babel Street seems to be saying that it's their customers who needs to follow these requirements not them.
Is this legit? Tons of other big sketchy personal data brokers actually allow you to access and delete your data under the CCPA even though they have the same customer arrangement. Acxiom for example: https://www.acxiom.com/data-privacy-ethics/california-consum...
> Data brokers are subject to the CCPA. On the Data Broker Registry website, you will find contact information and a website link for each registered data broker, as well as additional information to help you exercise your CCPA rights.
So by not allowing me to access and delete my data on Babel Street, it seems like they are in violation of the CCPA? What’s my recourse?
Anyone interested in privacy who can claim California residency should be interested too!
Our data is worth $,$$$,$$$,$$$'s and it's time we campaigned to get paid. It's time we change privacy laws worldwide to make violations of individual privacy worth 30% of a company's gross income for 5 years. If the penalty is large enough, they'll stop screwing us.
We can't send a company to prison, but we sure as hell can take that prison tax right off the top of their bottom line. Hell 30% gross profits for 5 years is probably not even enough, but it's a good damn start
I wish there was the ability to make a poll:
* This is fine, privacy is dead.
* This is okay because of private companies collecting and selling the data, even to the government
* This is okay because the government is using this data to enforce laws I believe in, even though it rewards private data merchants.
* Everyone involved is evil, the contracts should be voided and the companies dissolved.
* The data collection is fine, but the government shouldn't be allowed to circumvent checks and balances by buying this data
* The government using such data without warrant is fine, but it shouldn't be sold on the open market
People are much more complex than a single choice.
Second, while I might think the action is “not okay”, they might be reasoning from different principles, or different evidence than I am. Maybe, instead of being complicit in something I view as “not okay”, they have valid reasons to think it’s “okay”.
I’m just not so willing to condemn every person with such a broad brush just because I disagree on this conclusion.
The most obvious answer would be that they're spending our money in a way which is contrary to our interests. If it were their own funds, and they had no powers beyond those of any other private citizen or organization, that would be one thing. But they're supposed to be acting on our behalf, in our interests rather than their own, and to many people this does not qualify.
Personally I would focus less on the fact that they've obtained this information and more on (a) the fact that this information is available on the market and (b) how they (and others) intend to use it.
Politics in America has become so hostile that people are now openly celebrating harm done to "the other side", so I don't doubt that there are people who will feel that way.
But I suspect that most of them will feel quite differently when the White House is controlled by the other party.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb...
Interesting. Clearly data analysis can find all the tax dodgers, but is that an unreasonable search?
I also see lots of talk in the comments about a social credit and hiring potential. There are no restrictions on hiring software developers. As horrible as a social credit sounds at least its some kind of guardrails, where now there are none. In any system without constraints there is maximum potential for implicit bias.
I'm shocked and amazed by how much of this stuff more and more people are not only content to ignore, but defend!
9/11 opened more of a pandoras box than anyone could have ever imagined. Our concerns back then now seem quaint compared to the stuff that is going on right now with many of our government institutions :(
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_Nation
That is, once data is on the open market (including at dark web) then a gov acquiring it is a click or two away.
Seems kinda convenient we get our nice exciting "adversarial" article about this four days /after/ the infrastructure bill passes and we are locked in to have tons of new bank surveillance and like 80,000 new IRS agents...
Social credit score is about how close you hew to proscribed behavior at large.
In the US, fines are mostly meaningless if you are poor as debtor prisons are (rightfully) illegal.
You're overwhelmingly correct, however someone is going to shortly reply to your comment with a link to a story about how someone somewhere got jailed over a debt and how debtor prisons are making a comeback. It's extraordinarily rare in the US.
Worst case scenario, even in a city, you could sublet or get roommates while you rebuild your credit.
I suspect you are right. I walk down my block and every other building is owned by the same slumlord. It is bad.
I don't care for the credit companies, they're total scum. But I'm not sure how to do anything better.
When I graduated, rented, and paid all my student loans off early and did not have a credit card my credit score actually went down significantly until I opened credit cards and used them regularly.
Most folks in US can’t even afford a $400 emergency expense. Good luck doing even that when your credit is maxed out and your car breaks down so you can’t work.
>> Most folks in US can’t even afford a $400 emergency expense.
It looks like they can, and fortunately the number of people in poverty continues to decline: https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/average-american...
They’d much rather teach them activism than actually give them useful tools for evaluating their finances and making good decisions.
This is a great primer for those completely unfamiliar: https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465...
Turns out, a lot of "bad" actions result in missed bill payments.
It used to be the merchant had to know you and you had to build up your credit with each merchant over time. Credit scoring made it easier for merchants and customers to issue and leverage we credit.
They absolutely solve the problem that you are pointing out. But they also serve to kind of solve a whole class of other problems around identifying behaviors that correlate with bad credit scores.
For example, if you're a land lord who vehemently opposes divorce, it's possible to use a poor credit score as cover to deny renting to this middle-aged guy who is clearly just gone through one.
Sure credit scores aren’t perfect but they are better than the legacy alternative.
What was the option for what? You're replying to a post about discriminating against a divorcee, but having the landlord hide it behind the justification of "bad credit".
Not to be the missing antecedent police, but are you referring to by 'ther option' the pre-existing excuse to paper over arbitrary discrimination, or to practice of lending/renting in general?
The answer is sadly important to the final assessment of meaning. I don't think you mean the former, but I figured I'd be daft and ask.
What do you suppose is a better tool you have or would build which hides this person’s history but can vouch for their creditworthiness or lack of it?
I'm still lost on the part where we're stuck on having to be able to lookup a datastore managed by some private party in order to facilitate these arrangements?
I have no interest in perpetuating the credit bureau system. If you're convinced that it's some priceless fixture we must have, then we can talk about setting up a public Bureau; with strict regulations around what type of information they collect, how it is used, how it is dispensed, etc, security measures around its access, but most importantly, synchronous notification of the reported on by the Bureau, with services provided to the notified to aid in prompt remedy, or failing that a means dispute or correct fraudulent information.
Other than that, I object vehemently to these types of datastores. Welcome to investing. Them's the risks.
I've worked in finance. Finance for its own sake is not high on my list of things to facilitate. I also prefer discriminatory people be required to appear discriminatory.
Looks at the how Japan handles apartment credit. It's a different system but in my estimation its a worse answer than Credit Bureaus are.
We are already there.
Currently saying "Lets Go Brandon" doesn't drop your credit score, in China you may lose quite a few points for posting that pesky bear that likes honey.
Again, we are already there.
I was arrested once and I got the charge expunged with community service. Hasn't affected my job applications so far.
They may be too busy with genocide though.
Second thing : "Credit score is really important".
China's social credit system allegedly assigns (or will assign?) all citizens scores and punishes them for social wrongdoings. The IRS has always been tasked with auditing and catching tax cheats, the Treasury always went after people who violate economic sanctions. What's the similarity other than data collection?
You start with the little. Due to complexity and sheer amounts of laws, bylaws etc. each one of us breaks few of those every day. The systems like the one being mentioned will eventually be able to track those as well making every citizen an offender. Then when the time comes who do you thing they will choose to prosecute? Most likely those pesky human rights advocates and other similar people who are already monitored.
I think unless some "Reset" button is pushed we will end up exactly like this. End up on various lists (already happening) and private companies denying vital services.
In the west these things aren't public so it isn't the government grading you - but you still are very much being graded by private corporations. Since we have no idea what they're actually using to grade us we can't confidently say they aren't using any "social misbehavior" we'd find offensive.
If these programs were run by the government we could file FOIA requests - but with private organizations we're S.O.L.
If you want a taste of low social credit score in the US life, consider the status of a convicted felon, or a status of a sex offender.
Is it possible to do any of those things without money?
Wasn't there some kerfuffle a few years ago about "special attention" being given to political targets?
(Cue Richelieu's "six lines")
What you describe is something that is often said, but I'm yet to see any reliable sources; everything turns out to be editorials based on some plans that never got implemented.
If the IRS is going to start telling people they aren't allowed to ride trains or get on airplanes because they applied a deduction to their taxes in a way that's not allowed, then we should worry; that sounds like the China-style social credit system people talk about. But I don't see that as being realistic; the IRS doesn't have that kind of power.
Conservative press is abuzz with this (including photos of the promo leaflet), liberal press is dead silent. Since nobody on this site will believe a conservative news source, I'm not even going to bother providing a link. If you're in Utah, ask your local government to put an end to this horseshit before it's too late.
The national security and surveillance state is as bipartisan as putting economic sanctions on poor Latin American countries, arming proxies, funding NGO fronts and bombing countries.