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Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

It's not that the US won't have social credit scores... they just will be privatized and opaque.

Kind of like the credit scores we already have.

Oh I'm sorry you're on the Moody's blacklist, there's nothing we can do. Corporate policy, we can't make exceptions, maybe try somewhere else.

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I would prefer privatized credit scores to centrally controlled. I would prefer i was on one bad person list as opposed to the only bad person list.

This coordination already exists on some level. If you rip off a hotel they may inform their competitors and share information. Generally they don't care so much about tweets or politics as they are just trying to run a business. But if it was state controlled it runs the risk of beung used as a tool to suppress dissent or wrong think.

Large tech unicorns like social media are kind of inbetween state actors and private businesses as we have seen from the high amount of communication between state actors and these businesses

Why are you splitting hairs? If you're choosing between the two you've lost.

I like having a reputation. I pay my bills on time and im happy for my creditors to share that fact to others. Similarly i don't trash hotel rooms, get into fights or engage in other antisocial behavior. A reputation make things easier as service providers can focus efforts on higher risk individuals

I do have a problem if I get thrown on a general bad person list based on something unrelated (e.g. criticized [politician]) or the state telling private parties they should not associate with me for whatever reason

You like sharing that you’re a reliable citizen with anyone. You (presumably) don’t like sharing every bit of information that goes into making that assessment, such as what you buy, when you sleep, where you go, how your heart rate fluctuates, whom you interact with.

What’s missing, in my opinion, is being able to prove that you have a good credit rating without revealing your bank statement. That your life insurance should be cheap because you live a healthy, low-risk life without revealing biometrics. That your car insurance should be low because not only did you never have an accident, you never break suddenly or travel near where accidents happen, but without revealing GPS or acceleration data.

And so on.

Zero-knowledge cryptography is not mainstream. I hope it will be.

To concur: We have been living with private, decentralized social credit scores of varying sizes for most of our social history. Imagine you are asked for a $1000 loan from: a family member/a good friend/an acquaintance/a total stranger. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with being selective.

These only get scary when they are centralized. You can live without Airbnb. A government-mandated no-sleep list would be life changing.

Agree. The other upside of private companies doing it is that they might shoot themselves in the foot if their business interests misalign with their "credit scoring" ones, and intuition shows the former will take precedence and subsume the latter. That is, Airbnb might find the limits of its own risk-scoring scope when normal people will get upset and not be able to consume their product, which has happened quite a bit already. The cool thing is that in a place like the US, the open market will then adjust itself and propose a new competitor which will happily take Airbnb-banned users.

> It's not that the US won't have social credit scores... they just will be privatized and opaque.

We already have a social credit score and it's privatized now. It's background checks.

From the story:

> While she does not have a criminal record, her boyfriend does, she said, telling Motherboard it was “a white collar charge,” though she did not go into specifics.

I find it a bit odd to let private companies do background checks when this really seems more of a function of government where as a society we can have input and reform the process.

In some European countries, people don't have credit scores, but when they're applying for a mortgage, they also need a collateral which costs about the same as the house or apartment they're trying to buy.

I'd rather have credit scores, tbh.

Yeah, and basically Americans can purchase so much more on credit, and Europeans complain they can't buy shit.

Yet somehow the mortgage and lending industry manages to exist in Europe despite lack of a credit score.

[citation needed]; which countries? Obviously a 100% deposit is an exaggeration, and 5-10% more normal depending on the market, so what's the true deposit number?

That collateral is usually the house or apartment that your are trying to buy. You can use something else, if you want, but usually it is the thing you buy.

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