This reminds me of an old (apocryphal?) story about someone who ended up mailing back a bunch of misaddressed email with "DECEASED" on it and causing major issues for someone. I cannot remember where I read this first.
After buying our house, we kept getting important official mail from some governemental org, concerning not the previous owner, but some completely different guy, we dont even know who. We always sent it back noting wrong address, and they kept sending it right back to us. We started to get 4 or 5 of these letters each week. One day I got sick of it and wrote 'Has been swallowed alive by crocodile' on one of these. Someone took notice, presumably, as the mail stopped.
My somewhat spotty knowledge of law in an alternate universe spun from merging film noir and the Marx brothers tells me that a dead man can't be convicted of bank robbery.
It's something that sounds like a great twist in a drama. The bad guy looks on in horror as he realizes that the people who he's been maliciously declaring dead so that he can steal from them are also immune from legal consequences from taking revenge.
Of course in real life I bet they "realize" you're alive all of a sudden.
Which does make me wonder if that's not a legitimate way to "come back to life". Like if you commit a small crime are they just going to consider you a John Doe or kick you out of the country? Or are they going to do the leg work to declare you alive?
Or for that matter, maybe you can just turn yourself into the IRS for evading taxes. Would that make things better or worse?
I think you're assuming the system has more consistency than it does.
That is, there's no inherent reason the system must have a consistent view of you as alive or dead, so the reasonable conclusion is that it won't, so you'll be alive to the parts of it responsible for punishing you, but dead to the parts of it you want to be alive to. After all, the jail won't burn down because it's holding a person some government database considers to be dead.
However, I'm wondering if you can't bring things into alignment. Like, if the IRS wants to get money from you, then all of your financial parts of you need to be considered alive. And maybe that's good enough.
Or maybe you could commit libel or slander or copyright infringement such that people will want to sue you for damages, but you're not legally able to lose money because you can't legally hold money.
And from that perspective ... maybe people could pay you to commit slander or copy right infringement and then you can live off of that money until someone shows up who is willing to do the leg work to bring you financially back from the dead so that they can successfully sue you for damages.
Really this is more of a thought experiment though. Like, obviously the government could bring you back if they really wanted to. It's just that they don't really want to because it's too much work for somebody. And it's sad that there probably does exist a crime/civil violation that you could commit such that suddenly it's worth someone's effort to bring you back.
On a more local front, a friends social security card lists him as female.
After a months effort he finally gave up on correcting it.
Heck my owns wife’s birthday is wrong. By a few days. We inquired about it and
were told to just go with it. Multiple years of effort would be required to fix it.
My surname has two common spellings, and I've learned that it's easier to just accept the misspellings, as I have valid govt id with both spellings on it (my drivers license says one, my passport says the other). I've tried to fix it repeatedly but never managed to...
Whatever I want - because I have multiple documented uses pretty much just everyone is ok with it - its also clear that the multiple spellings (in my case) are from an Ellis Island-esque change to the name.
hah, I'm with you there. My surname's probably evident from my username. The more common variation has two L's. All was well until I moved to Ireland, where no matter how many times I tell them, they spell it with two L's.
I even got in an argument getting my public service card issued, where she told me quite sternly "It has to match your birth certificate". Except I've seen my birth certificate and she hasn't.
So the taxman, drivers licence, public service cards all have one spelling. And my passport has the correct one. I'm not entirely sure if I'm two people or not.
My birth cert has the "wrong" one, my passport has the correct one, and my drivers license was based on my birth cert, so it has the "wrong one". I've got an mac/mc in my name, _and_ a space. The frustrating one is when opening bank accounts and they want 2 forms of ID (passport/drivers license) for ID/address verification, and the names don't match...
My wife took her maiden name as her new middle name and my last name after we married. Different databases and documents have her with her old middle name, new middle name, or her middle initial (unchanged).
I always have to verify which document she'll be showing at the airport when buying airline tickets (in the before times, anyway).
My grandmother has a double-barrelled surname (Forename name1-name2), and it seems to be entirely random whether she gets name1-name2, name1name2, name1 name2, just name2, or on a few occasions name1/name2 from various companies.
> Heck my owns wife’s birthday is wrong. By a few days. We inquired about it and were told to just go with it. Multiple years of effort would be required to fix it.
The US Social Security Administration? It took me years to get the IRS to tell me why they were rejecting my electronic tax return filings. Once I found out it was the birthdate on file with the SSA, it took less than 5 minutes to fix at the SSA office in the nearest federal building (which was conveniently across the street from my work office at the time). Perhaps it is very challenging or impossible at the benefits offices that are in just about every city and town across the US. If you don't live in a big city with a complex of federal offices, maybe next time you go to one bring along a bunch of documents and get it done.
Its interesting, because I got the impression that unlike a lot of Federal offices, the Social Security Administration doesn't automatically thing they're right. They are touchy if money is involved, but basic fact correction seems to work fine in person if you bring the basic documents with you.
There are hundreds of thousands of living Americans older than the SSA! Think about all the people that never had birth certificates because they were born at home or in a poor rural hospital, or the side of a road, etc. My sister's "official" birth certificate is a letter from the US embassy (in a country that no longer exists), telling the state department of the birth of a US citizen abroad, to an active duty serviceman.
There were also some exemptions for the need for social security numbers so it's possible they could need one at some point.
(from memory this only applies to grandfather in groups like the Amish who are also required to provide their own form of 'definitely-not-social-security')
> Automation is not a good thing when it comes to credit reporting
I only agree in the sense that there are no good things when it comes to consumer credit reporting in the United States. This is just an example of systemic problems that can and should be solved by increased automation and removing humans from the process.
There's not a ton of reasons that setting isDead = false in a table somewhere shouldn't "just work" other than too much human intervention in the processes of evaluating credit, reporting it to stake holders, and keeping information in sync.
>There's not a ton of reasons that setting isDead = false in a table somewhere shouldn't "just work" other than too much human intervention in the processes of evaluating credit, reporting it to stake holders, and keeping information in sync.
Someone has to verify that the person is in fact alive. And not, for example, their meth addicted grandson trying to get their social security checks. The difficulty isn't in setting the flag but in proving that the flag should be set.
> This is just an example of systemic problems that can and should be solved by increased automation and removing humans from the process
I've seen this pattern fail too many times to take it seriously anymore. Programmers (myself included) tend to rather drastically underestimate the likelihood that data can end up in an error state.
Humans make more mistakes, to be sure, but they can also sensibly correct mistakes when they discover them (or have them reported). Automated systems make fewer errors but once they do, the problem can be nigh irresolvable. Just look at the endless trouble we read about every few weeks from people who get their Google accounts suspended. Those people are suspended incorrectly by automated systems, and the widely-responded best recourse is to be well-enough connected to be able to get a human who works for Google to bat for you.
Machines are great for increasing scale, but they are terrible for handling edge cases. If edge cases are important to your system, you need humans deeply involved.
More specifically here the humans in the process are the credit reporting agencies, which shouldn't exist at all and neither should systems to keep them up to date.
I've also seen automation fail spectacularly because of inconceivable edge cases during design. Almost universally it's because the process being automated was originally human, and the conceptual model of an automated process is as a human that doesn't sleep. If there's friction to structurally altering the process so it can be automated - including restricting the input data and output conditions - then you're going to see spectacular failures.
Automation isn't perfect but it really falls over when the stakeholders don't understand that it isn't perfect and the process needs to be altered for the project to succeed.
Why should there be no credit reporting agencies? Should everyone get the same mediocre credit limits/interest rates/etc instead of responsible borrowers being rewarded?
An unaccountable private enterprise should not have access to my financial information, let alone three of them. I feel that's the domain of a governmental agency with far less access to information and is or far more regulated than the existing bureaus.
> Should everyone get the same mediocre credit limits/interest rates/etc instead of responsible borrowers being rewarded
No, but non-borrowers or low borrowers shouldn't be penalized when they do need credit. I'm not against credit reporting, I'm against the usage of my data against me by people that don't have an incentive to make sure its accurate and keep it secure.
Well you can accomplish you goal with out having the government service as a credit reporting agency. Which I absolutely do not trust the government to do.
What you really need is data ownership rights, this would allow you to tell a credit reporting agency to forget you, the consequence of that of course would be that you likely would have a hard time getting credit at all but it would be your choice.
Even today, for most data, you have given permission for the data to be shared with the credit reporting agencies, it is in the contract or agreement you sign when you open an account, take out a loan or consume other financial services.
>>I'm against the usage of my data against me by people that don't have an incentive to make sure its accurate and keep it secure.
I find it odd that you believe government would have incentive to make sure it is accurate and secure.
As most countries have a working person registry and identity theft is one of these problems rampant in the US and rare in other country's : Why not trust the governement?
While they are far from perfect, this article discusses the worst case behaviour of your governement, except it is unfixable. In another country, you go to the central registry to fix the root of the problem, and every other entity reads the fix.
The question is not if they are secure etc... The question is if they are worse than a cluster of unaccountable megacorps.
Financial Fraud in the US is not because we lack a national database, the US is a federalist society and I will resist any action to undo that federalism
Financial Fraud in the US is directly because of 2 things, first and foremost the backdoor use of SocSec as a national ID, something ti was never intended to be, and it not suited for.
This is largely due to taxation, and the IRS being lazy by adopting a persons SocSec number as their Tax identification number as well. Once that happened, every one jumped on board
The second fact is treating Financial Fraud as ID Theft, no one steals a persons ID, If someone fraudulently represents themselves to a bank as me and the bank falls for that well that should be on the bank, it should not be on me to prove my "identity was stolen", this reversal of liability is what prevent the problem of Financial Fraud from being fixed
> Programmers (myself included) tend to rather drastically underestimate the likelihood that data can end up in an error state.
Have you priced ECC DDR4 recently? That stuff is expensive.
What I find interesting is that the chances of a bit error is minute... but the number of bits in a common system is large. (Actually to a human mind I would say it is astronomically inconceivably large)
I first became aware that bit errors <=> memory size were colliding when I heard about large sun systems were doing something called memory scrubbing.
Yeah. ZFS on modern systems schedules a complete read and “resilver” once a month. This is an aggressive schedule - But only “Probably”. I’m of the opinion that if you don’t have the capability of rereading 100% and rewriting 1% of your entire “cold” dataset every week, your data is already lost.
Flash’s failure mode is generally better than spinning disk, in that complete drive failure (from head crash) is rarer and bad sectors, while technically “more common” on flash, are immensely predictable (X writes, +/- a few %) whereas on hard drives they’re fairly random. The real trick is that the forced exercise catches data errors (1 copy is missing/bad) long before they become corruptions (multiple copies are missing/bad). The bandwidth to read all of your flash disk in the space of a week is also much easier to come by, because flash has a much “better” ratio of bandwidth:storage size. The advice is very much rooted in being a “one size fits all” for both spinning rush and solid state - Spinning rust needs the checksums, flash can simply afford the waste.
I have for years tried to get programmers to understand why active controls in software are necessary
For to many times in LOB applications do I see error produced by users doing things "they were not suppose to do" or in an out of order manner or something like that
to many programmers go with the "well the user should not have done that" instead of understanding that their program should have never allowed the error in the first place.
Machine do as they are instructed by humans. Machines do not make mistakes, programmers do.
You can't possibly anticipate everything that the user might want to do. Sometimes it's better for the tool to empower the user than to be all "I'm sorry, I can't let you do that Dave".
> I only agree in the sense that there are no good things when it comes to consumer credit reporting in the United States. This is just an example of systemic problems that can and should be solved by increased automation and removing humans from the process.
I don't understand your comment. You seem to be saying that we should increase the amount arbitrary, opaque decision making that happens in consumer credit reporting, by increasing automation. Am I reading that correctly?
As for nothing being good about consumer credit reporting in the US, consider the old system what we have now replaced. It was all done on handshakes and personal references. That sounds really fair to poor people, doesn't it?
It would be great if banks and other financial institutions had to follow libel laws. Why isn't a bank stating that you're dead when you're clearly not a clear case of libel?
In a similar manner, most cases of what is called "identity theft" are really just bank libel: a bank mistaking you for someone else and making false statements about your credit worthiness or reassigning your assets.
And if you've had your identity stolen, the banks are the victim of that crime. You become the victim not from the thief's actions, but the actions of the banks and other institutions that were swindled by the criminal.
It is the bank's job to be doing due diligence and validating identities and authentication and authorizations(1), that is why they charge us for the privilege of keeping our money. They just figured it is cheaper to skip that validation and attempt to extort you for their losses caused by their incompetence.
In the US banks have managed to pass laws so they're entitled only to upsides of risk taking but pass on all downsides to customers and the public.
(1) standard security protocol stuff:
- identity: I am person X
- authentication: I prove that the person claiming to be X is actually X (in the US, this step is almost always skipped because, hey, they lobby government and you don't)
- authorization: the person that has been confirmed to be X has permissions to do the task they're attempting to do
I can add 3 EU countries I'm familiar with to the list of places where banks charge a fee for running an account. It's usually pretty low and waived for many groups (students, elderly, unemployed...), but still there. A non-trivial amout of course also comes from various service fees like ATM withdrawals, e-banking, various reports, etc., which is where I assume your bank makes its money.
My banks don't charge for any of those things either (Santander in the UK, SBanken in Norway). Santander does charge for unexpectedly going into the red I believe but SBanken just charges you interest on overdrafts up to 5000 NOK/ 500 EU). SBanken also makes a little money managing the little I have invested in funds.
Santander is making money out of me because I am resident in Norway it doesn't pay interest unless you are resident in the UK
Most banks in the US either charge a fee, or waive it if you have enough money in your account(s). That too is a fee, as the interest they pay on your money is many basis points lower than the interest they charge for lending your money to someone else.
In my opinion, anybody that thinks they have a bank account "for free" doesn't know how to read financial statements. Banks are not charities.
The reason is because of the "Fair Credit Reporting Act" of 1970 said that Credit Reporting Agencies (CRA) are not liable for any errors if they are not malicious. And the act preempts any State laws that might impose other more restrictive laws on CRAs.
From a short publication on the "Fair Credit Reporting Act":
"Defamation, privacy, and negligence claims. The FCRA specifically bars defamation, invasion of privacy, and negligence claims that concern the reporting of information from being brought against any CRA, any user of a consumer report, or any furnisher of reported information, except for false information furnished with malice or willfully intended to injure the consumer (15 U.S.C. § 1681h(e); see, for example, Thornton v. Equifax, Inc., 619 F.2d 700, 703 (8th Cir. 1980)). For a state-law claim to stand under this provision, a defendant’s misconduct must be truly malicious and not simply careless (see Ross v. FDIC, 625 F.3d 808, 817 (4th Cir. 2010))."
The gist of it is that the customer says "this sounds like a bank robbery, not identity theft. I have my identity, but you don't have the money, so it sounds like they stole your money, not my identity".
On the subject of people being declared dead, there's a good defcon talk about abusing how easy it is to declare someone dead. "Chris Rock - I Will Kill You" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FdHq3WfJgs
58 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadOf course in real life I bet they "realize" you're alive all of a sudden.
Which does make me wonder if that's not a legitimate way to "come back to life". Like if you commit a small crime are they just going to consider you a John Doe or kick you out of the country? Or are they going to do the leg work to declare you alive?
Or for that matter, maybe you can just turn yourself into the IRS for evading taxes. Would that make things better or worse?
That is, there's no inherent reason the system must have a consistent view of you as alive or dead, so the reasonable conclusion is that it won't, so you'll be alive to the parts of it responsible for punishing you, but dead to the parts of it you want to be alive to. After all, the jail won't burn down because it's holding a person some government database considers to be dead.
However, I'm wondering if you can't bring things into alignment. Like, if the IRS wants to get money from you, then all of your financial parts of you need to be considered alive. And maybe that's good enough.
Or maybe you could commit libel or slander or copyright infringement such that people will want to sue you for damages, but you're not legally able to lose money because you can't legally hold money.
And from that perspective ... maybe people could pay you to commit slander or copy right infringement and then you can live off of that money until someone shows up who is willing to do the leg work to bring you financially back from the dead so that they can successfully sue you for damages.
Really this is more of a thought experiment though. Like, obviously the government could bring you back if they really wanted to. It's just that they don't really want to because it's too much work for somebody. And it's sad that there probably does exist a crime/civil violation that you could commit such that suddenly it's worth someone's effort to bring you back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man
Maybe they do like the movie Brazil when Jill was legally dead.
Apparently corruption is so bad you bribe a government official get someone declared dead.
There is no recourse for coming back to life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh_Association_of...
On a more local front, a friends social security card lists him as female. After a months effort he finally gave up on correcting it.
Heck my owns wife’s birthday is wrong. By a few days. We inquired about it and were told to just go with it. Multiple years of effort would be required to fix it.
I even got in an argument getting my public service card issued, where she told me quite sternly "It has to match your birth certificate". Except I've seen my birth certificate and she hasn't.
So the taxman, drivers licence, public service cards all have one spelling. And my passport has the correct one. I'm not entirely sure if I'm two people or not.
I always have to verify which document she'll be showing at the airport when buying airline tickets (in the before times, anyway).
The US Social Security Administration? It took me years to get the IRS to tell me why they were rejecting my electronic tax return filings. Once I found out it was the birthdate on file with the SSA, it took less than 5 minutes to fix at the SSA office in the nearest federal building (which was conveniently across the street from my work office at the time). Perhaps it is very challenging or impossible at the benefits offices that are in just about every city and town across the US. If you don't live in a big city with a complex of federal offices, maybe next time you go to one bring along a bunch of documents and get it done.
Real data is messy, and theirs is especially so.
(from memory this only applies to grandfather in groups like the Amish who are also required to provide their own form of 'definitely-not-social-security')
Sounds a lot like the ISP help that tells you to fill out a form online if your internet is out...
I only agree in the sense that there are no good things when it comes to consumer credit reporting in the United States. This is just an example of systemic problems that can and should be solved by increased automation and removing humans from the process.
There's not a ton of reasons that setting isDead = false in a table somewhere shouldn't "just work" other than too much human intervention in the processes of evaluating credit, reporting it to stake holders, and keeping information in sync.
Someone has to verify that the person is in fact alive. And not, for example, their meth addicted grandson trying to get their social security checks. The difficulty isn't in setting the flag but in proving that the flag should be set.
I've seen this pattern fail too many times to take it seriously anymore. Programmers (myself included) tend to rather drastically underestimate the likelihood that data can end up in an error state.
Humans make more mistakes, to be sure, but they can also sensibly correct mistakes when they discover them (or have them reported). Automated systems make fewer errors but once they do, the problem can be nigh irresolvable. Just look at the endless trouble we read about every few weeks from people who get their Google accounts suspended. Those people are suspended incorrectly by automated systems, and the widely-responded best recourse is to be well-enough connected to be able to get a human who works for Google to bat for you.
Machines are great for increasing scale, but they are terrible for handling edge cases. If edge cases are important to your system, you need humans deeply involved.
I've also seen automation fail spectacularly because of inconceivable edge cases during design. Almost universally it's because the process being automated was originally human, and the conceptual model of an automated process is as a human that doesn't sleep. If there's friction to structurally altering the process so it can be automated - including restricting the input data and output conditions - then you're going to see spectacular failures.
Automation isn't perfect but it really falls over when the stakeholders don't understand that it isn't perfect and the process needs to be altered for the project to succeed.
An unaccountable private enterprise should not have access to my financial information, let alone three of them. I feel that's the domain of a governmental agency with far less access to information and is or far more regulated than the existing bureaus.
> Should everyone get the same mediocre credit limits/interest rates/etc instead of responsible borrowers being rewarded
No, but non-borrowers or low borrowers shouldn't be penalized when they do need credit. I'm not against credit reporting, I'm against the usage of my data against me by people that don't have an incentive to make sure its accurate and keep it secure.
What you really need is data ownership rights, this would allow you to tell a credit reporting agency to forget you, the consequence of that of course would be that you likely would have a hard time getting credit at all but it would be your choice.
Even today, for most data, you have given permission for the data to be shared with the credit reporting agencies, it is in the contract or agreement you sign when you open an account, take out a loan or consume other financial services.
>>I'm against the usage of my data against me by people that don't have an incentive to make sure its accurate and keep it secure.
I find it odd that you believe government would have incentive to make sure it is accurate and secure.
While they are far from perfect, this article discusses the worst case behaviour of your governement, except it is unfixable. In another country, you go to the central registry to fix the root of the problem, and every other entity reads the fix.
The question is not if they are secure etc... The question is if they are worse than a cluster of unaccountable megacorps.
Financial Fraud in the US is directly because of 2 things, first and foremost the backdoor use of SocSec as a national ID, something ti was never intended to be, and it not suited for.
This is largely due to taxation, and the IRS being lazy by adopting a persons SocSec number as their Tax identification number as well. Once that happened, every one jumped on board
The second fact is treating Financial Fraud as ID Theft, no one steals a persons ID, If someone fraudulently represents themselves to a bank as me and the bank falls for that well that should be on the bank, it should not be on me to prove my "identity was stolen", this reversal of liability is what prevent the problem of Financial Fraud from being fixed
Have you priced ECC DDR4 recently? That stuff is expensive.
What I find interesting is that the chances of a bit error is minute... but the number of bits in a common system is large. (Actually to a human mind I would say it is astronomically inconceivably large)
I first became aware that bit errors <=> memory size were colliding when I heard about large sun systems were doing something called memory scrubbing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_scrubbing
For to many times in LOB applications do I see error produced by users doing things "they were not suppose to do" or in an out of order manner or something like that
to many programmers go with the "well the user should not have done that" instead of understanding that their program should have never allowed the error in the first place.
Machine do as they are instructed by humans. Machines do not make mistakes, programmers do.
I don't understand your comment. You seem to be saying that we should increase the amount arbitrary, opaque decision making that happens in consumer credit reporting, by increasing automation. Am I reading that correctly?
As for nothing being good about consumer credit reporting in the US, consider the old system what we have now replaced. It was all done on handshakes and personal references. That sounds really fair to poor people, doesn't it?
In the US banks have managed to pass laws so they're entitled only to upsides of risk taking but pass on all downsides to customers and the public.
(1) standard security protocol stuff: - identity: I am person X
- authentication: I prove that the person claiming to be X is actually X (in the US, this step is almost always skipped because, hey, they lobby government and you don't)
- authorization: the person that has been confirmed to be X has permissions to do the task they're attempting to do
The only charges I have ever paid were for borrowing money.
Is it that the UK and Norway are unusual in not charging or is it the US that is unusual in charging?
Santander is making money out of me because I am resident in Norway it doesn't pay interest unless you are resident in the UK
In my opinion, anybody that thinks they have a bank account "for free" doesn't know how to read financial statements. Banks are not charities.
From a short publication on the "Fair Credit Reporting Act": "Defamation, privacy, and negligence claims. The FCRA specifically bars defamation, invasion of privacy, and negligence claims that concern the reporting of information from being brought against any CRA, any user of a consumer report, or any furnisher of reported information, except for false information furnished with malice or willfully intended to injure the consumer (15 U.S.C. § 1681h(e); see, for example, Thornton v. Equifax, Inc., 619 F.2d 700, 703 (8th Cir. 1980)). For a state-law claim to stand under this provision, a defendant’s misconduct must be truly malicious and not simply careless (see Ross v. FDIC, 625 F.3d 808, 817 (4th Cir. 2010))."
See [1] for the whole document: https://www.jonesday.com/files/Publication/e42f45d6-a8c6-43f...
Don't keep reading if you don't want a spoiler.
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The gist of it is that the customer says "this sounds like a bank robbery, not identity theft. I have my identity, but you don't have the money, so it sounds like they stole your money, not my identity".