>Citing soft-data points like “the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases” that could be incorporated into evaluating a borrower, the researchers believe that when a lender has a more intimate relationship with the potential client’s history, they might be more willing to cut them some slack.
I don't think social credit is enough to describe what this and other proposals like this are. It doesn't go far enough. This isn't social credit. It's life credit or maybe existence credit.
You're gaining or losing credit from merely the way you exist or live. It's essentially a hidden tax on life itself and everything you do.
Every thought, belief, action, piece of information you read, media you consume, basically every single thing you do will have some kind of value placed on it.
In my opinion, this goes far beyond social credit.
> researchers believe that when a lender has a more intimate relationship with the potential client’s history, they might be more willing to cut them some slack
Is it a comedy writing? Lender can't have "a more intimate relationship" with anything because today it's a computer. Automated sociopath.
Most people who claim that they don’t care about protecting their data or how it’s used don’t realize that a 0.1% increase in their interest rate on a big expense (say a home loan) probably works out far more expensive than all the nickels and dimes they might save otherwise, including by using “free” services on the web.
A %0.1 interest rate increase is like $40/month if you live somewhere expensive. Could you reproduce all of the free services for $40/month or less? I'm not so sure.
If you ask people if they would pay $40/mo for the assortment of social media etc web services they use to completely avoid usage tracking, they’d probably typically refuse.
> Great. Just one more reason to get off the current financial system.
Be careful what you wish for. The replacement might be worse.
Seems we're moving towards a system with Central Bank Digital Currencies in which people own accounts at central banks and governments can use policy on an individuals' central bank account to incentive people to do the "right" thing.
I’m using Bitcoin for many years now, and while it has its own problems (like sometimes waiting for an hour so that I can do a hotel reservation), I’m quite happy with it so far
For this to work, it would have to become illegal to use VPNs or even do anything on internet logged out. Also probably need to eliminate the address bar from the browser -- you can only get to sites from a search.
Actually it wouldn't be illegal to have privacy, it would just become so expensive only the very wealthy could afford it. So the internet would mirror the real world ever more.
Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but it really does feel like the powerful are chipping away at every aspect of the internet and its empowering of the common person.
> Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but it really does feel like the powerful are chipping away at every aspect of the internet and its empowering of the common person.
It's not just you; that definitely seems to be the trend. Already, privacy is only really available for the wealthy or technical.
It’s not even available to the wealthy. You have basically zero privacy using Android, and almost zero privacy using iOS; and indirectly, using stuff like Waze for which there is no “wealthy” alternative puts you on the Google radar - and apparently the FB one as well, because Waze were lazy and used the FB SDK before the google acquisition (and don’t seem to cars enough to remove it).
It’s only available to technical people with good understanding and the will to pay in convenience and time (which the wealthy do not have excess of either)
Wealthy people can afford multiple single-app semiburner phones, technical consultants for vpns/firewalls/piholes/etc, and assistants that will do the app installation and ordering on their own phones.
A lot of the privacy invasion stuff assumes you don't have multiple devices or multiple platform accounts. It's just a matter of cost to have 2-4 different devices and accounts and vpn routers if you want to keep from being tracked across platforms and use cases.
I have multiple phones- one for Waze, one for WhatsApp, another one for calls. The extra phones cost me $100 each at the time I bought them new - not flagship, but definitely workable. This does not require any real wealth - most western HN reader can afford an amortized $100/year for privacy (half that or less if you buy 2nd hand). I also have multiple emails.
Where I pay dearly, and it’s a cost even billionaires can’t avoid, is convenience. carrying 5 phones around, or remote controlling one from the others, is far from convenient.
Consultant can only take you so far. If you have an aid carrying the 5 phones so they are always available to you, then you have no privacy in a different way.
I have worked with some extremely high wealth individuals, and none of them practices any better OPSec than your average person; some of them inquired but balked at the non-monetary cost (e.g. seeing me with multiple phones, often off until use so they are harder to correlate, etc). These are people who would easily buy 10 iPhone12 max per year if it gave them convenient privacy. But it doesn’t.
It wouldn't have to become illegal, they would just have to penalize you for not knowing anything about you. Most people wouldn't be able to afford the privacy
TBH it already works that way somewhat. I think I got rejected for a credit card application for B&H payboo card because I forgot to turn off the VPN.
A lot of stuff in the name of anti-fraud / anti-bot is also anti-privacy. Try buying or subscribing (ex: patreon) to many things online with a prepaid card of some sort, you'll find out you cannot. Try accessing etsy from a data center or VPN IP and they just serve you a blank page. Make your browser hard to fingerprint and it looks like automated chromium and you hit bot wall after bot wall.
I think a reason why it isn't like this already is because many old people just don't use the internet that much at all, so there isn't that much data to rate them with, but they are valuable customers so they keep the legacy and more private way of doing things open for them. In 20 or 30 years, that might not be available anymore as the last of the people who didn't learn how to use desktop computing in the 90s die off.
Are there alternative 'internets' that are better than AMPRnet? Is TOR/I2P/freenet the only way to not have a toxic (if smooth) user experience at the expense of themselves?
While this idea is obviously an outrage and an abomination, it's the result of another economic factor. Modern creditors take very little actual risk, and that asymmetry of risk creates a power dynamic that is itself a kind of tyranny by a protected class. Creditors can organize, conspire, conduct surveillance, slander, and do pretty much anything a state can do, and that's a set of perverse incentives. Unsecured debt is servitude, and so is debt without an expiry. Some people may be fine with it, but very few who understand it are.
Creditors' low risk manifests as low interest rates, which everyone loves until they create bubbles and other forms of hyperinflation, which burst, and the costs are socialized.
The IMF was a pernicious organization from its very beginnings, basically using "cheap" subsidized debt from central banks to subordinate developing economies to a neoliberal order and force social policies that enabled globalized businesses (resource extraction and financialization) to in-effect loot them. This used to be a major progressive cause, and one that I supported, but it too seems to have been co-opted by the same interests. Now anti-globalization is abandoned by progressives, who used the activism as a stepping stone into institutional power, where now it's no longer necessary to have the popular support of maker and builder classes. Trade tariffs and economic borders have been banished to the backwater of right-wing populist causes, where people still believe in unfashionable things like nations and the responsibility of government to secure a perimeter for growth.
This IMF scheme would seem like a troll, but it's not. The people behind it have an institutional contempt for anyone outside their power games, and to them we're basically livestock. The difference between the 1990's and 2020's is that leftist led populist revolts against this exact kind of IMF driven policy were largely performative, critical, and non-violent because they were carried out by feckless flower children, whereas in the 2020's, I'd predict they will be carried out by men with little left to lose.
If that sounds scary, it should. These IMF people just don't get it.
Get ready for CBDC wallets linked to your web history. Things like this justify the existence of an alternative financial system based around Bitcoin and related digital assets.
Remember that when it comes to personal credit scores (or even pricing of corporate debt) the IMF is no more important than, say, the Harvard econ department. They have no authority over such matters. It's just research.
Pricing of sovereign debt, particularly of more "problematic" countries, yeah - that's their purpose/business.
>They have no authority over such matters. It's just research.
You are right. They do not, directly. But, never underestimate bureaucrats hunger for control. This "just research", if it can be used as a cudgel, it will. The IMF dictates many many things through its financial tentacles that impacts individuals to the extreme. Just look talk to some who are from countries where IMF came and helped out.
Yes, and it gives us a view into the headspace of the people in the finance industry. It’s true, these researchers don’t have direct power, but they do have influence. And that can be dangerous too.
This quote from the article is very illustrative:
> institutional banking system is facing a serious threat from tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. The researchers identify two key areas in which this is true: Tech companies have greater access to soft-information, and messaging platforms can take the place of the physical locations that banks rely on for meeting with customers
This tells me that there are people in the finance industry that think that they are the underdog. They just want the same access to information big tech companies already have so that they could cut the little guy a better deal. If only governments and regulators could see that. Wouldn’t we live in a better world?
They don’t think that this could usher in a financial version of 1984 because they’re optimistic in the same way that Mark Zuckerberg was optimistic that making a social networking site to connect people together would be utopian.
These researchers are going to impart this idea on students and their colleagues, eventually someone is going to go into government with complete faith that giving financial institutions very fine grained information on citizens is in everyone’s best interests. That is what is dangerous about this.
The IMF is hardly the "finance industry". It deals exclusively with countries, and serves as the lender of last resort to nations denied by the private markets, or who want better rates in exchange for structural adjustment.
There are no 'students' at the IMF, and their 'colleagues' (e.g. the World Bank staff) similarly do not deal with the internal policies of first world nations.
Simply put, this isn't a slippery slope to anywhere, its just a research paper.
The reason why credit rating agencies have strict limits on what kind of information they can use is because for the first 50-75 years they were totally abusive. What the IMF want's isn't a return to that, but something worse. Where a mere interest in a subject has an effect on your finances.
Currently: Friend of mine had HepC. And then liver cancer. Reading up on that online? The blowback was just some annoying targeted ads.
IMF Future: You get denied a loan or have to pay higher rates because you were reading up on HepC.
They have quite a pull in influencing governments, and if IMF will say "you need to implement social credit system if you want our help", there is not a lot of governments that will say no. Especially in "problematic" countries.
I work in Banking and have worked in Banks and for them for the last 15 years. This is a terrible idea. It will be deeply exacerbate systemic structural exclusion of those that do not make up the ideal picture of an institution.
Were one combining browser history, visa transactions, GPS location data from your car/phone, and who you interacted with via social networking/phone/email, one could probably create a very powerful personal profile. Be nice to keep the commercial entities from having that much end to end data for as long as we can.
And yet truly awful organizations have no trouble hiring programmers! Far too many of us are obsessed with puzzles and paychecks and couldn't give a fuck about the ethics of something like this.
This may be feasible in Tim Berner-Lee’s vision of Solid and data pods.
I’d only do it if I control access to data, and can allow an auditable one-time no-copy access to get 0.X% off my mortgage.
But no handing over data to banks between banks / social media companies.
48 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadSo this
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/03/...
https://www.techlicious.com/blog/price-discrimination-by-ope...
But for your entire credit history?
Sounds pretty awful to me.
You're gaining or losing credit from merely the way you exist or live. It's essentially a hidden tax on life itself and everything you do.
Every thought, belief, action, piece of information you read, media you consume, basically every single thing you do will have some kind of value placed on it.
In my opinion, this goes far beyond social credit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
Is it a comedy writing? Lender can't have "a more intimate relationship" with anything because today it's a computer. Automated sociopath.
Be careful what you wish for. The replacement might be worse.
Seems we're moving towards a system with Central Bank Digital Currencies in which people own accounts at central banks and governments can use policy on an individuals' central bank account to incentive people to do the "right" thing.
Actually it wouldn't be illegal to have privacy, it would just become so expensive only the very wealthy could afford it. So the internet would mirror the real world ever more.
Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but it really does feel like the powerful are chipping away at every aspect of the internet and its empowering of the common person.
It's not just you; that definitely seems to be the trend. Already, privacy is only really available for the wealthy or technical.
It’s only available to technical people with good understanding and the will to pay in convenience and time (which the wealthy do not have excess of either)
A lot of the privacy invasion stuff assumes you don't have multiple devices or multiple platform accounts. It's just a matter of cost to have 2-4 different devices and accounts and vpn routers if you want to keep from being tracked across platforms and use cases.
Where I pay dearly, and it’s a cost even billionaires can’t avoid, is convenience. carrying 5 phones around, or remote controlling one from the others, is far from convenient.
Consultant can only take you so far. If you have an aid carrying the 5 phones so they are always available to you, then you have no privacy in a different way.
I have worked with some extremely high wealth individuals, and none of them practices any better OPSec than your average person; some of them inquired but balked at the non-monetary cost (e.g. seeing me with multiple phones, often off until use so they are harder to correlate, etc). These are people who would easily buy 10 iPhone12 max per year if it gave them convenient privacy. But it doesn’t.
A lot of stuff in the name of anti-fraud / anti-bot is also anti-privacy. Try buying or subscribing (ex: patreon) to many things online with a prepaid card of some sort, you'll find out you cannot. Try accessing etsy from a data center or VPN IP and they just serve you a blank page. Make your browser hard to fingerprint and it looks like automated chromium and you hit bot wall after bot wall.
I think a reason why it isn't like this already is because many old people just don't use the internet that much at all, so there isn't that much data to rate them with, but they are valuable customers so they keep the legacy and more private way of doing things open for them. In 20 or 30 years, that might not be available anymore as the last of the people who didn't learn how to use desktop computing in the 90s die off.
Creditors' low risk manifests as low interest rates, which everyone loves until they create bubbles and other forms of hyperinflation, which burst, and the costs are socialized.
The IMF was a pernicious organization from its very beginnings, basically using "cheap" subsidized debt from central banks to subordinate developing economies to a neoliberal order and force social policies that enabled globalized businesses (resource extraction and financialization) to in-effect loot them. This used to be a major progressive cause, and one that I supported, but it too seems to have been co-opted by the same interests. Now anti-globalization is abandoned by progressives, who used the activism as a stepping stone into institutional power, where now it's no longer necessary to have the popular support of maker and builder classes. Trade tariffs and economic borders have been banished to the backwater of right-wing populist causes, where people still believe in unfashionable things like nations and the responsibility of government to secure a perimeter for growth.
This IMF scheme would seem like a troll, but it's not. The people behind it have an institutional contempt for anyone outside their power games, and to them we're basically livestock. The difference between the 1990's and 2020's is that leftist led populist revolts against this exact kind of IMF driven policy were largely performative, critical, and non-violent because they were carried out by feckless flower children, whereas in the 2020's, I'd predict they will be carried out by men with little left to lose.
If that sounds scary, it should. These IMF people just don't get it.
Pricing of sovereign debt, particularly of more "problematic" countries, yeah - that's their purpose/business.
You are right. They do not, directly. But, never underestimate bureaucrats hunger for control. This "just research", if it can be used as a cudgel, it will. The IMF dictates many many things through its financial tentacles that impacts individuals to the extreme. Just look talk to some who are from countries where IMF came and helped out.
This quote from the article is very illustrative:
> institutional banking system is facing a serious threat from tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. The researchers identify two key areas in which this is true: Tech companies have greater access to soft-information, and messaging platforms can take the place of the physical locations that banks rely on for meeting with customers
This tells me that there are people in the finance industry that think that they are the underdog. They just want the same access to information big tech companies already have so that they could cut the little guy a better deal. If only governments and regulators could see that. Wouldn’t we live in a better world?
They don’t think that this could usher in a financial version of 1984 because they’re optimistic in the same way that Mark Zuckerberg was optimistic that making a social networking site to connect people together would be utopian.
These researchers are going to impart this idea on students and their colleagues, eventually someone is going to go into government with complete faith that giving financial institutions very fine grained information on citizens is in everyone’s best interests. That is what is dangerous about this.
There are no 'students' at the IMF, and their 'colleagues' (e.g. the World Bank staff) similarly do not deal with the internal policies of first world nations.
Simply put, this isn't a slippery slope to anywhere, its just a research paper.
Currently: Friend of mine had HepC. And then liver cancer. Reading up on that online? The blowback was just some annoying targeted ads.
IMF Future: You get denied a loan or have to pay higher rates because you were reading up on HepC.
Programmers will be the first luddites.
https://twitter.com/ppathole/status/1116670170980859905
I’d only do it if I control access to data, and can allow an auditable one-time no-copy access to get 0.X% off my mortgage. But no handing over data to banks between banks / social media companies.