
Credit Bureaus Were the NSA of the 19th Century - runesoerensen
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/mass-surveillance-was-invented-by-credit-bureaus/479226/?single_page=true
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AdmiralAsshat
Credit Bureaus don't need to collect that much information anymore. People
bring it to them, because reporting an account to the credit bureau is how you
make people pay their bills.

The guys who do the scary data harvesting these days are "data furnishers"
like Lexis Nexis.

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aab0
I dunno about Lexis Nexis. I've had occasion to use LN to look up information
about some people, both Academic and full commercial versions, and while it
was useful and worthwhile spending those hours digging through all its hits, I
was not that impressed by what they had. Ultimately, usually I wound up with
less new information than I had gotten from simply closely examining their
social media activity and writings.

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GauntletWizard
The ability to verify trust and impose consequences on those who abuse it is
imperative to society; Or, at the very least, societies where the repeated
prisoner's dilemma has any bearing, which I'll argue ours is. The fact that we
are willing to go to great lengths and invasions of privacy to do that is a
tradeoff that we often make poorly, but is nonetheless a tradeoff we have to
make for continued stability.

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analyst74
After living in both China and Canada for extended period of time, I've always
wondered why China's society has such low trust compared to Canada's, and came
up with a few possible contributing factors.

One of them, I believe, is the lack of history-tracking entities like credit
bureaus, meaning that people who abuse trust are not remembered.

Lack of a proper justice system is another major contributor, meaning that
people who abused trust can get away more easily.

Take a few concrete examples, when buying a used car in Canada, you can check
vehicle history, which will bring up any major damages to the car (except in
some exceptionally elaborate scandal cases); when renting to a tenant, you
check his/her credit history; after a car accident, you only have to exchange
insurance information; if you ate something bad in a restaurant or a food
truck, you report it to the health services and they'll get inspected,
potentially closing it down costing the owner dearly.

In China, those things are either non-existent or not very well run, making
private commerce a risky venture, heck, even eating out is a risky adventure.

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drjesusphd
What's to stop the NSA from becoming be the credit bureau of the 21st?

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arca_vorago
With FICO algorithms being secret, and parallel construction being a thing,
who is to say they aren't already sharing info?

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rcar
The inputs to FICO are far from secret; just the specifics of mapping them to
scores are. If you've got bureau data on a wide population, it's trivial to
nearly perfectly replicate them with standard machine learning models.

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cloudjacker
Wow "In 1854, a man sued Tappan’s Mercantile Agency for libel after a credit
report claimed that he had left his wife for a prostitute."

If Experian posted that shit, I'd be livid, having to file a correction to say
"Mistress" "not prostitute"

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jowiar
Love seeing a Scott Sandage reference -- his classes were probably the
highlight of CMU Undergrad for me.

