6 ms·

Credit Bureaus Were the NSA of the 19th Century

60 points by runesoerensen 11y ago

AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
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.
- aab0 11y ago
  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.
- ashwinl 11y ago
  Everyone should order their Lexis Nexis report to see what is collected. http://www.lexisnexis.com/privacy/for-consumers/request-personal-information.aspx http://www.lexisnexis.com/privacy/for-consumers/request-pers...
jowiar 11y ago
Love seeing a Scott Sandage reference -- his classes were probably the highlight of CMU Undergrad for me.
GauntletWizard 11y ago
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.
- arca_vorago 11y ago
  Bullshit. You are speaking in abstract terms and then seguing into the subject matter at hand as if it actually applies. Did you actually read the article? Even at their inception the "credit agencies" were full of inaccuracies, gossip, and otherwise unreliable information with little to no foundation. Let's extrapolate to their current form, to the complete and utter racket that FICO scores and the big three are. The algorithms are secret, there are some regulations on what they are supposed to use, but those who have taken the time to hack[1] the credit system have found they use them anyway. The entire credit/debt based system is a racket, a mere section of the myriad of tools in the ongoing class warfare that the rich are winning. It's a tool of social and financial repression, not one of imagined "stability" or "necessity". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gFDnQGr6WU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gFDnQGr6WU Addendum: If anyone or anything needs to "verify trust and impose consequences on those who abuse it", it's the people who need to do it against the oligarchy. What you are positing is basically the other way around.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    You have to look at these things in terms of the alternatives. You're welcome to not participate in the credit system, I didn't for some 8-9 years in my twenties. I simply didn't get any loans, credit cards, nothing that required a credit check. Now I'm happy to have access to credit because it makes my life easier and opens doors for me. Once I was ready to start, I found all of my old debts and things had fallen off my report. The agencies knew nothing about me. It took about a year with a Capital One card to rebuild, now I have three cards and a new car, for a while I was shopping for a condo. (ultimately decided against it) You can't have these things without a consumer credit industry, nobody's going to entrust financial instruments like mortgages and credit cards to random blokes coming in off the street. The alternative isn't a world in which credit reporting doesn't exist, the alternative is a world in which none of the things credit reporting gives you access to exist either. You can live in that world today. Stop paying your bills, let your credit cards go to collections, ignore the phone calls until you can change your number and move away. That's exactly what I did when I was 21. My only regret really is that I didn't run up bigger credit card balances or buy a nicer car. Credit reporting exists because lots of people are like I was when I was 21.
drjesusphd 11y ago
What's to stop the NSA from becoming be the credit bureau of the 21st?
- arca_vorago 11y ago
  With FICO algorithms being secret, and parallel construction being a thing, who is to say they aren't already sharing info?
  - rcar 11y ago
    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.
- samstave 11y ago
  They already are doing this (in China): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI
cloudjacker 11y ago
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"
godgod 11y ago
The NSA is far more than the credit bureaus of the 19th century. Credit bureaus only monitor your credit. The NSA monitors you entire digital life.

60 points by runesoerensen 11y ago

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.

aab0 11y ago
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.
ashwinl 11y ago
Everyone should order their Lexis Nexis report to see what is collected. http://www.lexisnexis.com/privacy/for-consumers/request-personal-information.aspx http://www.lexisnexis.com/privacy/for-consumers/request-pers...

jowiar 11y ago

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

GauntletWizard 11y ago

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.

arca_vorago 11y ago
Bullshit. You are speaking in abstract terms and then seguing into the subject matter at hand as if it actually applies. Did you actually read the article? Even at their inception the "credit agencies" were full of inaccuracies, gossip, and otherwise unreliable information with little to no foundation. Let's extrapolate to their current form, to the complete and utter racket that FICO scores and the big three are. The algorithms are secret, there are some regulations on what they are supposed to use, but those who have taken the time to hack[1] the credit system have found they use them anyway. The entire credit/debt based system is a racket, a mere section of the myriad of tools in the ongoing class warfare that the rich are winning. It's a tool of social and financial repression, not one of imagined "stability" or "necessity". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gFDnQGr6WU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gFDnQGr6WU Addendum: If anyone or anything needs to "verify trust and impose consequences on those who abuse it", it's the people who need to do it against the oligarchy. What you are positing is basically the other way around.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  You have to look at these things in terms of the alternatives. You're welcome to not participate in the credit system, I didn't for some 8-9 years in my twenties. I simply didn't get any loans, credit cards, nothing that required a credit check. Now I'm happy to have access to credit because it makes my life easier and opens doors for me. Once I was ready to start, I found all of my old debts and things had fallen off my report. The agencies knew nothing about me. It took about a year with a Capital One card to rebuild, now I have three cards and a new car, for a while I was shopping for a condo. (ultimately decided against it) You can't have these things without a consumer credit industry, nobody's going to entrust financial instruments like mortgages and credit cards to random blokes coming in off the street. The alternative isn't a world in which credit reporting doesn't exist, the alternative is a world in which none of the things credit reporting gives you access to exist either. You can live in that world today. Stop paying your bills, let your credit cards go to collections, ignore the phone calls until you can change your number and move away. That's exactly what I did when I was 21. My only regret really is that I didn't run up bigger credit card balances or buy a nicer car. Credit reporting exists because lots of people are like I was when I was 21.

drjesusphd 11y ago

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

arca_vorago 11y ago
With FICO algorithms being secret, and parallel construction being a thing, who is to say they aren't already sharing info?
- rcar 11y ago
  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.
samstave 11y ago
They already are doing this (in China): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI

cloudjacker 11y ago

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"

godgod 11y ago

The NSA is far more than the credit bureaus of the 19th century. Credit bureaus only monitor your credit. The NSA monitors you entire digital life.