10 ms·
How Goldman Sachs Made More Than $1B with Credit Scores
- patrickmn 10y agoIt's pretty terrifying how much information CreditKarma (TU- and Equifax-backed,) Mint and such have, and what that turns into when it's shared and combined.
- superquest 10y agoTrue. Recently I logged into Mint for the first time in a few years, and was quite disturbed to realize they had been importing every debit or credit card transaction, and every student loan payment I made. They know my financial health better than my bank does ...
- trendia 10y agoThis is why I don't trust cloud services. I track my budget using PearBudget [0], an Excel (or LibreOffice) spreadsheet. [0] https://pearbudget.com/ https://pearbudget.com/
- fuckemem 10y agoIt says 4.95 a month so I am guess this is some kind of SaaS?
- trendia 10y agoThey have two versions: an Excel doc and a cloud service. I have no idea what the cloud service is liek because the Excel doc is free.
- greenleafjacob 10y agoI have been looking to use GNUCash myself as a replacement for YNAB. Part of my general drive to text based scriptable systems over GUI.
- aidenn0 10y agoGNUCash is scriptiable (in fact IIRC much of the out-of-the-box functionality is written in guile), but http://ledger-cli.org/ http://ledger-cli.org/ is much more of a text-based system than GNUCash.
- killbrad 10y agoDoesn't really explain why you don't trust third parties. If you opted in......?
- killbrad 10y agoWhat's surprising to me is how many people are surprised by this. You gave them the credentials to all of your accounts, and then are shocked that they used them? What's more incredible is that you haven't changed the credentials for any of your critical accounts in that time.
- superquest 10y agoI simply forgot that I did it. I gave them my credentials half a decade ago when I didn't know what I was doing ...
- caseysoftware 10y agoSince they store the actual passwords and lose the connection as soon as you change them, I'm shocked that you went years without changing those passwords..
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoAt least it speaks highly of Mint's security practices. Their DB hasn't been stolen yet.
- patrick_haply 10y agoSerious question: how do we know for certain that their DB hasn't been stolen yet?
- zitterbewegung 10y agoWhy are you disturbed ? The whole point of Mint is to track your spending so that you have a unified dashboard of your money ? If it didn't import all of those things you wouldn't have much use of it. Also you can remove accounts from it if you don't want it to track.
- xeromal 10y agoI'm amazed considering mine tends to disconnect nearly daily.
- celim307 10y agoI have first hand experience in the datamodeling/credit report collation the biggest online lenders do. We know a lot.
- pretamanger 10y agoConcentrating all my credit and financial information into one company does concern me. However, I do want some insight into and options for my finances and financial health, and I know I don't have all the information to do that. I used YNAB for a bit, and I found it pretty stressful to do all the bookkeeping. I went back to my heuristic budgeting. I don't need to track every penny. CreditKarma is really helpful for monitoring. I've gotten some good card recommendations from them and my credit score has gone up 60 points with little effort. I did my taxes through them this year (more data for them!), but I was disappointed when my state return was incorrect and I got less money back. Given that my financials are getting more complicated, I'll likely be using an accountant/attorney this year. Most people, including myself, seem willing to give up their privacy and confidentiality in exchange for convenience. I try to play it as a zero-sum game. I've deleted all my social media accounts, because having that info plus my financials floating around seems like a bad idea. In regard to my financial data, I'll probably freak out in a few years and move all that to a professional to handle. This whole "social" experiment with tech is, in my eyes, a frightening failure. Given how slipshod the security and data handling is at most companies (including my workplace), it's only a matter of time until there are millions of digital doppelgangers running around committing fraud.
- snowmaker 10y agoThe "web" link isn't working for me anymore, even in an incognito browser. Is it working for anyone else, or is there some other solution to read WSJ articles?
- grzm 10y agoThis workaround using Facebook has been posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13621072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13621072 I haven't tried it myself, and it may no longer work. Might be worth giving it a try.
- taylorwc 10y agoThere is a handy Chrome extension that can solve this called xray: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xray/dgkdfehohjdbmnldpcegekjakcdjlnkg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xray/dgkdfehohjdbm...
- floatrock 10y agoLike, a solution that doesn't involve paying for journalism that you enjoy and find useful?
- superquest 10y agoCmon WSJ is expensive
- grzm 10y agoFor HN, the guideline is that submissions that have paywalls should have workarounds. See "Are paywalls ok?" in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- xbmcuser 10y agoPersonally I wouldn't mind a global $20-25 newspaper subscription where my views are paid to the newspaper like it is done for music with Spotify.
- ajdlinux 10y agoI'm interested in trying out https://launch.blendle.com/ https://launch.blendle.com/ at some point...
- techsupporter 10y agoThat sounds like PressReader to me. I pay them $30/month and can read all of the newspapers from around the world that I want. (A lot of libraries also offer access with a library card; another good reason to visit your local library.)
- dang 10y ago"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075570 and marked it off-topic.
- machineloop 10y agoAlt link: http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-markets/20170409526/how-goldman-sachs-made-more-than-1-billion-with-your-credit-score.aspx http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-markets/2017040...
- nojvek 10y agoThis is the wild west of information rape I guess. Companies buy companies who buy other companies. As an average customer you just don't know who has what interests and where your info is getting used. Even companies that started with noble goals like whatsapp ended up selling out to Facebook troves of private info. The only way I see things change is a holocaust level fuck up because people think they have nothing to hide. I predict the next generation terrorism in the digital form
- a3n 10y ago> The only way I see things change is a holocaust level fuck up ... ... that affects lawmakers and/or exposes national security secrets. I imagine there's a lot of clandestine spending that can be correlated and will eventually bubble up inadvertently.
- jacquesm 10y ago> The only way I see things change is a holocaust level fuck up because people think they have nothing to hide. We already had that one and it does not seem to make much difference.
- broknbottle 10y agoInteresting, Goldman Sachs bought this off a private equity firm that recently bought (2 years ago) my previous employer.
- FTA 10y agoPeople are always terrified of the Big Brother from government, but any time I have to verify my identity with questions like "What street of the listed have you lived on?" or "Which of these banks do you have a loan with?" it makes me realize how much aggregated data private (especially financial) companies have. I can imagine these corporations selling that info for good money, like how many transactions you make at a fast food restaurant in a given month to health insurance providers.
- tmarkovich 10y agoCheck out companies like cardlytics and acxiom. Cardlytics basically provides the exact service you're wondering about.
- zitterbewegung 10y agoA recent HN post about four square is that they pivoted to an API that tells you who is shopping and where. They use Instagram data . https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14052444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14052444
- ryanwaggoner 10y agoI believe Instagram is using their data.
- smokeyj 10y agoI don't say this often, but this observation is pure garbage. People who live in terror of "big brother" aren't in terror because they may be offered an unwanted credit card, or because it's their precious privacy that they value. They're in terror because their government wants to silence them and kill them. Maybe for who they associate with, their religious belief, sexual orientation or their political beliefs. On the topic of Big Brother, there was a law passed called The Patriot Act that required stringent KYC regulations.. Meaning financial institutions are required to ask these stupid questions and keep tabs on you. The government is forcing companies to keep tabs on you, along with telecom and other industries - so they can siphon this data.. But whatever. Stupid conspiracy theorists. Probably dumb libertarians or something.
- FT_intern 10y agoLet's also not forget about the traditional finance companies (Chase, BAML, Citi, Wells Fargo, Amex, etc.). They sell your data and are a large source of the random credit card offers you receive. And you can't opt out.
- rubyfan 10y agoYou can opt out on the credit card offers. https://www.optoutprescreen.com https://www.optoutprescreen.com
- downandout 10y agoPaywall bypass link: https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fhow-goldman-sachs-made-more-than-1-billion-with-your-credit-score-1491742835 https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Fa...
- kevindong 10y agoI assume that this is why every bank has started offering free TransUnion credit scores/reports in the last few years to cardholders/members.
- mrtri 10y agothey also make alot of money by infiltrating in US / EU governments.