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Apple Co-Founder Says Goldman’s Apple Card Algo Discriminates
- johnpowell 7y agoIsn't it Goldman loaning the line of credit? I'm not sure why Apple is getting the flack here. Apple is essentially a dumb middleman that shouldn't care about your credit rating since they have nothing to lose if you default on the loan. I do get Apple getting shit for partnering with a horrible company. But does anyone know if Apple has any influence over the credit limit? I am having a hard time coming up with a reason why they would.
- wmf 7y agoThe whole point of Apple is that they take full responsibility for the goodness of their products and they don't pass the buck. So when they outsource something and it goes wrong Apple has to own that failure and fix it.
- johnpowell 7y agoAnd yeah, that is why I said Apple gets some blame for choosing a horrible bank to partner with. But my point is that Apple doesn't have some fancy algorithm deciding females are 1/10th a person. Goldman does..
- ymolodtsov 7y agoWhat makes them a horrible consumer bank? They didn’t really have a consumer division before. If Apple partnered with, idk, Bank of America you could have a prior experience to project.
- eknkc 7y agoBut its Apple Card? Why do I care about the business relation of Apple and GS or whatever? If my MacBook CPU fails, its on Apple, not Intel. I don't care where they got it. I don't have an Apple card though, not available here.
- MaupitiBlue 7y agoWhy do they think filing a joint return is relevant?
- metafunk 7y agoLikely just pointing out that, in even more ways than should matter in this case, they and their partners are financially identical.
- MaupitiBlue 7y agoAnd if lenders based their credit decisions on the spouse’s creditworthiness, someone else would whine about that. The sense of entitlement that’s taken hold of the world is dismaying. If you don’t like the terms Apple / GS are offering, then go somewhere else.
- yardie 7y ago> If you don’t like the terms Apple / GS are offering, then go somewhere else. If they are basing those terms based on one of the protected classes (race, gender, age) that is illegal and should be investigated. > The sense of entitlement that’s taken hold of the world is dismaying. I know, right. Damn these brown people, LGBTQ, women for demanding a seat at the table. Cis-het white people must be feeling particularly oppressed with all of these racist|sexist|genderist calls for reform
- MaupitiBlue 7y ago“Damn these brown people, LGBTQ, women for demanding a seat at the table.” Maybe if they earned it instead of demanding it they’d be taken seriously?
- yardie 7y agoHow exactly do you earn equality?
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- vkizl 7y agoWozniak has got an opinion on everything and the media says we have to care because he co-founded Apple in 1976. Really, what makes him an expert on this? Why should we pay attention to what he has to say about it?
- Waterluvian 7y agoYeah. He's a really interesting guy but he kind of falls into a category shared by John McAfee and Garry Kasparov of "interesting people with a lot to blather about."
- threeseed 7y agoBecause it gets clicks. His opinion is as meaningless and irrelevant here as a random person off the street.
- sarah180 7y agoI think that's extremely hyperbolic. If your livelihood depended on an insight into the way Apple's financial systems operate, and your options were Steve Wozniak or the first person you saw on the street in a major city, you'd say "flip a coin?" I didn't think so.
- threeseed 7y ago1) Apple Card is backed by Goldman Sachs. So if I was in a major city I would much rather flip a coin and hope to get a GS employee. 2) I used to work at Apple and I know people that were fired for leaking. So I would be very surprised if anyone would be stupid enough to leak the inner workings of the company to Steve. Especially from a financial products team.
- scarface74 7y agoJobs left the company for all intents and purposes in the mid 80s. What would he know about Apple’s financial or technical decisions that any outside observer wouldn’t know?
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- braindeath 7y agoSo a couple guys in the top .1% net worth (outliers by any measure) don’t think their spouses were treated fairly by a credit check. It must be systemic discrimination. Also NYS is not a community property state, as DHH claimed, so he is full of shit on that one.
- solidsnack9000 7y agoWhen you mention their level of wealth, it also makes me consider their fame in the tech industry and it makes me wonder what the absolute credit limits are. They may be unusually high; and they may have gotten them in part because Apple knew who they were. Maybe their wives were treated fairly and they weren't. Say DHH got 10K USD. Then his wife got 5K USD which is really low for someone with the assets she can likely claim. But let's say he got 1M USD and his wife got a mere 50K USD...kind of a different story then.
- Spooky23 7y agoIt all depends. Do they make income from work or investments? Does the spouse have a credit history? Do they have work history? Banks do underwriting in various ways. When I (white male) got an AMEX student card in college 25 years ago, I had a $3k limit. MBNA and Citi gave me $35,000 and $20,000, respectively.
- scarface74 7y agoI don’t know of any consumer credit product that takes assets into account. I doubt very seriously that Apple would call Goldman and ask them to give some people special treatment. I’m not saying that Apple wouldn’t do that because it isn’t fair. They wouldn’t waste their time doing it.
- sgerenser 7y agoI had mentioned on a previous thread on this topic that I've found that once you're over the "good credit" threshold, I've found that a big indicator of what credit limit you'll get on a new card is what your credit limit is on OTHER cards on your credit report. Basically, the bank is "crowdsourcing" the decision of how much credit they can trust you with to all the other banks that have trusted you in the past (whether that's the right approach or not is up to debate). I think the other idea is you have to give someone at least the same, if not higher, credit limit as the other cards they already have or they won't bother using your card. Therefore, its possible that DHH has some ultra-premium cards with 100K limits or whatever, while his wife does not, and despite having similar credit limits "the algorithm" says "hey this guy has huge credit limits and an Amex Black card, we better give him a huge limit too."
- lawnchair_larry 7y agoExcept he didn’t say that, and many others commenting had opposite results. Nobody knows the reason for the difference.
- neximo64 7y agoSo people who are famous? get a higher credit limit probably?
- qaq 7y agoWhy everything has to immediately be about discrimination? If it is always giving lower number to a member of the couple that earns less regardless of sex where is discrimination exactly?
- zelly 7y agoYou know it's really easy to test a black box for bias right. This isn't something you have to speculate about like a human's bias.
- Bud 7y agoGreat. So where's the test? Because it sure hasn't occurred in the case mentioned by this article.
- wilg 7y agoLet's demand one!
- function_seven 7y agoSure. So let's see those test results then. Because right now all we have is speculation. And if there's no transparency with a company's credit decisions, then speculating with the limited data you do have is fair game.
- JimmyAustin 7y agoIt's only easy if you have the ability to control all of the inputs. In this case we don't even know what those inputs are, let alone the ability to control them.
- xienze 7y ago> In this case we don't even know what those inputs are, let alone the ability to control them. Eh, not quite. It’s fairly well-understood what is used to determine a credit score and basically how all that information is compiled. 1. How much money do you make? 2. How long have you been making that much? 3. Is your income irregular? 4. Have you ever taken out a loan? When’s the last time you did so? 5. Have you ever failed to pay back a loan? 6. How many loans do you currently have open? 7. Are any loans behind? 8. Do you have a revolving line of credit (credit card)? How many? 9. How much of your revolving credit is in use? 10. Are you late in paying any of your credit lines? And I’m sure there’s more stuff I’m missing. But broadly, if you’re looking to get credit/loans, banks prefer someone who a) makes enough money to service their debt, b) doesn’t have too much debt relative to their income, c) pays their bills on time, and d) has an established history of a, b, and c for an extended period of time. Creditworthiness is not a mysterious algorithm that few can comprehend.
- Bud 7y agoAnother key point being missed by the over-entitled Ruby on Rails dev, Wozniak, and most commenters here is that just because you are filing jointly doesn't mean you get to double-dip on credit limit entitlement. You want credit for the sum of the couple's income when filing jointly and applying for credit jointly? Great! But that doesn't mean that you get to have that full credit TWICE, separately, when each partner applies. You get it once.
- awinder 7y agoThat would be the “Ruby on rails creator”, lol. There’s also no way to apply jointly for the card. You can input your joint income, sure, but they’re single-user accounts. You can’t, during signup, specify a lower balance in order to “free up” that credit for another family user. The thing is literally not built for married couples, who command an outsized share of spending & wealth. Stop trying to outsmart the gimped product and skip it, there’s so many better options out there.
- michaelmrose 7y agoYou can absolutely add additional users to an account including but not limited to family members. You are trying to solve a non problem.
- awinder 7y agoThat’s not correct, it’s on the support page under “If a family member wants to use Apple Card”: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209228 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209228 I was baffled myself.
- michaelmrose 7y agoYou are absolutely correct how odd.
- xyst 7y agoSeeing journalists source from Twitter just shows the sad state of the journalism industry. 1 tweet from a single man from an uninformed perspective triggered this cascade of misinformation. What happened to "research" and integrity? All for that click bait and ad-money I suppose.
- tptacek 7y agoI'm always a little confused by stories about Apple featuring Wozniak. Does he have any special insight into the company?
- mimikatz 7y agoI wonder if crying sexism is the new best way to get your issue properly looked at. Note: I am not saying this is or isn't based in sexism, just that DHH has no idea or very limited information as to what is going on and is making some very harsh assumptions.
- function_seven 7y ago> just that DHH has no idea or very limited information as to what is going on That's the main problem he has. Major decisions based on secret information. (Or secret algorithms).
- foogazi 7y ago>Apple co-founder says Codeword for Woz