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IMF working paper suggests using browsing history in credit score calculations

247 points by gmemstr 5y ago

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nabla9 5y ago
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF and its Executive Board.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  This is the standard misattribution that comes up all the time in bad faith, especially online. "[Organization] published X, therefore that's what they believe." No, the IMF/NYT/News channel (or whoever) publishes opinion pieces all the time without agreeing with them.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    You are not incorrect. That said, to use your words, organization X does not publish Y without certain level of support for Y within X.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      You seem unaware that there are many opinion or whatever sections within organizations that are designed to publish things they consider provocative and of sufficient quality (and possibly by people in sufficient power to make their opinions into fact). And excellent example is the NYT regularly publishes opinion pieces from politicians all around the political spectrum. In other cases (CNN's Crossfire was a very bad example of this idea) the same organization tries to publish both Y and !Y often side by side to present a fuller view.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
        I disagree. I would welcome you to search for any number of truly provocative topics and you will see a chasm bordering. It is rarely a question of 'sufficient quality' as such is in the eye of the beholder. The issue is that of whether it can garner maximum amount of eyes with a minimum amount of real scrutiny. What you might think is provocative, I see simply as topics that are designed to induce 'engagement'. While the two overlap, those are not the same thing. In the end, editors have to decide whether it goes in. There needs to be a sufficient 'will' to make it happen. My point stands. There needs to be an internal support for any opinion pieces ( since that is the counter example you went with ).
rootsudo 5y ago
Hey, they got that system in place already in China! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System Go to HackerNews, post a dissenting topic, enjoy no travel or credit! Work in a high compliance job where you have to submit financials yearly, no more!
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Ultimately, human desire to control and measure other humans is not limited to totalitarian regimes. On the contrary, totalitarian regimes grow out of this naturally occurring phenomenon. We should be a bit vigilant about such concepts creeping into freer societies. They will usually do so either under guise of combating crime, or increasing efficiency. But there is no freedom without some slack.
  - sebastianconcpt 5y ago
    Good point. Reminded me of that talk of Ronald Reagan about Freedom being one generation away from extinction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDouNtnR_IA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDouNtnR_IA
- skocznymroczny 5y ago
  Don't worry, Western world is catching up to the same system. It's called a vaccine passport. The so-called pandemic may end someday, but the mechanisms will stay and you will have to show your individual QR code to go into the restaurant, store, leave the house, stray away from your house for a longer period of time. Sure, at first it will be about preventing the disease, then they will expand it to "keeping criminals away from our communities", then they can expand it to people who "foment dissent in our safe communities".
  - tigershark 5y ago
    Stop spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories here please.
josephcsible 5y ago
Maybe instead of taking even more of our personal data, they should worry about fixing the algorithm they run on the data they already have. For example, paying off an auto loan shouldn't make your credit score drop 60 points.
- MisterTea 5y ago
  > For example, paying off an auto loan shouldn't make your credit score drop 60 points. Sounds like it's working to me. Uncooperative credit slaves pay less money in interest.
  - gruez 5y ago
    If that was the intent you'd expect your credit score to be lower if you don't carry a balance on your credit card, but that's not the case. https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/will-carrying-a-balance-on-credit-card-help-credit-score/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/will-carrying-a-...
- cmattoon 5y ago
  Maybe abolish credit scores, because they're only used for evil. They help nobody but the bankers.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    ...help the bankers not lose all their money to deadbeats, which means they can keep loaning the rest of us money at a lesser rate?
  - dharmab 5y ago
    The system before credit scores was even worse. Human bankers used subjective judgement subject to individual biases. That system was unfair, inaccurate and difficult to scale. How would you replace or improve credit scores? Personally, I'd like to have much more control over who can view my credit data and for what purposes.
- randomdata 5y ago
garyrichardson 5y ago
The article talks about things like browser, ISP, etc and not so much browser history. Even so, this is the worst possible type of pattern matching. It’s easy for some to manipulate but really bakes in the worst bias. People with the means can easily change their computer - You go from a budget pc running an old version of windows to a brand new Mac and your credit score goes up. On the flip side your isp may indicate you live in a “bad neighborhood” and get penalized for it. We have all got to hope this never gets implemented.
jgalt212 5y ago
I thought these signals were already under active use in the peer to peer lending space.
nickdothutton 5y ago
I’d have thought browser history would be a very poor second to the “hard” metrics. If the credit companies were lacking data then they could probably do worse than look at your family history as far as credit goes.
NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
Somehow I have a feeling that each passing day, things are getting tighter and tighter and private corporation and government institutions are getting more controlling and totalitarian. That feeling like slowly being boiled into 1984.
- xyst 5y ago
  Apple is already half way there to be honest.
  - rangerdan 5y ago
    How do people not realize this, even when it's been made so painfully obvious with their photo scanning debacle? There is *zero* privacy on closed source, proprietary, for-profit, shareholder-owned platforms. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. They own the platform and they own your behavior when you use their products.
- bserge 5y ago
  Basic human nature, push it as far as the other side will take it. If the other side is significantly weaker they'll compromise a lot before they snap and push back, or try to.
- sebastianconcpt 5y ago
  The third world is becoming 1984, the first world is debating itself to either become the third world or A Brave New World.
- ksm1717 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
- rajin444 5y ago
  Won't be hard to pivot the NYC vaccine pass into the NYC health pass.
- nanis 5y ago
javajosh 5y ago
Well of course! The real question is: what shouldn't impact your credit score? Any information you consume could potentially impact your ability to repay a debt - if you read the wrong book, see the wrong movie, visit the wrong person, any of these events could change your mind, and make you a less reliable credit risk. Reading the wrong web resources is a natural extension. (Because the actually crazy people have killed satire, let me be clear: this is satire.)
- rootsudo 5y ago
  AFAIK, there are reporting systems in place at Libraries that flag your account if you check out media that is considered "not good." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Awareness_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Awareness_Program I ran into this myself, in my High-school Library and I'm sure may other children may have as well. Not per se a social credit system, but, how different is it? One org/database, interpreted by people of org and then a similar enough inquisition/questioning of "why."
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - im3w1l 5y ago
    Very interesting, but it seems that was more about sensitive information (I'm guess stuff like technology, maps, security procedures) rather than who reads which political ideology.
- shadilay 5y ago
  China today, us tomorrow.
cmattoon 5y ago
A better conversation is whether IMF/credit scores deserve to exist in the first place. Didn't these geniuses JUST add field-specific search to SWIFT, so orders for "cubanos" don't get held up because of Cuba sanctions? Maybe these clueless old men should stick to what they know - mountains of physical paperwork and pointless policies and procedures, and stay away from anything that uses electricity or internet. Bitcon/DeFi will render them obsolete in a few years' time anyway.
- gruez 5y ago
  >A better conversation is whether IMF/credit scores deserve to exist in the first place >Bitcon/DeFi will render them obsolete in a few years' time anyway. Credit scores exist because banks want to know how likely they're going to get their money back. I'm not sure how that'd be replaced with "bitcoin/difi". Most of the "loans" I see are difi are either flash loans or overcolateralized loans, which have limited application to typical consumer loans (eg. car loan or mortgage).
  - Mengkudulangsat 5y ago
    You know I've been wondering about that! Can an autonomous bot on some smart contract have a credit score? Why is credit a privilege only humans can enjoy? We should be able to spool up a persistent pseudonym that can have a credit score based solely on its selectively disclosed transaction history since inception. If we screw up the credit score of that pseudonym, we should be able to create another and another. The market decides what score to give based whatever factor it feels relavant, which should result in abuse prevention over the long term.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >Can an autonomous bot on some smart contract have a credit score? Why is credit a privilege only humans can enjoy? companies and even countries can have credit scores, so it's not something that "only humans can enjoy". >We should be able to spool up a persistent pseudonym that can have a credit score based solely on its selectively disclosed transaction history since inception. Part of what gives credit scores value is that you only have one identity, so you can't create burner accounts and default all the loans on them. >The market decides what score to give based whatever factor it feels relavant, which should result in abuse prevention over the long term. The market will react by treating pseudonyms the same way websites treat tor exit nodes: with extreme suspicion. Using a pseudonym with little history and/or "real" identity tied to it would essentially put you in the "default imminent" category of credit ratings.
bArray 5y ago
This is just yet another push by financial companies to impose on your freedom of speech. Why on earth do people keep pushing for private companies to become political activists? They have already come for individual bank accounts, in the UK for example an activist named 'Tommy Robinson' [1] is not allowed to open a bank account due to his politics [*]. "What business of mine is it So long they don’t take the yam From my savouring mouth?" Then they came for Trump, the former president of the United States [3]. Irrespective of your politics, do you believe that he should not be allowed to have money or do business? "What business of mine is it So long they don’t take the yam From my savouring mouth?" Now they come after sex workers on websites like OnlyFans [4], threatening the livelihoods of people doing perfectly legal business. Sure, OnlyFans did need to clean up their act - but we're talking here about the fringe, not the majority. I really also suspect PornHub were also targetted by payment processors not so long ago, but they kept more quiet about it. "What business of mine is it So long they don’t take the yam From my savouring mouth?" "And then one evening As I sat down to eat my yam A knock on the door froze my hungry hand. The jeep was waiting on my bewildered lawn Waiting, waiting in its usual silence." - (Interlaced poem by Niyi Osundare [5]) [*] I would suggest to hear his speech at the Oxford Union address [2], rather than a heavily biased Wikipedia entry. The first two references in the Wikipedia article are simply links to news articles calling him far-right - not evidence in the slightest of him having far-right opinions. If you even have the slightest doubt in the news media, please watch the video before casting judgement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson_%28activist%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson_%28activist%29 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YQ94jFg_4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YQ94jFg_4A [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-12/more-of-trump-s-banks-cut-ties-as-backlash-grows-over-violence https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-12/more-of-t... [4] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/21/tech/onlyfans-creators-react-sexually-explicit-ban/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/21/tech/onlyfans-creators-re... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_My_Business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_My_Business
- upearly3 5y ago
  It's worth considering whether the 'far-right', which probably just means stuff-that-everyone-thought-20-years-ago, would go the same route if they had the upper hand in the West currently. Maybe it's all more just a matter of opportunity than it is belief system.
streamofdigits 5y ago
The recent Chinese crackdown on tech entities and their use of data hints that the shape of the digital financial landscape depends sensitively on what is deemed acceptable (read: legal) information flow in any jurisdiction. In this sense digital finance will be created by decree rather than as the unavoidable culmimation of some particular "tech innovation". Underneath the huge risks there is always the potential that easier collection and dissemination of information will support a "better" financial system, somehow combining the best rather than the worst of "fin" and "tech".
tru3_power 5y ago
Lol this kind of shit is ripe for abuse. Not even sure if it would be unethical to find a flaw in the pattern matching just to enhance your credit score.
JBorrow 5y ago
Is it just me or is this article entirely unreadable due to the in-page scrollable HP ads in the background? The page breaks aren’t calculated correctly so I can’t see half the text. Sigh.
upearly3 5y ago
lol. wow. nice article. Of course the IMF has it's own goals which are fairly easy to guess. It's no surprise that a 'credit score' is more a way to separate friends from enemies rather than a measure of creditworthiness. It's interesting to think of machine learning let loose on the problem of a persons likelihood to pay back their bills. The uproar about the 'unfairness' of the decisions would be tremendous. No doubt that's already been done to a large extent, but the politics of the era won't allow it so there's bound to be a bit of tension in the system.
throwawaygh 5y ago
The article is about a post on the IMF's blog by Arnoud Boot, Peter Hoffmann, Luc Laeven, Lev Ratnovski [1], which itself is basically just summarizing a more detailed working paper by the same authors [2]. The working paper doesn't really contain any original research (at least on this topic); they cite a single paper by Tobias Berg, Valentin Burg, Ana Gombović, Manju Puri [3]. The IMF working paper/blog post concludes, on the basis of this paper, that a system "powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning" (ugh) can improve credit assessments using features such as "the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet". I feel kind of depressed that this needs to be said, but... 1. There is no causal link between user-agent and loan repayment. 2. Attaching high-value signals such as credit scores to such easily spoofed data as user-agent and browsing history has some amazingly obvious problems that are never mentioned. The level of technological and statistical incompetence on display here is rather astounding, and it's difficult for me to take any of this seriously even before the ethical questions begin. This is part of an ongoing trend I've noticed: the quality of human capital in financial services seems to be in rapid decline. The cream of the crop was scraped off by huge tech companies on the industry side. On the academic side, all the top students are choosing CS PhD programs instead of econ/finance and top-tier faculty are leaving core econ/business/finance/etc. departments for specialized institutes/departments. And even within finance, already degraded, the under-60 talent that does remain isn't doing stuff like loan origination or credit risk assessment for obvious reasons. I think it's time to start strictly regulating things like credit scores. If not for reasons of privacy/equality, at least merely because the entire industry seems to be incompetent and getting worse. -- [1] https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-fintech/ https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-finte... [2] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2020/08/07/Financial-Intermediation-and-Technology-Whats-Old-Whats-New-49624 https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2020/08/07/Fin... [3] https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article/33/7/2845/5568311 https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article/33/7/2845/5568311
- Pmop 5y ago
  I know "assume incompetence before evil intent" but all of this is so conveniently set up to be an instrument for oppressing and shutting down dissent.
leshenka 5y ago
This is bizarre. I don't live in the US and have questions. a) how do they acquire users' web history? Do they purchase it from ISP? b) how do they know what ISP to ask? c) how does the ISP know my web history? Last time I checked, almost all websites I visit use https, so the only thing they can see is domain, not /pathname/ d) how does it feel to poke your nose where it doesn't belong?
- p410n3 5y ago
  a) Yes. Amongst others, many ISPs sell data. I picked comcast as a random example, here in Germany ISPs do that too: "We may also share personal information that does not identify you with third parties for their own marketing and advertising purposes, which you can opt out of. This mainly occurs when you interact with our websites and mobile applications that contain third-party cookies or other advertising trackers. To learn more about this, please read our Cookies Notice." Coupled with: https://www.vice.com/en/article/gygx7y/your-anonymous-browsing-data-isnt-actually-anonymous https://www.vice.com/en/article/gygx7y/your-anonymous-browsi... b) Afaik there's data brokers that know this and collect data from many different kinds of sources (isps being only one of them) those then sell to people like private investigators and private intelligence companies. Sadly I don't have a source ready, I learned this on a podcast and completely forgot which one. But the vice article above goes into that direction too. c) That's correct, but that's also already valuable on it's own. I assume the /pathnames/ can come from third party tracking / ad companies, but dns data alone is also valuable. It's all in the patters of the (meta)data d) Very likely exciting to many. Voyeurism and the "forbidden apple" aren't exactly new concepts
- p410n3 5y ago
  Additionally, take a look at the official Californian data Broker registry: https://oag.ca.gov/data-brokers https://oag.ca.gov/data-brokers
lettergram 5y ago
Those over at https://patriots.win https://patriots.win have been claiming this has been the plan for years. A slow move to a CCP style credit system and world government, led by the IMF (control through finances) and WHO (health experts managing governance) Even the vice chair of Berkshire Hathaway has said he wanted a Chinese style system (among many others): https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/30/investing/charlie-munger-china-berkshire-hathaway-warren-buffett/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/30/investing/charlie-munger-chin... It’s been real interesting to watch the conspiracy theories blend and become reality in some cases. Personally, I think it’s more of a lose collection of similar minded people leading to certain conclusions and/or outcomes. But it does feel like an economic victory in civilization ...
- upearly3 5y ago
  The simplest model I can think of goes like so: . Do the ruling classes benefit? . Is it practical/possible? In any case, the easiest response is to remove yourself from the system as best as possible. Slowly getting grey'ed out by participating with the hivemind is no way to live.
- tjpnz 5y ago
  >A slow move to a CCP style credit system and world government, led by the IMF (control through finances) and WHO (health experts managing governance) Even if this were credible I'm not worried. The WHO has shown itself incapable of leading anything.
archildress 5y ago
Credit scores are so fundamentally broken anyway. In financial analysis of a company, the number one item you tend to look at is "free cash flow" - the "cash available for the company to repay creditors or pay dividends and interest to investors." [1] Why then do we not take income into account in credit worthiness? Why do I not periodically upload my W2 or tax return to the credit bureaus in order to show that yes, I'm credit-worthy because my income makes it possible to service my debt? The entire idea of a credit score based on having had credit and paying past loans off is asinine. To start throwing nonsensical parameters like browsing history into the equation is second derivative asinine. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/freecashflow.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/freecashflow.asp
- travoc 5y ago
  Can you tell us who is giving out large loans without verifying income?
  - runako 5y ago
    All major US credit card issuers. Many auto lenders. Most of consumer credit outside of mortgages operates without any real income verification. Here, "large" runs at least up to $50k-$100k per lender without any meaningful income verification.
    - rafale 5y ago
      They usually ask you for your income in the credit card application. If you lie, you may be committing credit card fraud.
      - devmor 5y ago
        Hence, the key word "VERIFYING"
        intended 5y ago
        These issues are abstracted by the delinquency rate. Some X% will not pay on time. By reducing the information taken, do we add sufficient additional users to overcome the X% loss expected.
cube00 5y ago
From the IMF blog post[1]: > Even a well-paid expatriate moving to the United States can be caught in the conundrum of not getting a credit card for lack of credit record, and not having a credit record for lack of credit cards. > Fintech resolves the dilemma by tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases. I enjoy the framing of this; give us the keys to the kingdom and we'll give you even more credit (to get yourself further into debt!) Of course it won't stop there, better pay down that mortgage before you search or buy the "wrong" thing if you want to keep your house (they won't take it outright, just raise the interest rate on your loan because you now represent a higher risk based on "new information") [1] https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-fintech/ https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-finte...
- jart 5y ago
  The fact that the IMF thinks your choice of operating system should impact your creditworthiness is something I've been warning people about for months because it shows why we need cosmopolitan software. Since it's nice to have the ability to pick up and move our apps elsewhere should we discover we're using the "wrong" one. Because political winds change, but good engineering endures. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Time to link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_tag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_tag and because of where it came from, maybe to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheist_Quakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheist_Quakers
  - nanis 5y ago
    > The fact that the IMF thinks your choice of operating system should impact your creditworthiness is something At some point in the past or maybe in another universe, a well known accommodation booking site might or might not have been offering better rates to people using Linux than OSX. Not confirmed, obviously.
teekert 5y ago
Sounds nice, I am in full control of my browser history, at least the one that the IMF will see, sign me up. Soon, privacy is for nerds only anyway.
- FractalHQ 5y ago
  Privacy is already for “nerds” only. Coincidentally, I brought up Ublock Origin last night at a gathering, and multiple people claimed they had never heard of a browser extension.
  - teekert 5y ago
    That's nice, but have you ever heard someone refer to IE as "just the normal internet"? Anyways, Whatever the law says, us nerds should be in charge anyway, right?! Or at least we should have some inherent privilege. These guys at the IMF have great ideas.
    - jart 5y ago
      It was only within the past few decades that being a nerd stopped having social stigma and we became elevated to the social status of normal people. But we don't have any real power since lawyers still have a monopoly on that. They fill all the seats in congress, even though they're .5% of the population. They have the power to read our emails. But if you think about it, legal code is really just a primitive form of code that lacks the precision modern programming languages can provide. Modern code has so much more benefit to offer the public, like things happening in microseconds whereas previously you'd have to wait weeks and pay thousands of dollars in fees. So the transition to the newer better technology where legal code is executable and written by nerds is inevitable, but people with power are afraid of losing their power, so it'll take time for society to evolve. Each time the lawyer ruling class does something bad, like build a website that doesn't work, they'll need to give us a little more power in order to save them. Then eventually, we'll win.
      - teekert 5y ago
rglover 5y ago
The answer is "no."
motohagiography 5y ago
It's like we need eternal vigilence against people like this or something. There is always someone who thinks they have a technocratic solution that optimizes for their own interests and then litigates for it and encircles us while insisting it is in ours. Nobody subject to this proposed measure desires it. Why on earth does the IMF, an organization staffed almost exclusively by academic economists and political appointees, think they have any expertise whatsoever in consumer credit decisions? These are people whose understanding of business stops at "getting funding," from presumed and paternalistic granting agencies. The entire premise of their organization was to use lending as a globalized policy leverage tool, to issue bad loans to weak governments for political reasons, and then demand policy concessions in exchange for renegotiation terms. These have always been really bad people. It does suggest we need better p2p lending instruments, and really, anything that these organizations think they can do, we should probably be developing alternatives that limit their influence.
swiley 5y ago
Don’t like crypto currency? Stop making it necessary.
RoryH 5y ago
Good luck with that!
Proven 5y ago
I'd expect something like that from the current USSA government.
peteyPete 5y ago
Haven't they just been talking about changing how credit scores are made and take it out of the hands of private parties and let the government handle it? https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2021/07/02/congress-credit-score-overhaul-proposal-act/46965135/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2021/07...
a9h74j 5y ago
Perhaps the long-term expectation is that people will be disappeared or dis-employed for their browsing history. If so, then your browsing history will be a predictor of your ability to repay a loan. A curiously valid predictor.
avnigo 5y ago
And they expect we'll just sit idly by and be surveilled? https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
isoblvck 5y ago
this is dystopian and another reasons why privacy matters. me googling stuff has absolutely no impact on creditworthiness
dogman144 5y ago
Cypherpunks write code. This is part of a larger trend of non-state actors with a huge variety of sometimes very pro-social missions (IMF, anti-child exploitation non-profits) advancing their respective missions through leveraging or targeting other non-state actors' platform control (tech companies, adtech infra) of platforms we totally rely on for day-to-day life (browsers, smart phones, OSs). The connective tissue is the selective analysis, or less generously: magical thinking, of tech's beneficial features for a specific mission while ignoring (or not understanding) what their views for tech-use cause in aggregate. The only counteraction that seems capable of effective reaction to this trend is forcing that "aggregate view." Developers on GitHub re: showing hash collisions for Apple's CSAM tech have recently lead the way in this space. Tools which passively search the web to generate browser histories which have beneficial credit score impact are another option. It's time to return to the mindset cypherpunks created, but expand it from their hyper-focus on privacy: write and socialize tools which politely but directly force tech-lite researchers and non-state actors with powerful missions and influence to acknowledge their blindspots (hopefully), or screw up their products (more likely).
stickfigure 5y ago
This is daft, but not (just) because of the Orwellian aspect. The problem is that if it was widely implemented, it would immediately stop working. Pretty much everyone here is familiar with Goodhart's Law; I'm surprised the IMF isn't. Use browsing history for credit scores, watch for the immediate proliferation of apps that generate/clean your browser history.
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
Whenever I have connectivity problems I get mad and google something childish, usually a curse word. I hope I don't run into financial consequences. On the bright side, if I do I'll probably not realize it ...
sureglymop 5y ago
Can anyone explain to me what credit score is and what it's used for? Does it have to have something to do with credit cards, taking loans or mortgages? (I'm from Europe and I've never borrowed money. I even only use a prepaid credit card, always wondered what benefits a real credit card would even bring.)
- nobody9999 5y ago
  https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/ficoscore.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/ficoscore.asp
nyanpasu64 5y ago
>isps giving out "correlation attacks as a service" to "i swear i'm a good actor" companies >IMF recommends using ISP/OS/browsing history metadata for credit reports >salary data is being sent to credit companies I wish i could just only pick ISPs and jobs and houses and lenders and such which don't send information to tracking companies. Sadly working for someone who pays you is illegal unless you report legal names, tax forms, and such to the government... and even making an online purchase without revealing your identity is difficult and questionably legal. How viable it is to rent an apartment or buy a house, without letting others vacuum your personal information?
Barrin92 5y ago
People are very cynical about this but I honestly don't think there's in principle anything wrong with using such data to establish credit-worthiness, because as the article points out many people do not have a stable financial history and this creates a negative cycle. Fact of the matter is if people want access to credit the creditor has a legitimate interest in making an informed decision about whether the individual is reliable to set a correct rate. There is no way around this. The two other alternatives are, we don't give someone access to credit, or we hand out credit without any sort of metrics. The first one doesn't help anyone, the second one doesn't make any financial sense. Consumer data (the article also mentions online shopping history, which makes more sense than 'browser history'), in contrast to institutional banking data is ubiquitous even in poor countries because people now have wide access to phones and services. It would enable a lot of people to get access to credit.

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nabla9 5y ago

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF and its Executive Board.

HWR_14 5y ago
This is the standard misattribution that comes up all the time in bad faith, especially online. "[Organization] published X, therefore that's what they believe." No, the IMF/NYT/News channel (or whoever) publishes opinion pieces all the time without agreeing with them.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  You are not incorrect. That said, to use your words, organization X does not publish Y without certain level of support for Y within X.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    You seem unaware that there are many opinion or whatever sections within organizations that are designed to publish things they consider provocative and of sufficient quality (and possibly by people in sufficient power to make their opinions into fact). And excellent example is the NYT regularly publishes opinion pieces from politicians all around the political spectrum. In other cases (CNN's Crossfire was a very bad example of this idea) the same organization tries to publish both Y and !Y often side by side to present a fuller view.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
      I disagree. I would welcome you to search for any number of truly provocative topics and you will see a chasm bordering. It is rarely a question of 'sufficient quality' as such is in the eye of the beholder. The issue is that of whether it can garner maximum amount of eyes with a minimum amount of real scrutiny. What you might think is provocative, I see simply as topics that are designed to induce 'engagement'. While the two overlap, those are not the same thing. In the end, editors have to decide whether it goes in. There needs to be a sufficient 'will' to make it happen. My point stands. There needs to be an internal support for any opinion pieces ( since that is the counter example you went with ).

rootsudo 5y ago

Hey, they got that system in place already in China! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System Go to HackerNews, post a dissenting topic, enjoy no travel or credit! Work in a high compliance job where you have to submit financials yearly, no more!

inglor_cz 5y ago
Ultimately, human desire to control and measure other humans is not limited to totalitarian regimes. On the contrary, totalitarian regimes grow out of this naturally occurring phenomenon. We should be a bit vigilant about such concepts creeping into freer societies. They will usually do so either under guise of combating crime, or increasing efficiency. But there is no freedom without some slack.
- sebastianconcpt 5y ago
  Good point. Reminded me of that talk of Ronald Reagan about Freedom being one generation away from extinction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDouNtnR_IA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDouNtnR_IA
skocznymroczny 5y ago
Don't worry, Western world is catching up to the same system. It's called a vaccine passport. The so-called pandemic may end someday, but the mechanisms will stay and you will have to show your individual QR code to go into the restaurant, store, leave the house, stray away from your house for a longer period of time. Sure, at first it will be about preventing the disease, then they will expand it to "keeping criminals away from our communities", then they can expand it to people who "foment dissent in our safe communities".
- tigershark 5y ago
  Stop spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories here please.

josephcsible 5y ago

Maybe instead of taking even more of our personal data, they should worry about fixing the algorithm they run on the data they already have. For example, paying off an auto loan shouldn't make your credit score drop 60 points.

MisterTea 5y ago
> For example, paying off an auto loan shouldn't make your credit score drop 60 points. Sounds like it's working to me. Uncooperative credit slaves pay less money in interest.
- gruez 5y ago
  If that was the intent you'd expect your credit score to be lower if you don't carry a balance on your credit card, but that's not the case. https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/will-carrying-a-balance-on-credit-card-help-credit-score/ https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/will-carrying-a-...
cmattoon 5y ago
Maybe abolish credit scores, because they're only used for evil. They help nobody but the bankers.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  ...help the bankers not lose all their money to deadbeats, which means they can keep loaning the rest of us money at a lesser rate?
- dharmab 5y ago
  The system before credit scores was even worse. Human bankers used subjective judgement subject to individual biases. That system was unfair, inaccurate and difficult to scale. How would you replace or improve credit scores? Personally, I'd like to have much more control over who can view my credit data and for what purposes.
randomdata 5y ago

garyrichardson 5y ago

The article talks about things like browser, ISP, etc and not so much browser history. Even so, this is the worst possible type of pattern matching. It’s easy for some to manipulate but really bakes in the worst bias. People with the means can easily change their computer - You go from a budget pc running an old version of windows to a brand new Mac and your credit score goes up. On the flip side your isp may indicate you live in a “bad neighborhood” and get penalized for it. We have all got to hope this never gets implemented.

jgalt212 5y ago

I thought these signals were already under active use in the peer to peer lending space.

nickdothutton 5y ago

I’d have thought browser history would be a very poor second to the “hard” metrics. If the credit companies were lacking data then they could probably do worse than look at your family history as far as credit goes.

NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

Somehow I have a feeling that each passing day, things are getting tighter and tighter and private corporation and government institutions are getting more controlling and totalitarian. That feeling like slowly being boiled into 1984.

xyst 5y ago
Apple is already half way there to be honest.
- rangerdan 5y ago
  How do people not realize this, even when it's been made so painfully obvious with their photo scanning debacle? There is *zero* privacy on closed source, proprietary, for-profit, shareholder-owned platforms. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. They own the platform and they own your behavior when you use their products.
bserge 5y ago
Basic human nature, push it as far as the other side will take it. If the other side is significantly weaker they'll compromise a lot before they snap and push back, or try to.
sebastianconcpt 5y ago
The third world is becoming 1984, the first world is debating itself to either become the third world or A Brave New World.
ksm1717 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
rajin444 5y ago
Won't be hard to pivot the NYC vaccine pass into the NYC health pass.
nanis 5y ago

javajosh 5y ago

Well of course! The real question is: what shouldn't impact your credit score? Any information you consume could potentially impact your ability to repay a debt - if you read the wrong book, see the wrong movie, visit the wrong person, any of these events could change your mind, and make you a less reliable credit risk. Reading the wrong web resources is a natural extension. (Because the actually crazy people have killed satire, let me be clear: this is satire.)

rootsudo 5y ago
AFAIK, there are reporting systems in place at Libraries that flag your account if you check out media that is considered "not good." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Awareness_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Awareness_Program I ran into this myself, in my High-school Library and I'm sure may other children may have as well. Not per se a social credit system, but, how different is it? One org/database, interpreted by people of org and then a similar enough inquisition/questioning of "why."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- im3w1l 5y ago
  Very interesting, but it seems that was more about sensitive information (I'm guess stuff like technology, maps, security procedures) rather than who reads which political ideology.
shadilay 5y ago
China today, us tomorrow.

cmattoon 5y ago

A better conversation is whether IMF/credit scores deserve to exist in the first place. Didn't these geniuses JUST add field-specific search to SWIFT, so orders for "cubanos" don't get held up because of Cuba sanctions? Maybe these clueless old men should stick to what they know - mountains of physical paperwork and pointless policies and procedures, and stay away from anything that uses electricity or internet. Bitcon/DeFi will render them obsolete in a few years' time anyway.

gruez 5y ago
>A better conversation is whether IMF/credit scores deserve to exist in the first place >Bitcon/DeFi will render them obsolete in a few years' time anyway. Credit scores exist because banks want to know how likely they're going to get their money back. I'm not sure how that'd be replaced with "bitcoin/difi". Most of the "loans" I see are difi are either flash loans or overcolateralized loans, which have limited application to typical consumer loans (eg. car loan or mortgage).
- Mengkudulangsat 5y ago
  You know I've been wondering about that! Can an autonomous bot on some smart contract have a credit score? Why is credit a privilege only humans can enjoy? We should be able to spool up a persistent pseudonym that can have a credit score based solely on its selectively disclosed transaction history since inception. If we screw up the credit score of that pseudonym, we should be able to create another and another. The market decides what score to give based whatever factor it feels relavant, which should result in abuse prevention over the long term.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Can an autonomous bot on some smart contract have a credit score? Why is credit a privilege only humans can enjoy? companies and even countries can have credit scores, so it's not something that "only humans can enjoy". >We should be able to spool up a persistent pseudonym that can have a credit score based solely on its selectively disclosed transaction history since inception. Part of what gives credit scores value is that you only have one identity, so you can't create burner accounts and default all the loans on them. >The market decides what score to give based whatever factor it feels relavant, which should result in abuse prevention over the long term. The market will react by treating pseudonyms the same way websites treat tor exit nodes: with extreme suspicion. Using a pseudonym with little history and/or "real" identity tied to it would essentially put you in the "default imminent" category of credit ratings.

bArray 5y ago

This is just yet another push by financial companies to impose on your freedom of speech. Why on earth do people keep pushing for private companies to become political activists? They have already come for individual bank accounts, in the UK for example an activist named 'Tommy Robinson' [1] is not allowed to open a bank account due to his politics [*]. "What business of mine is it So long they don’t take the yam From my savouring mouth?" Then they came for Trump, the former president of the United States [3]. Irrespective of your politics, do you believe that he should not be allowed to have money or do business? "What business of mine is it So long they don’t take the yam From my savouring mouth?" Now they come after sex workers on websites like OnlyFans [4], threatening the livelihoods of people doing perfectly legal business. Sure, OnlyFans did need to clean up their act - but we're talking here about the fringe, not the majority. I really also suspect PornHub were also targetted by payment processors not so long ago, but they kept more quiet about it. "What business of mine is it So long they don’t take the yam From my savouring mouth?" "And then one evening As I sat down to eat my yam A knock on the door froze my hungry hand. The jeep was waiting on my bewildered lawn Waiting, waiting in its usual silence." - (Interlaced poem by Niyi Osundare [5]) [*] I would suggest to hear his speech at the Oxford Union address [2], rather than a heavily biased Wikipedia entry. The first two references in the Wikipedia article are simply links to news articles calling him far-right - not evidence in the slightest of him having far-right opinions. If you even have the slightest doubt in the news media, please watch the video before casting judgement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson_%28activist%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson_%28activist%29 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YQ94jFg_4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YQ94jFg_4A [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-12/more-of-trump-s-banks-cut-ties-as-backlash-grows-over-violence https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-12/more-of-t... [4] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/21/tech/onlyfans-creators-react-sexually-explicit-ban/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/08/21/tech/onlyfans-creators-re... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_My_Business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_My_Business

upearly3 5y ago
It's worth considering whether the 'far-right', which probably just means stuff-that-everyone-thought-20-years-ago, would go the same route if they had the upper hand in the West currently. Maybe it's all more just a matter of opportunity than it is belief system.

streamofdigits 5y ago

The recent Chinese crackdown on tech entities and their use of data hints that the shape of the digital financial landscape depends sensitively on what is deemed acceptable (read: legal) information flow in any jurisdiction. In this sense digital finance will be created by decree rather than as the unavoidable culmimation of some particular "tech innovation". Underneath the huge risks there is always the potential that easier collection and dissemination of information will support a "better" financial system, somehow combining the best rather than the worst of "fin" and "tech".

tru3_power 5y ago

Lol this kind of shit is ripe for abuse. Not even sure if it would be unethical to find a flaw in the pattern matching just to enhance your credit score.

JBorrow 5y ago

Is it just me or is this article entirely unreadable due to the in-page scrollable HP ads in the background? The page breaks aren’t calculated correctly so I can’t see half the text. Sigh.

upearly3 5y ago

lol. wow. nice article. Of course the IMF has it's own goals which are fairly easy to guess. It's no surprise that a 'credit score' is more a way to separate friends from enemies rather than a measure of creditworthiness. It's interesting to think of machine learning let loose on the problem of a persons likelihood to pay back their bills. The uproar about the 'unfairness' of the decisions would be tremendous. No doubt that's already been done to a large extent, but the politics of the era won't allow it so there's bound to be a bit of tension in the system.

throwawaygh 5y ago

The article is about a post on the IMF's blog by Arnoud Boot, Peter Hoffmann, Luc Laeven, Lev Ratnovski [1], which itself is basically just summarizing a more detailed working paper by the same authors [2]. The working paper doesn't really contain any original research (at least on this topic); they cite a single paper by Tobias Berg, Valentin Burg, Ana Gombović, Manju Puri [3]. The IMF working paper/blog post concludes, on the basis of this paper, that a system "powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning" (ugh) can improve credit assessments using features such as "the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet". I feel kind of depressed that this needs to be said, but... 1. There is no causal link between user-agent and loan repayment. 2. Attaching high-value signals such as credit scores to such easily spoofed data as user-agent and browsing history has some amazingly obvious problems that are never mentioned. The level of technological and statistical incompetence on display here is rather astounding, and it's difficult for me to take any of this seriously even before the ethical questions begin. This is part of an ongoing trend I've noticed: the quality of human capital in financial services seems to be in rapid decline. The cream of the crop was scraped off by huge tech companies on the industry side. On the academic side, all the top students are choosing CS PhD programs instead of econ/finance and top-tier faculty are leaving core econ/business/finance/etc. departments for specialized institutes/departments. And even within finance, already degraded, the under-60 talent that does remain isn't doing stuff like loan origination or credit risk assessment for obvious reasons. I think it's time to start strictly regulating things like credit scores. If not for reasons of privacy/equality, at least merely because the entire industry seems to be incompetent and getting worse. -- [1] https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-fintech/ https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-finte... [2] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2020/08/07/Financial-Intermediation-and-Technology-Whats-Old-Whats-New-49624 https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2020/08/07/Fin... [3] https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article/33/7/2845/5568311 https://academic.oup.com/rfs/article/33/7/2845/5568311

Pmop 5y ago
I know "assume incompetence before evil intent" but all of this is so conveniently set up to be an instrument for oppressing and shutting down dissent.

leshenka 5y ago

This is bizarre. I don't live in the US and have questions. a) how do they acquire users' web history? Do they purchase it from ISP? b) how do they know what ISP to ask? c) how does the ISP know my web history? Last time I checked, almost all websites I visit use https, so the only thing they can see is domain, not /pathname/ d) how does it feel to poke your nose where it doesn't belong?

p410n3 5y ago
a) Yes. Amongst others, many ISPs sell data. I picked comcast as a random example, here in Germany ISPs do that too: "We may also share personal information that does not identify you with third parties for their own marketing and advertising purposes, which you can opt out of. This mainly occurs when you interact with our websites and mobile applications that contain third-party cookies or other advertising trackers. To learn more about this, please read our Cookies Notice." Coupled with: https://www.vice.com/en/article/gygx7y/your-anonymous-browsing-data-isnt-actually-anonymous https://www.vice.com/en/article/gygx7y/your-anonymous-browsi... b) Afaik there's data brokers that know this and collect data from many different kinds of sources (isps being only one of them) those then sell to people like private investigators and private intelligence companies. Sadly I don't have a source ready, I learned this on a podcast and completely forgot which one. But the vice article above goes into that direction too. c) That's correct, but that's also already valuable on it's own. I assume the /pathnames/ can come from third party tracking / ad companies, but dns data alone is also valuable. It's all in the patters of the (meta)data d) Very likely exciting to many. Voyeurism and the "forbidden apple" aren't exactly new concepts
p410n3 5y ago
Additionally, take a look at the official Californian data Broker registry: https://oag.ca.gov/data-brokers https://oag.ca.gov/data-brokers

lettergram 5y ago

Those over at https://patriots.win https://patriots.win have been claiming this has been the plan for years. A slow move to a CCP style credit system and world government, led by the IMF (control through finances) and WHO (health experts managing governance) Even the vice chair of Berkshire Hathaway has said he wanted a Chinese style system (among many others): https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/30/investing/charlie-munger-china-berkshire-hathaway-warren-buffett/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/30/investing/charlie-munger-chin... It’s been real interesting to watch the conspiracy theories blend and become reality in some cases. Personally, I think it’s more of a lose collection of similar minded people leading to certain conclusions and/or outcomes. But it does feel like an economic victory in civilization ...

upearly3 5y ago
The simplest model I can think of goes like so: . Do the ruling classes benefit? . Is it practical/possible? In any case, the easiest response is to remove yourself from the system as best as possible. Slowly getting grey'ed out by participating with the hivemind is no way to live.
tjpnz 5y ago
>A slow move to a CCP style credit system and world government, led by the IMF (control through finances) and WHO (health experts managing governance) Even if this were credible I'm not worried. The WHO has shown itself incapable of leading anything.

archildress 5y ago

Credit scores are so fundamentally broken anyway. In financial analysis of a company, the number one item you tend to look at is "free cash flow" - the "cash available for the company to repay creditors or pay dividends and interest to investors." [1] Why then do we not take income into account in credit worthiness? Why do I not periodically upload my W2 or tax return to the credit bureaus in order to show that yes, I'm credit-worthy because my income makes it possible to service my debt? The entire idea of a credit score based on having had credit and paying past loans off is asinine. To start throwing nonsensical parameters like browsing history into the equation is second derivative asinine. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/freecashflow.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/freecashflow.asp

travoc 5y ago
Can you tell us who is giving out large loans without verifying income?
- runako 5y ago
  All major US credit card issuers. Many auto lenders. Most of consumer credit outside of mortgages operates without any real income verification. Here, "large" runs at least up to $50k-$100k per lender without any meaningful income verification.
  - rafale 5y ago
    They usually ask you for your income in the credit card application. If you lie, you may be committing credit card fraud.
    - devmor 5y ago
      Hence, the key word "VERIFYING"
      - intended 5y ago
        These issues are abstracted by the delinquency rate. Some X% will not pay on time. By reducing the information taken, do we add sufficient additional users to overcome the X% loss expected.

cube00 5y ago

From the IMF blog post[1]: > Even a well-paid expatriate moving to the United States can be caught in the conundrum of not getting a credit card for lack of credit record, and not having a credit record for lack of credit cards. > Fintech resolves the dilemma by tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases. I enjoy the framing of this; give us the keys to the kingdom and we'll give you even more credit (to get yourself further into debt!) Of course it won't stop there, better pay down that mortgage before you search or buy the "wrong" thing if you want to keep your house (they won't take it outright, just raise the interest rate on your loan because you now represent a higher risk based on "new information") [1] https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-fintech/ https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-finte...

jart 5y ago
The fact that the IMF thinks your choice of operating system should impact your creditworthiness is something I've been warning people about for months because it shows why we need cosmopolitan software. Since it's nice to have the ability to pick up and move our apps elsewhere should we discover we're using the "wrong" one. Because political winds change, but good engineering endures. https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Time to link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_tag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_tag and because of where it came from, maybe to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheist_Quakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheist_Quakers
- nanis 5y ago
  > The fact that the IMF thinks your choice of operating system should impact your creditworthiness is something At some point in the past or maybe in another universe, a well known accommodation booking site might or might not have been offering better rates to people using Linux than OSX. Not confirmed, obviously.

teekert 5y ago

Sounds nice, I am in full control of my browser history, at least the one that the IMF will see, sign me up. Soon, privacy is for nerds only anyway.

FractalHQ 5y ago
Privacy is already for “nerds” only. Coincidentally, I brought up Ublock Origin last night at a gathering, and multiple people claimed they had never heard of a browser extension.
- teekert 5y ago
  That's nice, but have you ever heard someone refer to IE as "just the normal internet"? Anyways, Whatever the law says, us nerds should be in charge anyway, right?! Or at least we should have some inherent privilege. These guys at the IMF have great ideas.
  - jart 5y ago
    It was only within the past few decades that being a nerd stopped having social stigma and we became elevated to the social status of normal people. But we don't have any real power since lawyers still have a monopoly on that. They fill all the seats in congress, even though they're .5% of the population. They have the power to read our emails. But if you think about it, legal code is really just a primitive form of code that lacks the precision modern programming languages can provide. Modern code has so much more benefit to offer the public, like things happening in microseconds whereas previously you'd have to wait weeks and pay thousands of dollars in fees. So the transition to the newer better technology where legal code is executable and written by nerds is inevitable, but people with power are afraid of losing their power, so it'll take time for society to evolve. Each time the lawyer ruling class does something bad, like build a website that doesn't work, they'll need to give us a little more power in order to save them. Then eventually, we'll win.
    - teekert 5y ago

rglover 5y ago

The answer is "no."

motohagiography 5y ago

It's like we need eternal vigilence against people like this or something. There is always someone who thinks they have a technocratic solution that optimizes for their own interests and then litigates for it and encircles us while insisting it is in ours. Nobody subject to this proposed measure desires it. Why on earth does the IMF, an organization staffed almost exclusively by academic economists and political appointees, think they have any expertise whatsoever in consumer credit decisions? These are people whose understanding of business stops at "getting funding," from presumed and paternalistic granting agencies. The entire premise of their organization was to use lending as a globalized policy leverage tool, to issue bad loans to weak governments for political reasons, and then demand policy concessions in exchange for renegotiation terms. These have always been really bad people. It does suggest we need better p2p lending instruments, and really, anything that these organizations think they can do, we should probably be developing alternatives that limit their influence.

swiley 5y ago

Don’t like crypto currency? Stop making it necessary.

RoryH 5y ago

Good luck with that!

Proven 5y ago

I'd expect something like that from the current USSA government.

peteyPete 5y ago

Haven't they just been talking about changing how credit scores are made and take it out of the hands of private parties and let the government handle it? https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2021/07/02/congress-credit-score-overhaul-proposal-act/46965135/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2021/07...

a9h74j 5y ago

Perhaps the long-term expectation is that people will be disappeared or dis-employed for their browsing history. If so, then your browsing history will be a predictor of your ability to repay a loan. A curiously valid predictor.

avnigo 5y ago

And they expect we'll just sit idly by and be surveilled? https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

isoblvck 5y ago

this is dystopian and another reasons why privacy matters. me googling stuff has absolutely no impact on creditworthiness

dogman144 5y ago

Cypherpunks write code. This is part of a larger trend of non-state actors with a huge variety of sometimes very pro-social missions (IMF, anti-child exploitation non-profits) advancing their respective missions through leveraging or targeting other non-state actors' platform control (tech companies, adtech infra) of platforms we totally rely on for day-to-day life (browsers, smart phones, OSs). The connective tissue is the selective analysis, or less generously: magical thinking, of tech's beneficial features for a specific mission while ignoring (or not understanding) what their views for tech-use cause in aggregate. The only counteraction that seems capable of effective reaction to this trend is forcing that "aggregate view." Developers on GitHub re: showing hash collisions for Apple's CSAM tech have recently lead the way in this space. Tools which passively search the web to generate browser histories which have beneficial credit score impact are another option. It's time to return to the mindset cypherpunks created, but expand it from their hyper-focus on privacy: write and socialize tools which politely but directly force tech-lite researchers and non-state actors with powerful missions and influence to acknowledge their blindspots (hopefully), or screw up their products (more likely).

stickfigure 5y ago

This is daft, but not (just) because of the Orwellian aspect. The problem is that if it was widely implemented, it would immediately stop working. Pretty much everyone here is familiar with Goodhart's Law; I'm surprised the IMF isn't. Use browsing history for credit scores, watch for the immediate proliferation of apps that generate/clean your browser history.

Jeff_Brown 5y ago

Whenever I have connectivity problems I get mad and google something childish, usually a curse word. I hope I don't run into financial consequences. On the bright side, if I do I'll probably not realize it ...

sureglymop 5y ago

Can anyone explain to me what credit score is and what it's used for? Does it have to have something to do with credit cards, taking loans or mortgages? (I'm from Europe and I've never borrowed money. I even only use a prepaid credit card, always wondered what benefits a real credit card would even bring.)

nobody9999 5y ago
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/ficoscore.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/ficoscore.asp

nyanpasu64 5y ago

>isps giving out "correlation attacks as a service" to "i swear i'm a good actor" companies >IMF recommends using ISP/OS/browsing history metadata for credit reports >salary data is being sent to credit companies I wish i could just only pick ISPs and jobs and houses and lenders and such which don't send information to tracking companies. Sadly working for someone who pays you is illegal unless you report legal names, tax forms, and such to the government... and even making an online purchase without revealing your identity is difficult and questionably legal. How viable it is to rent an apartment or buy a house, without letting others vacuum your personal information?

Barrin92 5y ago

People are very cynical about this but I honestly don't think there's in principle anything wrong with using such data to establish credit-worthiness, because as the article points out many people do not have a stable financial history and this creates a negative cycle. Fact of the matter is if people want access to credit the creditor has a legitimate interest in making an informed decision about whether the individual is reliable to set a correct rate. There is no way around this. The two other alternatives are, we don't give someone access to credit, or we hand out credit without any sort of metrics. The first one doesn't help anyone, the second one doesn't make any financial sense. Consumer data (the article also mentions online shopping history, which makes more sense than 'browser history'), in contrast to institutional banking data is ubiquitous even in poor countries because people now have wide access to phones and services. It would enable a lot of people to get access to credit.