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EU agency advises against using search and browsing history for credit scores

192 points by imagine99 5y ago

hyperman1 5y ago
I always tought a credit score was an American ism, maybe including UK and Ireland for the EU. Does anyone know if there exists something like credit scores in Belgium, and how you find out what yours is?
- the_third_wave 5y ago
  In Sweden it is common for companies to check on income and payment records before accepting purchase orders. Income data is provided by the tax authorities while payment records are available through the enforcement agency (state bailiff, "Kronofogden"). If your income is deemed to be too low or you have a derelict payment on record (these records are in place for 3 years after the payment has been completed) you will be denied credit in which case you'll have to pay up-front.
  - zinekeller 5y ago
    But this is more like based on government data rather than, I know this is very American, private data shared by companies (and usually handled badly, whether in cybersecurity or identity correlation terms). Also, a credit checking association boasted that their members' data is 95% accurate - so that means that around 15 million Americans do have devastating errors on their credit score (through no fault of their own).
    - the_third_wave 5y ago
      The data comes from governmental institutions but the actual checking is done by private companies like UC [1] and Ratsit [2]. [1] https://www.uc.se/ https://www.uc.se/ [2] https://www.ratsit.se/ https://www.ratsit.se/
- AnssiH 5y ago
  Many (most?) EU countries have credit score systems and/or companies, and the details on how they work differ on a country-by-country basis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score#By_country In some countries credit score registries are restricted by law to only holding information on delinquent debt, so an average person has no entries in the credit score registries. This is the case here in Finland currently, though a national positive credit register is being planned for 2024 (https://www.vero.fi/en/positivecreditregister/ https://www.vero.fi/en/positivecreditregister/).
  - user5994461 5y ago
    You conclude that most EU countries have a credit score by linking to a Wikipedia article showing that almost none European country has a credit score?
    - Throwaway197401 5y ago
      It's not like the US system. It's a negative credit score meaning that you start as a good lender and then you can only fuck it up by not paying your bills. In the US we have positive credit score meaning you have to show you are a good lender to get a better score. The european ones are mostly much less granular.
    - AnssiH 5y ago
      > You conclude that most EU countries have a credit score by linking to a Wikipedia article showing that almost none European country has a credit score? The Wikipedia article does not show that almost no European country has a credit score or credit reporting system. It simply provides examples from various countries and is obviously not exhaustive, like most lists in Wikipedia. If you want to just see how many EU countries have any credit registries, these World Bank links have good data: - Public registries: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.CRD.PUBL.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.CRD.PUBL.ZS - Private registries: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.CRD.PRVT.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.CRD.PRVT.ZS They show most EU countries have such registries. I did go through a dozen countries manually before finding the above handy links, though... Of course one could argue whether or not those systems which only allow negative entries (and thus most people will have no data there) for a credit check should be considered credit score systems.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  Finland only has a negative credit system (basically a record of payment delinquencies) but there are plans to introduce a positive credit system similar to the US.
  - mimsee 5y ago
    Would you happen to have a source or link to an article mentioning about this?
    - AnssiH 5y ago
      Current private negative registries: - https://www.asiakastieto.fi/web/en/about-us/about-credit-data.html https://www.asiakastieto.fi/web/en/about-us/about-credit-dat... - https://www.dnb.com/fi-fi/tuotteet/bisnode-risk-guardian/ https://www.dnb.com/fi-fi/tuotteet/bisnode-risk-guardian/ (Finnish only) Current legislation: https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2007/20070527 https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2007/20070527 (Finnish and Swedish only, Google translate of Swedish text: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=se&tl=en&u=https://www.finlex.fi/sv/laki/ajantasa/2007/20070527 https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=se&tl=en&u=https:/... ) I'm not aware of a good English page describing the current system in detail, though. The Finnish pages of e.g. the Asiakastieto registry are more detailed. Planned positive public registry: https://www.vero.fi/en/positivecreditregister/ https://www.vero.fi/en/positivecreditregister/
- heurisko 5y ago
  In Germany, there is SCHUFA, which is a credit score. To rent in Germany, I had to have a SCHUFA check and a letter from my previous landlord saying I didn't have any outstanding debts, the "Mietschuldenfreiheitsbescheinigung."
  - bserge 5y ago
    Germany is like a proto-US. Ignore the media spin, it's the most capitalist country in Europe, where unequal contracts rule supreme and you get fines and prison time for nearly anything. I'm surprised the socialist policies stuck around, although there's still time to get rid of them.
    - throwaway210222 5y ago
      > where contracts rule supreme What, other than a contract that complies with the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, should be more supreme between two parties freely trading with each other? The weather report? A poem?
      - bserge 5y ago
        Somehow you replied before my edit. I meant unequal contracts, where one party has more power and the other is screwed if they, for whatever reason, cannot fulfill it. Which is to say, most contracts. The requirements and punishment for breach of contract are rather nutty even compared to the US.
    - heurisko 5y ago
      I don't get the media spin in the UK. I don't expect Germany to be anything other than capitalist, or as they say "ordoliberal", which is a market with strong state regulation. Considering their socialist policies started with Bismarck, I think they'll remain. But I think perhaps US-centric media somewhat over-eggs "socialist Europe".
    - luckylion 5y ago
      That's a weird take, meaningful fines are rare, except for parking/speeding tickets (because it's an easy way for cities to get cash), prison is very rare, you have to really go for the large crimes to not get probation. The one exception is coercive detention ("Beugehaft"), which they hand out instead of fines. It's a dumb concept, but it's also not that common. I also generally disagree that Germany is capitalist. Most markets are heavily regulated and full of subsidies, taxes are extremely high, and there's a fundamental mistrust of individualism.
- Joeri 5y ago
  Specifically for Belgium there is the CKP, which keeps track of all loans, including how timely they are paid, and which credit providers have to consult before granting any loan or line of credit. https://www.nbb.be/nl/kredietcentrales/centrale-voor-kredieten-aan-particulieren https://www.nbb.be/nl/kredietcentrales/centrale-voor-krediet... They also keep a black list of people who should be denied credit.
  - kome 5y ago
    so, in Belgium there is no creepy credit score, but a public registry. That's a more intelligent solution to the problem, like in the rest of Europe.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- xen0 5y ago
  Funnily enough, despite the advertising, there really is no such thing as a Credit 'Score' in the UK. Lenders get information about you from a Credit Reference Agency and will have their own internal systems to make decisions based on that. You can ask the reference agency for a copy of your credit report.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    The three "score" sites are partnered - and possibly funded - by Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. The "scores" are only loosely related to actual credit ratings, which are somewhat context/application dependent. In reality the sites are mostly just marketing fronts for various consumer services - credit cards, loans, mobile and energy contracts, and so on. They're notoriously aggressive about getting you to log in and keep checking your score. Partly because this looks good for partner engagement metrics, but also because it trains you to keep checking your score in an obsessive and gamified way.
    - xen0 5y ago
      I briefly worked in that space for my first job; a small company that would essentially resell you your own credit report for a 'not insignificant" monthly subscription. The TV advertising for credit score checking was just about to start around then as far as I could tell.
WA 5y ago
I don't get it: How do credit scoring companies in the EU even get access to browsing data or my search history? Wasn't the GDPR introduced to prevent data sharing like this in the first place if I don't explicitly opt-in to this particular use case, like, as a separate toggle and not "by using our service you agree to our privacy policy". I'm confused.
- thepangolino 5y ago
  Some members of the European Parliament have probably been lobbied to implement something like that and asked for an opinion of their in house experts on the matter.
- sfvisser 5y ago
  If you read the linked article by the IMF you start to get it, bunch of ECB economists exploring innovation in financial products and writing a meaningless blogpost about it. Bunch of buzzwords, nothing interesting. In their defense, they write: “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.” So it seems they’re not recommending this usage of data persee, but just say fintech is already doing this.
  - swiley 5y ago
    That's not innovation.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
So, on the assumption that this might start happening before it gets outlawed: Anyone know what queries my bot should be plugging into search engines to game this particular system? Shouldn't be too hard to have a machine ask Google 3000 times a day "what to do when you're super rich and deserve unlimited credit", right?
- bserge 5y ago
  It might be harder than it seems, Google is incredibly AIcist. I hit their threshold manually sometimes (it's like a dozen or so queries per minute) :D
  - tpmx 5y ago
    Those "we have detected unusual traffic" messages after unusually heavy (hey, we're not all average in our usage patterns) but very human usage are kinda evil. I wasted so much time wiping the machine and reinstalling the OS etc after getting paranoid that I had some undetectable kind of malware before I caught on.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      It usually means you're behind carrier grade nat or some other shared IP and someone else is running a bot.
      - tpmx 5y ago
        I wasn't behind CGNAT. Had a dedicated public ipv4 ip. I was just using google a lot, sometimes.
        londons_explore 5y ago
        Google does bot detection on a /24 basis. So you were still sharing with 253 other households most likely.
mnd999 5y ago
This is pretty obviously a bad idea. Credit agencies already have all the relevant information, whether you take out loans or credit cards and whether you pay them on time. Anything else is at best correlation, which as we know is not the same as causation.
- Sharlin 5y ago
  Having a "credit score" is not common in the EU in the first place, and even rarer is using credit just in order to prove that you're a good customer.
  - n_ary 5y ago
    Not sure about EU but Germany has SCHUFA scores, which hold equal power and works similarly.
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      The EU doesn't have a common credit score system because it doesn't have a common consumer banking system. Some countries have individual systems, but others don't.
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Correlation is plenty if your goal is to be right most of the time and have the loans you sell be slightly more profitable than a competitor. People forget that all these big data schemes are rather inaccurate at the individual user level, and that doesn't matter to the companies that use the data.
- HALtheWise 5y ago
  Unfortunately, while that may be enough data for you as a (presumably) relatively affluent position, there are a _lot_ of people who aren't able to get loans today because they don't have that sort of history. For the subset of those people who would in fact be able to pay back loans, they have a ton to gain from improvements in credit score accuracy. I had a friend at a startup trying to close some of that gap by reporting one-time rent payments to credit agencies, and the sheer scale of benefits they were trying to bring their users is hard to overstate. I guess my point here is that there are in fact large portions of the population that are not well served by credit scores today, and just because you are not among them doesn't mean they don't exist.
kome 5y ago
This Italian startups does exactly this kind of Orwellian credit scoring - like checking what browser, email provider and how old your computer is: https://www.fido.id/ https://www.fido.id/
eurasiantiger 5y ago
The only way to realistically enforce this is through software developers refusing to implement, like that’s gonna happen, or by whistleblowers, but by then, it is already too late.
- izacus 5y ago
  Really? Because the obvious way to "realistically enforce" this is by passing legislation banning such practices and demanding transparency in credit score calculations. And then massively fining credit companies which use those factors in calculation. Not sure how the heck would a single developer refuse to implement a system that earns boatload of money.
  - manachar 5y ago
    Exactly. Regulation is the primary method necessary to ensure that the market doesn't do an unethical but profitable thing. The other approach, which is employed by other specialties, is to have a professional trade accreditation group create certain standards that must be upheld by all people in that group. Doctors and lawyers are examples of how this works, and in what ways it fails too.
  - rob_c 5y ago
    I'm now expecting someone to claim they accidentally left the Chinese tools on for their EU accounts and only noticed when those with an interest in "squares" got hit with higher loan rates.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Yeah you can't touch the powerful entities, let the small guys do it and pretend it's enough.
swiley 5y ago
Everyone is going to start using TOR and similar for everything.
- Quillbert182 5y ago
  Yay, TOR speed increase.
crispyambulance 5y ago
Wait a second, the article suggests that a credit reporting agency could simply engage with google or other data brokers and obtain browsing history, NOT simply statistical target demographic roll-ups, but browsing data for actual specific named individuals. Is that really possible?
- White_Wolf 5y ago
  For the majority of people it is doable if you start gathering enough data (from all sources you can) to link devices and browsers that one person owns. Not easy for the average person but with the size of some of these behemoths... 100% possible.
  - crispyambulance 5y ago
    Yeah, I've heard about how it's "possible" to piece together information about individuals from data-brokers (see nytimes article https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...). But has any entity (outside of the CCP in China) ever done this on a large-enough scale that it would even begin to make sense for a "customer" like a credit reporting agency?
- asiachick 5y ago
  From Google, No! Google does not share user data. From "other data brokers" maybe
  - crispyambulance 5y ago
    OK, but is Google's ability to "share user-specific data" with an credit-reporting agency or any high-enough bidder, merely a matter of changing a policy clause and turning on the spigot?
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
If you want to get the average suburban Republican to lose their shit, all you have to do is tell them that what they do in private will affect them in real life. Imagine trying to explain to your wife that, when she takes care of all the household bills expenses, that your credit score never budges above 700 because of the weird late-night things you do when nobody's watching.
oblak 5y ago
I have no agency to back my claims but yeah, I would also like to advise against using deeply personal stuff to determine anyone's effective social score. Oh, you eat too much, or the wrong things. Oh, but smoke, drink. Oh, you're exercising enough. Oh, you're exercising too much. Oh, you're just exercising the right amount. I've not even touched the browsing history yet. Surely the end goal here is not simply exploiting big data they have on everyone. Outrageous as that may be, that would also mean the very final end of any pretence of privacy online. Everything finally tied to our legal real personas. Ugh...
dilippkumar 5y ago
I wonder if we are looking at the motivation for such a scheme backwards. The 2008 Banking disaster happened because banks were happy to give out tons of loans to people who couldn't pay them back. The response was to tighten various parameters that should have made it harder for banks to give out bad loans. I wonder if this is a way to break out of those handcuffs and allow banks to go back to giving out more loans. "Yeah this person has a terrible credit score, but look at their browsing history. They are looking at healthy diets, they are comparing prices and shopping cheap - all signs of a responsible adult. Why should we deny this upstanding member of the society access to credit and help them become homeowners?" Update: Thinking about it some more, looking at browsing history is a fantastic way to identify vulnerable members of the society who can be talked into signing themselves up for new loans. History shows that bankers have loved to do this.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  > "Yeah this person has a terrible credit score, but look at their browsing history. They are looking at healthy diets, they are comparing prices and shopping cheap - all signs of a responsible adult. Why should we deny this upstanding member of the society access to credit and help them become homeowners?" Oh god, that could be my browsing history but it's not me nor what I do and they would be in for a rude awakening.
Tycho 5y ago
It just boggles the fucking mind. How are credit score companies even legal in the first place? Isn’t the point of GDPR (and all the other data protection laws) to stop companies collecting your personal info and then sharing it with other parties against your own interests? Can I call up Experian and demand they delete my file? Please someone just class-action sue these guys into oblivion.
- sirsinsalot 5y ago
  Not sure why this is getting downvoted. I get that GDPR permits legitimate interest but being able to request deletion should be doable. It isnt.
Goety 5y ago
'advises against' well a bit too late for that
rob_c 5y ago
Slightly concerning how far the overton window has shifted in the last few years...
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Start a company that searches for you: “How to pay my bills on time” “How to save more money for retirement”
skeletal88 5y ago
Where I am from in Europe, in Estonia, we havr a negative credit score system and when you want to get a big loan then you have to give the bsnk your account transactions from the last 6 months so they can see what you are spending on. Casinos and such are frowned upon. But nobody uses Credit cards. There are talks about creating a positive credit registry also, but it is for the short term lenders who should be able to see that you took out a loan yesterday and then they should not give you one today
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  Sounds easily gamed. Can't you just use cash at the casino? I suppose I'm assuming rational actors though - downrating people for having casino payments on their card might still make statistical sense.
  - Duralias 5y ago
    Would look odd for you to take out tons of money through an ATM though. Someone who needed to game that system probably spends enough that it would be very hard to explain away those withdrawals.
MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
If I were to lend you money, would you pay me back in full, on time? To venture a guess, I'd like to know: - the outcome of all of your past debts, - your current sources of income, - likely future sources of income, - and a valuation of (some) of your assets that I might be able to go after if you don't pay me. To me, any other indicator used in some kind of correlation game is just laziness. Let's just identify people we don't like and give them low credit scores, and give ourselves high credit scores. Right? [edited for formatting]
arp242 5y ago
From the linked IMF article: > 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. Recent research documents that, once powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, these alternative data sources are often superior than traditional credit assessment methods, and can advance financial inclusion, by, for example, enabling more credit to informal workers and households and firms in rural areas. No research is linked, but assuming this kind of statistical data is roughly accurate in the first place for the sake of the argument, feeding that in some black box ML "AI" system is likely to produce a fair amount of inaccurate results, and since it's all a magical system you can't really argue with it; it's just "computer says no". Even employees high up the food chain (if you get that far) won't be able to really help you either, because insight in these systems is hard and deal poorly with exceptional situations (and turns out there are a lot of those, it's just that all of them are different). Without going in to all the privacy aspects and other problems, it's a good example of the dehumanisation of our society. At the end of the day you just can't beat human judgement and "common sense", but the possibility for this is increasingly taken from us. Sure, humans are not perfect but just because a few mistakes are made doesn't mean taking away the entire human aspect is desirable.

192 points by imagine99 5y ago

I always tought a credit score was an American ism, maybe including UK and Ireland for the EU. Does anyone know if there exists something like credit scores in Belgium, and how you find out what yours is?

the_third_wave 5y ago
In Sweden it is common for companies to check on income and payment records before accepting purchase orders. Income data is provided by the tax authorities while payment records are available through the enforcement agency (state bailiff, "Kronofogden"). If your income is deemed to be too low or you have a derelict payment on record (these records are in place for 3 years after the payment has been completed) you will be denied credit in which case you'll have to pay up-front.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  But this is more like based on government data rather than, I know this is very American, private data shared by companies (and usually handled badly, whether in cybersecurity or identity correlation terms). Also, a credit checking association boasted that their members' data is 95% accurate - so that means that around 15 million Americans do have devastating errors on their credit score (through no fault of their own).
  - the_third_wave 5y ago
    The data comes from governmental institutions but the actual checking is done by private companies like UC [1] and Ratsit [2]. [1] https://www.uc.se/ https://www.uc.se/ [2] https://www.ratsit.se/ https://www.ratsit.se/
AnssiH 5y ago
Many (most?) EU countries have credit score systems and/or companies, and the details on how they work differ on a country-by-country basis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score#By_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_score#By_country In some countries credit score registries are restricted by law to only holding information on delinquent debt, so an average person has no entries in the credit score registries. This is the case here in Finland currently, though a national positive credit register is being planned for 2024 (https://www.vero.fi/en/positivecreditregister/ https://www.vero.fi/en/positivecreditregister/).
- user5994461 5y ago
  You conclude that most EU countries have a credit score by linking to a Wikipedia article showing that almost none European country has a credit score?
  - Throwaway197401 5y ago
    It's not like the US system. It's a negative credit score meaning that you start as a good lender and then you can only fuck it up by not paying your bills. In the US we have positive credit score meaning you have to show you are a good lender to get a better score. The european ones are mostly much less granular.
  - AnssiH 5y ago
    > You conclude that most EU countries have a credit score by linking to a Wikipedia article showing that almost none European country has a credit score? The Wikipedia article does not show that almost no European country has a credit score or credit reporting system. It simply provides examples from various countries and is obviously not exhaustive, like most lists in Wikipedia. If you want to just see how many EU countries have any credit registries, these World Bank links have good data: - Public registries: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.CRD.PUBL.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.CRD.PUBL.ZS - Private registries: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.CRD.PRVT.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.CRD.PRVT.ZS They show most EU countries have such registries. I did go through a dozen countries manually before finding the above handy links, though... Of course one could argue whether or not those systems which only allow negative entries (and thus most people will have no data there) for a credit check should be considered credit score systems.
Hamuko 5y ago
Finland only has a negative credit system (basically a record of payment delinquencies) but there are plans to introduce a positive credit system similar to the US.
- mimsee 5y ago
  Would you happen to have a source or link to an article mentioning about this?
  - AnssiH 5y ago
    Current private negative registries: - https://www.asiakastieto.fi/web/en/about-us/about-credit-data.html https://www.asiakastieto.fi/web/en/about-us/about-credit-dat... - https://www.dnb.com/fi-fi/tuotteet/bisnode-risk-guardian/ https://www.dnb.com/fi-fi/tuotteet/bisnode-risk-guardian/ (Finnish only) Current legislation: https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2007/20070527 https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/2007/20070527 (Finnish and Swedish only, Google translate of Swedish text: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=se&tl=en&u=https://www.finlex.fi/sv/laki/ajantasa/2007/20070527 https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=se&tl=en&u=https:/... ) I'm not aware of a good English page describing the current system in detail, though. The Finnish pages of e.g. the Asiakastieto registry are more detailed. Planned positive public registry: https://www.vero.fi/en/positivecreditregister/ https://www.vero.fi/en/positivecreditregister/
heurisko 5y ago
In Germany, there is SCHUFA, which is a credit score. To rent in Germany, I had to have a SCHUFA check and a letter from my previous landlord saying I didn't have any outstanding debts, the "Mietschuldenfreiheitsbescheinigung."
- bserge 5y ago
  Germany is like a proto-US. Ignore the media spin, it's the most capitalist country in Europe, where unequal contracts rule supreme and you get fines and prison time for nearly anything. I'm surprised the socialist policies stuck around, although there's still time to get rid of them.
  - throwaway210222 5y ago
    > where contracts rule supreme What, other than a contract that complies with the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, should be more supreme between two parties freely trading with each other? The weather report? A poem?
    - bserge 5y ago
      Somehow you replied before my edit. I meant unequal contracts, where one party has more power and the other is screwed if they, for whatever reason, cannot fulfill it. Which is to say, most contracts. The requirements and punishment for breach of contract are rather nutty even compared to the US.
  - heurisko 5y ago
    I don't get the media spin in the UK. I don't expect Germany to be anything other than capitalist, or as they say "ordoliberal", which is a market with strong state regulation. Considering their socialist policies started with Bismarck, I think they'll remain. But I think perhaps US-centric media somewhat over-eggs "socialist Europe".
  - luckylion 5y ago
    That's a weird take, meaningful fines are rare, except for parking/speeding tickets (because it's an easy way for cities to get cash), prison is very rare, you have to really go for the large crimes to not get probation. The one exception is coercive detention ("Beugehaft"), which they hand out instead of fines. It's a dumb concept, but it's also not that common. I also generally disagree that Germany is capitalist. Most markets are heavily regulated and full of subsidies, taxes are extremely high, and there's a fundamental mistrust of individualism.
Joeri 5y ago
Specifically for Belgium there is the CKP, which keeps track of all loans, including how timely they are paid, and which credit providers have to consult before granting any loan or line of credit. https://www.nbb.be/nl/kredietcentrales/centrale-voor-kredieten-aan-particulieren https://www.nbb.be/nl/kredietcentrales/centrale-voor-krediet... They also keep a black list of people who should be denied credit.
- kome 5y ago
  so, in Belgium there is no creepy credit score, but a public registry. That's a more intelligent solution to the problem, like in the rest of Europe.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xen0 5y ago
Funnily enough, despite the advertising, there really is no such thing as a Credit 'Score' in the UK. Lenders get information about you from a Credit Reference Agency and will have their own internal systems to make decisions based on that. You can ask the reference agency for a copy of your credit report.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  The three "score" sites are partnered - and possibly funded - by Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. The "scores" are only loosely related to actual credit ratings, which are somewhat context/application dependent. In reality the sites are mostly just marketing fronts for various consumer services - credit cards, loans, mobile and energy contracts, and so on. They're notoriously aggressive about getting you to log in and keep checking your score. Partly because this looks good for partner engagement metrics, but also because it trains you to keep checking your score in an obsessive and gamified way.
  - xen0 5y ago
    I briefly worked in that space for my first job; a small company that would essentially resell you your own credit report for a 'not insignificant" monthly subscription. The TV advertising for credit score checking was just about to start around then as far as I could tell.

WA 5y ago

I don't get it: How do credit scoring companies in the EU even get access to browsing data or my search history? Wasn't the GDPR introduced to prevent data sharing like this in the first place if I don't explicitly opt-in to this particular use case, like, as a separate toggle and not "by using our service you agree to our privacy policy". I'm confused.

thepangolino 5y ago
Some members of the European Parliament have probably been lobbied to implement something like that and asked for an opinion of their in house experts on the matter.
sfvisser 5y ago
If you read the linked article by the IMF you start to get it, bunch of ECB economists exploring innovation in financial products and writing a meaningless blogpost about it. Bunch of buzzwords, nothing interesting. In their defense, they write: “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.” So it seems they’re not recommending this usage of data persee, but just say fintech is already doing this.
- swiley 5y ago
  That's not innovation.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

So, on the assumption that this might start happening before it gets outlawed: Anyone know what queries my bot should be plugging into search engines to game this particular system? Shouldn't be too hard to have a machine ask Google 3000 times a day "what to do when you're super rich and deserve unlimited credit", right?

bserge 5y ago
It might be harder than it seems, Google is incredibly AIcist. I hit their threshold manually sometimes (it's like a dozen or so queries per minute) :D
- tpmx 5y ago
  Those "we have detected unusual traffic" messages after unusually heavy (hey, we're not all average in our usage patterns) but very human usage are kinda evil. I wasted so much time wiping the machine and reinstalling the OS etc after getting paranoid that I had some undetectable kind of malware before I caught on.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    It usually means you're behind carrier grade nat or some other shared IP and someone else is running a bot.
    - tpmx 5y ago
      I wasn't behind CGNAT. Had a dedicated public ipv4 ip. I was just using google a lot, sometimes.
      - londons_explore 5y ago
        Google does bot detection on a /24 basis. So you were still sharing with 253 other households most likely.

mnd999 5y ago

This is pretty obviously a bad idea. Credit agencies already have all the relevant information, whether you take out loans or credit cards and whether you pay them on time. Anything else is at best correlation, which as we know is not the same as causation.

Sharlin 5y ago
Having a "credit score" is not common in the EU in the first place, and even rarer is using credit just in order to prove that you're a good customer.
- n_ary 5y ago
  Not sure about EU but Germany has SCHUFA scores, which hold equal power and works similarly.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    The EU doesn't have a common credit score system because it doesn't have a common consumer banking system. Some countries have individual systems, but others don't.
londons_explore 5y ago
Correlation is plenty if your goal is to be right most of the time and have the loans you sell be slightly more profitable than a competitor. People forget that all these big data schemes are rather inaccurate at the individual user level, and that doesn't matter to the companies that use the data.
HALtheWise 5y ago
Unfortunately, while that may be enough data for you as a (presumably) relatively affluent position, there are a _lot_ of people who aren't able to get loans today because they don't have that sort of history. For the subset of those people who would in fact be able to pay back loans, they have a ton to gain from improvements in credit score accuracy. I had a friend at a startup trying to close some of that gap by reporting one-time rent payments to credit agencies, and the sheer scale of benefits they were trying to bring their users is hard to overstate. I guess my point here is that there are in fact large portions of the population that are not well served by credit scores today, and just because you are not among them doesn't mean they don't exist.

kome 5y ago

This Italian startups does exactly this kind of Orwellian credit scoring - like checking what browser, email provider and how old your computer is: https://www.fido.id/ https://www.fido.id/

eurasiantiger 5y ago

The only way to realistically enforce this is through software developers refusing to implement, like that’s gonna happen, or by whistleblowers, but by then, it is already too late.

izacus 5y ago
Really? Because the obvious way to "realistically enforce" this is by passing legislation banning such practices and demanding transparency in credit score calculations. And then massively fining credit companies which use those factors in calculation. Not sure how the heck would a single developer refuse to implement a system that earns boatload of money.
- manachar 5y ago
  Exactly. Regulation is the primary method necessary to ensure that the market doesn't do an unethical but profitable thing. The other approach, which is employed by other specialties, is to have a professional trade accreditation group create certain standards that must be upheld by all people in that group. Doctors and lawyers are examples of how this works, and in what ways it fails too.
- rob_c 5y ago
  I'm now expecting someone to claim they accidentally left the Chinese tools on for their EU accounts and only noticed when those with an interest in "squares" got hit with higher loan rates.
imtringued 5y ago
Yeah you can't touch the powerful entities, let the small guys do it and pretend it's enough.

swiley 5y ago

Everyone is going to start using TOR and similar for everything.

Quillbert182 5y ago
Yay, TOR speed increase.

crispyambulance 5y ago

Wait a second, the article suggests that a credit reporting agency could simply engage with google or other data brokers and obtain browsing history, NOT simply statistical target demographic roll-ups, but browsing data for actual specific named individuals. Is that really possible?

White_Wolf 5y ago
For the majority of people it is doable if you start gathering enough data (from all sources you can) to link devices and browsers that one person owns. Not easy for the average person but with the size of some of these behemoths... 100% possible.
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  Yeah, I've heard about how it's "possible" to piece together information about individuals from data-brokers (see nytimes article https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...). But has any entity (outside of the CCP in China) ever done this on a large-enough scale that it would even begin to make sense for a "customer" like a credit reporting agency?
asiachick 5y ago
From Google, No! Google does not share user data. From "other data brokers" maybe
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  OK, but is Google's ability to "share user-specific data" with an credit-reporting agency or any high-enough bidder, merely a matter of changing a policy clause and turning on the spigot?

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

If you want to get the average suburban Republican to lose their shit, all you have to do is tell them that what they do in private will affect them in real life. Imagine trying to explain to your wife that, when she takes care of all the household bills expenses, that your credit score never budges above 700 because of the weird late-night things you do when nobody's watching.

oblak 5y ago

I have no agency to back my claims but yeah, I would also like to advise against using deeply personal stuff to determine anyone's effective social score. Oh, you eat too much, or the wrong things. Oh, but smoke, drink. Oh, you're exercising enough. Oh, you're exercising too much. Oh, you're just exercising the right amount. I've not even touched the browsing history yet. Surely the end goal here is not simply exploiting big data they have on everyone. Outrageous as that may be, that would also mean the very final end of any pretence of privacy online. Everything finally tied to our legal real personas. Ugh...

dilippkumar 5y ago

I wonder if we are looking at the motivation for such a scheme backwards. The 2008 Banking disaster happened because banks were happy to give out tons of loans to people who couldn't pay them back. The response was to tighten various parameters that should have made it harder for banks to give out bad loans. I wonder if this is a way to break out of those handcuffs and allow banks to go back to giving out more loans. "Yeah this person has a terrible credit score, but look at their browsing history. They are looking at healthy diets, they are comparing prices and shopping cheap - all signs of a responsible adult. Why should we deny this upstanding member of the society access to credit and help them become homeowners?" Update: Thinking about it some more, looking at browsing history is a fantastic way to identify vulnerable members of the society who can be talked into signing themselves up for new loans. History shows that bankers have loved to do this.

johnchristopher 5y ago
> "Yeah this person has a terrible credit score, but look at their browsing history. They are looking at healthy diets, they are comparing prices and shopping cheap - all signs of a responsible adult. Why should we deny this upstanding member of the society access to credit and help them become homeowners?" Oh god, that could be my browsing history but it's not me nor what I do and they would be in for a rude awakening.

Tycho 5y ago

It just boggles the fucking mind. How are credit score companies even legal in the first place? Isn’t the point of GDPR (and all the other data protection laws) to stop companies collecting your personal info and then sharing it with other parties against your own interests? Can I call up Experian and demand they delete my file? Please someone just class-action sue these guys into oblivion.

sirsinsalot 5y ago
Not sure why this is getting downvoted. I get that GDPR permits legitimate interest but being able to request deletion should be doable. It isnt.

Goety 5y ago

'advises against' well a bit too late for that

rob_c 5y ago

Slightly concerning how far the overton window has shifted in the last few years...

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Start a company that searches for you: “How to pay my bills on time” “How to save more money for retirement”

skeletal88 5y ago

Where I am from in Europe, in Estonia, we havr a negative credit score system and when you want to get a big loan then you have to give the bsnk your account transactions from the last 6 months so they can see what you are spending on. Casinos and such are frowned upon. But nobody uses Credit cards. There are talks about creating a positive credit registry also, but it is for the short term lenders who should be able to see that you took out a loan yesterday and then they should not give you one today

MaxBarraclough 5y ago
Sounds easily gamed. Can't you just use cash at the casino? I suppose I'm assuming rational actors though - downrating people for having casino payments on their card might still make statistical sense.
- Duralias 5y ago
  Would look odd for you to take out tons of money through an ATM though. Someone who needed to game that system probably spends enough that it would be very hard to explain away those withdrawals.

MathMonkeyMan 5y ago

If I were to lend you money, would you pay me back in full, on time? To venture a guess, I'd like to know: - the outcome of all of your past debts, - your current sources of income, - likely future sources of income, - and a valuation of (some) of your assets that I might be able to go after if you don't pay me. To me, any other indicator used in some kind of correlation game is just laziness. Let's just identify people we don't like and give them low credit scores, and give ourselves high credit scores. Right? [edited for formatting]

arp242 5y ago

From the linked IMF article: > 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. Recent research documents that, once powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, these alternative data sources are often superior than traditional credit assessment methods, and can advance financial inclusion, by, for example, enabling more credit to informal workers and households and firms in rural areas. No research is linked, but assuming this kind of statistical data is roughly accurate in the first place for the sake of the argument, feeding that in some black box ML "AI" system is likely to produce a fair amount of inaccurate results, and since it's all a magical system you can't really argue with it; it's just "computer says no". Even employees high up the food chain (if you get that far) won't be able to really help you either, because insight in these systems is hard and deal poorly with exceptional situations (and turns out there are a lot of those, it's just that all of them are different). Without going in to all the privacy aspects and other problems, it's a good example of the dehumanisation of our society. At the end of the day you just can't beat human judgement and "common sense", but the possibility for this is increasingly taken from us. Sure, humans are not perfect but just because a few mistakes are made doesn't mean taking away the entire human aspect is desirable.