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I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

nytimes.com

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Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#181

Post by lisper »

Symmetry wrote: post #166
lisper wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The link doesn't. The experience you will have if you actually go try to start a bank will. I only provided the link to point you to the entrance of the rabbit hole.

I don't see how the fact that the process of becoming a bank is strictly regulated means that it's corrupt?

It doesn't. What makes it corrupt is that banks are not in fact strictly regulated, it only appears that way. But there is no way I can prove that to you in an HN comment. I would have to write a book. I can point you to a lot of circumstantial evidence but there is nothing probative in the public record (see below). The only definitive evidence I have of the corruption in the system is my personal experience, some accounts of which I have published on my blog. But if you don't put credence in my conclusion, then you will likely not put credence in my evidence either, because I can't prove any of it. The only way I can prove it is to invite you to undertake the same journey I did. If you do that, I predict you will learn first-hand the same thing I did: the system is corrupt, and whether or not you succeed in penetrating it will ultimately depend entirely on whether you have the right connections and whether they decide that you can be trusted to toe the line on the unwritten rules, the first of which is that you never talk about the unwritten rules to anyone who is not a member of the club.

Note that I never joined the club, so my theory of the unwritten rules is pure speculation. No one ever sat me down and said, "Look, son, this is how it is..." But I did spend ten years of my life on this, and during that time I accumulated a lot of evidence that I have a very hard time explaining in any other way. It eventually led me to a serious existential crisis.

BTW, it's not just the financial system. Academia is corrupt in much the same way, and in that case I did join the club so I can speak to that with some authority. That experience is one of the things that allowed me to recognize what I was seeing in the financial industry. But both academia and finance are centuries-old industries. They have become very skilled at hiding their corruption from prying eyes, and a big part of the strategy is making it appear that anyone who accuses them of corruption is a crackpot. (Which is, of course, exactly what a crackpot would say, and that, too, is part of the strategy. It's a horrible catch-22.)

So you have to decide whether to believe me or not, whether you think I'm a crackpot or not. Before you jump to a conclusion I invite you to look up my record. My life is pretty well documented on the web.

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#183

Post by aledalgrande »

Frost1x wrote: post #96
Cieplak wrote: post #26

I’m curious what sort of due diligence these companies must do to authenticate you as a person prior to satisfying an information retrieval request. Given that the exchange is entirely digital, it seems plausible that there are bad actors who would pose as someone else to gain access to their personal information. What sort of liability does one of these data controllers bear when they fail to properly authenticate a…

I suspect we as a society need new legislation to deal with these sort of issues. Before, much of this was incredibly difficult to impossible so legislation and regulation was entirely avoidable and relatively rare occurence could be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. At this point, technology has enabled this sort of behavior at mass scale, now revealing far more personal and useful information about individuals. A…

Isn't GDPR enforcing on this vein? You could build something similar in North America.

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#184

Post by gorgoiler »

Having your drivers license fall into the hands of a bad actor must be a complete nightmare.

Uploading a photo of government ID is also the backdoor to all sorts of things. The one that worries me is my Facebook account, including all my private messages.

A better idea: the data collectors should ask me for a notarized letter confirming my identity (the notary has seen my government ID) which references a unique support-ticket number from the data collector (avoid replay attacks). The data collector would verify the letter out-of-band with the notary too? I’d be a lot happier with that.

What else would such a pen and paper protocol need to work? The notary network is a handy piece of national infra — it can be trusted in this way? Legislation would be needed to force the data collectors to adhere to the protocol.

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#186

Post by wongarsu »

aedocw wrote: post #171
hirundo wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it has value, both to the advertiser and to the target, compared to un-targeted advertising. Advertising is an attempt to transfer information. Targeted ads means that the information is more likely to be relevant, whatever its other downsides. Let's not throw out that baby with the bath water.

"Advertising is an attempt to transfer information" is deeply misguided unless you adjust that to say "transfer very biased information". Advertising is an attempt to influence one party to give their money to another party, generally through manipulation and guile. Targeted advertising is like the difference between spam and spear phising. The person being advertised to rarely (if ever) benefits.

I benefit if Youtube shows me advertisements for desk chairs and lathes instead of beauty products and kids toys. Targeted advertisements help me discover new products and product categories, while untargeted advertising just wastes my time. This is in essence no different than companies buying advertising time in specific TV shows with a known audience.

Of course the abuses are also plentiful and dangerous. We probably do need a lot of regulation. But in general targeted advertisement is a useful thing to have.

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#187

Post by aledalgrande »

nojvek wrote: post #108
Frost1x wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect we as a society need new legislation to deal with these sort of issues. Before, much of this was incredibly difficult to impossible so legislation and regulation was entirely avoidable and relatively rare occurence could be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. At this point, technology has enabled this sort of behavior at mass scale, now revealing far more personal and useful information about individuals. A…

Looking out how the spam act played out, which allows implicit opt in compared to Europe’s explicit opt-in. I believe US govt will always be at the mercy of corporations. Now some things are great. Like CCPA, California’s version of GDPR. But getting it accepted throughout the US is a mammoth task. I have hope though.

I've been wondering: if there was a world government, corporations would probably reach a point in which they are unstoppable from a law point of view. The bigger the machine, the harder to steer it in a good direction.

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#188

Post by papln »

gorgoiler wrote: post #184

Having your drivers license fall into the hands of a bad actor must be a complete nightmare. Uploading a photo of government ID is also the backdoor to all sorts of things. The one that worries me is my Facebook account, including all my private messages. A better idea: the data collectors should ask me for a notarized letter confirming my identity (the notary has seen my government ID) which references a unique supp…

Notarization essentially puts a $30-$100 price tag on the operation, which meets with a lot of resistance.

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#189

Post by sethbannon »

SamBam wrote: post #146
astura wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want life insurance then you are required to give permission to view this data about you. If you don't want to give permission, then you don't get life insurance. https://www.rxhistories.com/irix/medical-data/ >How It Works >1 Applicants sign a HIPAA-compliant authorization, enabling insurers to retrieve their medical information >2 Insurers electronically query Milliman IntelliScript in real-time >3 Milliman…

But I never gave Milliman permission to hold this data, so didn't they already violate HIPAA?

Likely deep within the terms and conditions you agreed to with your private health insurance company, you did indeed give permission.

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#190

Post by Androider »

The Sift report is based on your email address, among other things. My email box is full of random people's insurance quotes, medical and electric bills, birthday greetings, and welcome emails to services I've never heard of. We all know the company is going to spend approximately zero time to sanity check or sanitize that data firehose. Turns out the movie Brazil was a documentary.
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