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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

#191

Post by astura »

papln wrote: post #188
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.

Most banks and credit unions provide their customers notary services for free or low cost. Even Bank of F̶e̶e̶s̶ America provides free notary services.

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#192

Post by arrozconcosas »

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…

Great questions! This conversation is already pretty mature I think. Take a look at Bruce Schneier to see some great synthesized commentary on the questions you're posing.

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#193

Post by bonyt »

papln wrote: post #188
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.

That sounds high. In New York, at least, a notary can’t charge more than $2.00 in most circumstances.

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#194

Post by papln »

rhegart wrote: post #134

Dating apps too? Wtf, imagine if they knew your preferences were same sex and you flew to Dubai or China and you’ve criticized them, they could sell that data and get you arrested or honeypot you. Great way to get dissidents overseas with other compromising information

It's a fun game: Brainstorm hypothetical horrible abuses of private daat, and then find a news article that confirm the abuse has already happened.

http://theconversation.com/should-grindr-users-worry-about-w...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/technology/grindr-sets-of...

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#195

Post by gwd »

earthboundkid wrote: post #114
astura wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is already a big (and largely unaddressed) problem with the big 3 credit CRAs, if you know enough about a person you can very easily request their credit report and get the keys to the kingdom (so-to-speak) - everything you didn't already know. I mean, I already request credit reports for my husband without issue, for example (with his permission! - he finds it much easier to just ask me to do those things for h…

CRAs are a scam from top to bottom. A bank makes a lot of money, but in theory, it's doing an important job which benefits society. That job is independently assessing creditworthiness. Of course, it's hard to assess creditworthiness if you don't know if someone is making a lot of loans at different places. So, there needs to be a system for credit monitoring . But credit monitoring is not credit rating . Credit rati…

> What actually happened was first a criminal learned some information about me, then Verizon chose to give the criminal a line of credit on a cellphone, then the CRAs reported that I was profligate to anyone who asked. Saying "my identity" was stolen makes it seem like I was somehow a party to any of this. "My identity" is not a property of mine; it is a property of the reliability of the CRAs' data. What actually happened was the CRAs had their data polluted by the combination of a criminal and lax identity checking at Verizon, and then the various guilty parties forced me to do their data cleanup for them.

Right -- and really, that should be some class of negligent libel on behalf of the CRAs.

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#196

Post by gorgoiler »

papln wrote: post #188
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.

It shouldn’t be that expensive. Which state do you live in? I’ve had documents notarized for only nominal charges, through a notary I shared an office with in California.

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#198

Post by vastoi »

diminoten wrote: post #169
diafygi wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I originally studied chemical engineering, and one of the common catchphrases is, "regulations are written in blood." The reason there's a requirement to put a pressure relief valve on that tank is because at some point a tank like it didn't have one and it blew up and killed people. However, safety in chemical engineering has been evolving over centuries as we have understood more about the dangers and consequenc…

Another interpretation of that catchphrase is that once it's written, it can't be unwritten, and that's true with laws, or at least they've very difficult to change once on the books. We need to understand the full scope of the problem, rather than try to fix what isn't fully grasped, and honestly I have very little faith in the US government to accurately grasp the subtleties and nuances of the advertising and priva…

Not familiar with that interpretation, though there is another similar one that refers to what you mentioned: “written in stone”

Re: I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

#200

Post by whatshisface »

dkonofalski wrote: post #156
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…

>will our representatives actually give teeth to real data protection legislation No. The majority of them don't even understand what data is being collected, how it can be used, or the technology behind any of it. Until the people in office change, the idea that our representatives can or will protect us is toothless and spineless.

What trouble Congress is in! They have to be experts in law, warfare, every industry from oil refining to adtech, science (at least as far as funding it goes), ecology, economics, medicine...

In fact I would say that it's impossible to expect anyone to understand enough to know what they're legislating. Aside from being a powerful libertarian argument against the excessive involvement of government, I think it shows that we have to figure out a way to work around the fact that congressmen don't understand everything that they're in charge of, rather than trying to remedy it.

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