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Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you

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Re: Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you

#151

Post by annoyingnoob »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #129
annoyingnoob wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are talking about would no longer be considered insurance. > the accounting profession formally recognizes in financial accounting standards, the premium cannot be so large that there is not a reasonable chance of a significant loss to the insurer The vast majority of automobiles do not hold their value, they depreciate over time. If I've had my car for say 5 years and I've paid the premiums for 5 years, I m…

The payout is the risk you transferred to the insurance company. You’re not “supposed” to get all your premiums back because then why would anyone start an insurance company? Its not a bank account, its more like a lottery ticket. The insurer assumes risk of covering an accident in exchange for the guaranteed income of your monthly premiums. In return you exchange a fixed regular payment for protection against an unl…

I'm not asking for my premiums back and don't expect it. Just saying that after 5 years of premiums the insurance company would be break even on that policy. If premiums are high enough its not really insurance. Not that everyone has the same insurance company but generally if everyone has paid premiums that meet the value of the car after 5 years then all of the insurance company risk is with cars less than 5 years old. The insurance company will keep pushing for more intrusion into your life to 'give you the best rate' but really you'll just pay more. Like you said if it wasn't profitable then no one would do it. Making apps and integrating with telematics doesn't come for free and its not coming out of the insurance company bottom line.

Re: Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you

#152

Post by syshum »

cactus2093 wrote: post #150
syshum wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> And it’s not even just used for credit anymore, renting an apartment now usually requires a credit check. Renting an apartment is credit, I am not sure why you view it has something other than credit? The owner of the property is loaning (credit) the use of their property to you for X amount of time in exchange for N amount of dollars, payable over monthly installments How is that not credit? A better example is e…

Renting is not credit because you don’t get the thing all upfront and then pay for it later. If fact if anything, the renter is giving the landlord up to one month of rent as credit because rent is usually due on the first of the month in order to be able to live there that month. But that’s just sort of an artifact of the discretization of the payment, as far as the arrangement goes there is an ongoing equal trade o…

>>Renting is not credit because you don’t get the thing all upfront and then pay for it later. If fact if anything, the renter is giving the landlord up to one month of rent as credit because rent is usually due on the first of the month in order to be able to live there that month

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a lease works, you are equating it to something like a prepaid phone bill, and that is not at all what a lease is

You are obligated the pay the full amount of the lease, if you up and move in the middle you still owe the landlord the full amount.

The property owner would run a credit check for the same reason as a lender would, to judge if you are responsible person that would repay this obligation under the terms of the agreement, it far closer to a loan then you seem to want to give it credit for.

Further the use of credit scores and other background checks only become more important the harder it becomes to evict bad tenants

Something that "there is an ongoing equal trade of values between both parties." would be terminable by either party the second that value proposition changes, this is not the case with Rental property where the interaction is governed not only by the terms of the lease but layers of federal and local laws

>If I ask a bank why they denied my loan, they won’t tell me about the specific activities I’ve done that prove me un creditworthy

If you scroll to my other comments I advocate for changing that, I am a big advocate of personal data ownership and believe any person should have the right at any time to request all data any company collected about them.

>> (sometimes I can press to ask what they can see on my report and if they’re feeling nice they may tell me, but they don’t have to).

You have the right to get an annual credit report from every credit agency every year, that is would they would see

>The fact that there’s no party you can ask to just evaluate ahead of time what the result will be, or to see what i can do to get myself above the threshold, so the individual is always at a disadvantage of information asymmetry, is what makes the system bogus.

Yes and no, there is 100% guarantee nothing is in life, but there are several ways you can get a good fact based analysis of your general credit worthiness, can it predict if a given institution would grant you a loan... no. but it can predict if you have a good chance at some institution giving you a loan.

The lower your general score obviously the less reliable these tools will be, If you have a FICO of 810 + provable long term income then chances are anyone will loan to you, if you have a FICO of 620 well that become more of crap shoot and will be based on many other factors than just your credit score, similarly if you have a high FICO score but unreliable income (self employed) then it also becomes more of a crap shoot.

>>If I’ve been burned by this as a high paid tech worker with just a couple of mistakes in my autopay settings in the past

I hear stories like this often but this is not my personal experience. Not saying it cant happen but companies I do business with do not insta report you if you autopay fails...

You have to be 60+ days over due before it shows up on the credit report... and with all the modern alerting and other tools I fail to believe that a "simple auto-pay mistake" is what caused one to become 60+ days delinquent on a payment

Re: Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you

#153

Post by syshum »

gruez wrote: post #142
syshum wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there are a few problems with this 1. I would like you to define "most places" as for the first 35 years of my life I was a renter and in that time I only ever had to pay "First and last" in one instance. Most of the time it was The first months rent, and security deposit(which was often something small like $100 or $200), no "last months rent" so around here it was not "most places" 2. Even if you use that as a…

I'm not sure I follow here. The transaction might be structured as the landlord giving you 12 months of housing service at the time of signing of the contract (or when the lease starts) and you paying him in installments of 12 payments (with the first one or two upfront), but you don't "take delivery" of the service all at once. It's given to you on a continuous basis. Therefore, at any moment during the 12 months, y…

The second you sign the lease you owe the landlort the full amount. It is a debt you owe.

Does not matter if you realize the use of the property or not, for example if you signed a Lease on an apartment in January, then due to a global pandemic you could not move (through not fault of the landlord) in until July you would still owe the rent for the 6 months even though you did not occupy the unit.

Re: Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you

#154

Post by annoyingnoob »

kofejnik wrote: post #109
annoyingnoob wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? My insurance company offers programs with apps or use of telematics. I don't use any apps and don't allow access to any telematics. After the location data scandal last year my cell phone company claims to have stopped selling location data. I don't knowing allow any access to my location data.

A modern car very likely already has a built in gsm module and possibly gps as well. If so, this data is collected and could be subpoenaed by whoever

That is different than monitoring it over time as a way to set rates.

Re: Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you

#155

Post by m463 »

elliekelly wrote: post #3
dijksterhuis wrote: post #2

I remember once being in a branch of HSBC trying to sort out a loan. I saw on the screen for my account they had a score of something like "customer behaviour", which was like 54 something. I had drunkenly called HSBC and ended up ranting at the person on the phone a few times (lost cards etc) so I think this was a rating of how well behaved I was towards their staff. The manager I was speaking to changed his tone fa…

It very well might be garbage data but if companies are acting on that data it’s still highly problematic. Maybe even worse than if the data were accurate.

Does "risk avoidance" mean they have to act on the data?

Re: Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you

#156

Post by bsanr2 »

gruez wrote: post #143
bsanr2 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If some guy walks into a bank and claim they're you and they believe it, the banks aren't gaining anything. They would have just sold a loan. >If anything, they lost money. Can't they sell the defaulted loan to collections? >Lax security practices are negligence at best. Systemic, known, and long-standing negligence speaks to intention.

>They would have just sold a loan. Yeah, that's what their books say, but that doesn't necessarily match reality. In reality they gave $1000 in cash to someone, and their expected return on that is a fraction of that. Same logic if you bought paid $800 for bonds with face value of $1000, but unknown to you, the bonds are actually junk bonds with a expected value (factoring in repayment and default) of $500. In that c…

Does... interest stop being a factor? They gave an x-year loan for $1000 at x% APR (was it subprime?). Also, penalties. Collections can go after you for the full amount. They buy it from the bank for the original $1000+.

Or, the loan hasn't defaulted yet. The bank suspects it will. They load it into a bundle, get it highly-rated, sell the bundle. They make a profit. A whole bunch of other people get hosed.

>Clearly the banks don't have an interest in selling fraudulent loans

This is the wrong decade to be making that statement.

Re: Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you

#157

Post by annoyingnoob »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #111
shuntress wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe most insurance also covers the damage done by your vehicle to other property. So the upper limit on the total collected through premiums is somewhere between 0 and the cost of an expensive house.

It's actually more along the lines of whatever a person's life is worth. Also where I live the ~3 cars around me in traffic could each cost more than a nearby home. You can pretty easily destroy $400,000 of property here in an otherwise uneventful accident.

Automobile deaths has been declining for years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Cars are safer than ever. https://one.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa/timeline/index.html

The folks with those fancy cars are paying into the system too, insurance is about pooling after all.

It seems you have a point about bodily injury claims. https://www.insurance-research.org/sites/default/files/downl...

However, it looks like that is mostly due to more lawyers being involved in bodily injury claims. More lawyers involved points to a failure with insurance company's ability to properly adjudicate claims. When insurance is only about profits and finding tools to further squeeze your existing clients no one benefits. Insurance companies do not need more ways to rate me, they just need to do the job they get paid to do.

Re: Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you

#158

Post by speby »

We're already "scored" all the time ... all types of insurance, mortgages, credit ratings, past criminal record, and so on. Now, we may wish to control the use of data being used on us or against us, and I support that, but to the degree with which we are being "scored" generally, we are already being scored all the time across tons of other dimensions and commercial and even governmental applications.

Re: Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you

#159

Post by inetknght »

syshum wrote: post #119
erikerikson wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you're doing what sounds to be healthier. I suspect many think differently here but I don't think the problem lies in the knowledge but in how people with power are currently using the knowledge. Restricting the knowledge is simply or current best mitigation of the current conventions. Another world might use that knowledge to better support you and others who have seen hard times and restore what sounds like a…

The biggest problem today be it credit scoring, Social media Censorship, or anything that is using these vast databases of personal info is the complete lack of transparency Denied a loan, denied a job, kicked off a platform, in none of these situations is the company requires to justify their actions or be transparent in the policies and processes they used to reach that conclusion This black box leaves people feeli…

> The biggest problem today ... is the complete lack of transparency

While that's the biggest problem right now, transparency by itself isn't useful. I have transparency into my bills but I don't have the ability to change them. Negotiating power is being taken away from consumers. When's the last time you've seen anything which didn't have some form of liability limitation clause? When's the last time you've been able to negotiate that liability limitation?

Re: Data isn't just being collected from your phone, it's being used to score you

#160

Post by inetknght »

gruez wrote: post #132
lmkg wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil. The book explores several ways that's already happening. Her main premise is that there's a feedback loop in many data-driven policies. You only get success results for the things that you try, and you only try the things you already think are likely to receive. As a result, algorithmic policies tend to reinforce the status quo. Loan risk algorithms will favor people…

Can't this be solved by randomly giving out the wrong prediction, and seeing how it turns out? eg. for 1% of applicants, pretend to give them 800+ credit score, then check the outcome compared to the "expected" score.

You're playing with peoples' lives here. That's not funny at all.
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