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Is my Facebook activity fucking my finances?

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Re: Is my Facebook activity fucking my finances?

#31

Post by jrockway »

jmspring wrote: post #15
wyxuan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, Facebook and other big tech companies are way less likely to get hacked thanks to more established data handling practices. Breaches still occasionally happen, but you're more likely to see data breaches from these data broker companies because they didn't secure their elasticsearch DBs or something dumb like that.

Granted it’s old news, but you mean like the founder and employees stalking profiles of those they were interested in during the early days?

I think every company has an incident that makes data protection a real concern. When it's two guys with a PHP app in a dorm room, you don't really expect anything serious, but eventually the risk to the company becomes too high and some useful system gets implemented.

I think Google's watershed moment was this: https://www.gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalke... By the time I got there, it seemed like standard practice for engineers to not be able to read "their own" databases -- every piece of data would be encrypted by a per-user key that only arrives at your application when the user's session is present (or by heavily-audited special exceptions; breakglass, batch jobs, etc.) Much attention was paid to not making data available too widely. (For example, on Google Fiber our hardware knew the MAC addresses of devices that wanted to use WiFi. That's a requirement for 802.11 to work. We modified the Linux kernel, wpa_supplicant, etc. to not log these, explicitly so that someone couldn't collect the logs and do a mapreduce to see who takes their iPhone to their friend's house and intuit a social network. We did that because it was the right thing to do; we only wanted information that was required to operate the service effectively, not to be a dragnet for anything potentially interesting. I'd personally be fascinated to see that information, but it's not the right thing to do.)

I have to imagine that any other large tech company has similar access controls and privacy focus -- even Facebook. Where it gets scary are governments and large non-tech companies that just email around spreadsheets with personal information in them. Yesterday there was an article about Missouri exposing teachers' social security numbers in HTML comments. If you tried to write that code with a data storage system like Google's, it simply wouldn't work. Your code wouldn't have the decryption key for those rows, and you wouldn't be able to output them as HTML comments.

Re: Is my Facebook activity fucking my finances?

#32

Post by floatingatoll »

tryptophan wrote: post #12

>Credit scores aren't perfect, but at least they're based on information relevant to the question at hand: whether you could repay a loan. Well if other (non-financial) things are correlated, how are they not relevant? Should we actively hide information from loan providers, making loans more expensive for others to "protect"( I say protect with quotes, because really it is just a naked handout to people) a few? If t…

As of when I posted this comment, there's a formatting error in your statement — there's a whitespace character after your second opening parentheses that was meant to precede it. That typo indicates that the component of your credit score that is derived from your HN participation should be scored lower than those whose HN comments do not include any typos, because if you're more likely to overlook a single-character error, then you're more likely to overlook a loan payment.

By your argument, it is permissible and appropriate for a credit rating company to make use of any signal — such as that typo — in their calculations. It's a business opportunity to make use of HN's freely-available data to charge you a higher interest rate for loans, because you made a typo, as by the evaluation metric "typos on HN" you're more careless than someone with fewer. It may or may not end up actually being an effective tool for increasing the accuracy of a credit rating, but there's no law prohibiting a US credit agency from trying it out today.

I do not feel that this is acceptable. I think it's an invasion of privacy to incorporate that information into your financial score, even if it technically would improve the precision of the score when applied to everyone in a society. I think that credit scores should have their inputs restricted by law to only consider your financial behaviors.

ps. The above example is impersonal and generic, and the point I'm making is not intended in any way to actually reflect poorly upon you at all. I do not as an individual consider your typo to in any way detract from your statement, and I think it's inappropriate to judge you so harshly as I suggest a credit agency would above. You should not be shamed or penalized for a typo in this forum.

Re: Is my Facebook activity fucking my finances?

#33

Post by rahimnathwani »

"In some countries, loan providers can only look at your official credit score, which is based on your financial history: how much money you have in your bank account, whether you have outstanding loans, and so on. Credit scores aren't perfect, but at least they're based on information relevant to the question at hand: whether you could repay a loan."

Some things wrong with this:

1. There is no single 'official credit score'. Credit scores are calculated using different data and different methodologies by (i) credit bureaus like Equifax, and (ii) lenders. To say that loan providers can only 'look at your official credit score' is equivalent to saying that lenders cannot create their own scoring models, which is obviously wrong.

2. Most credit scores do not depend on how much money you have (or had) in your bank account. Credit scores are based on money you owe or owed. So a bank account would only be relevant to the extent that it provided a credit facility, or went negative at some point.

3. As mentioned in another comment, information other than credit/financial history is useful for credit decisions. For example, a common thing that unsecured loan providers look at is whether you have a job, and how much you earn. This information is verified through payslips, reference calls and/or bank statements. Whether you have a job now doesn't affect your credit history (it's in the past) but it sure is useful.

Re: Is my Facebook activity fucking my finances?

#34

Post by tylermenezes »

tryptophan wrote: post #12

>Credit scores aren't perfect, but at least they're based on information relevant to the question at hand: whether you could repay a loan. Well if other (non-financial) things are correlated, how are they not relevant? Should we actively hide information from loan providers, making loans more expensive for others to "protect"( I say protect with quotes, because really it is just a naked handout to people) a few? If t…

For one, correlation != causation

For two, it's arguably a good public policy to judge people on the basis of what they've done, and not on the basis of statistical correlation to what other people have done.

Can you imagine i.e. having to post to Instagram regularly to get a loan, because some algorithm noticed that people who pay back their loans happen to post frequently on Instagram (when in reality the correlation is because people working salaried jobs have the time to post lots on Instagram, and people working minimum wage jobs don't)?

Re: Is my Facebook activity fucking my finances?

#35

Post by justshowpost »

ve55 wrote: post #3

There's many terrible data brokers involved in many terrible things (especially in the US - they generally get zero headlines because they are b2b and rather secretive), so it's strange to have this headline be about Facebook, when they're the only company being discussed that doesn't sell your data (even if they do many other things with it that we may not like!). I know it's very fun to use them as the worst possib…

> Facebook ... the only company ... that doesn't sell your data

Was that CNN style reporting where Dr. Zuckerberg sells users' personal data left and right in bulk quantities and seems privacy-friendly at same time? Or just NBC style Let's Go Brandon?

> GDPR

Also, I blame Dr. Zuckerberg for constantly getting caught brown-handed while selling data to private intelligence firms. His miserable failures to do shady business in shady way resulted in this extremely idiotic legislation which rendered a significant number of US websites inaccessible to, say, Frankfurt VPDN endpoint and polluted the rest with ridiculous cookie police which is even more annoying than popup and animated porn banners.

Re: Is my Facebook activity fucking my finances?

#36

Post by justshowpost »

tedunangst wrote: post #23
GaryTang wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really far fetched? Did you not see what Biden is proposing? Anyone with more than $600 in their bank accounts will have their transactions monitored. They will be mining that data asap.

I did not see that Biden will mandate google turn over search history to banks.

Your search history on "$700 saving deposit" instantly became much more valuable. Think about that.

Re: Is my Facebook activity fucking my finances?

#37

Post by nottaylorswift »

When I quit Facebook a few years back I read up on the details of how these profiles function. They're tied to a name, birthday and phone number. Now Facebook takes the deleted profile of a user and can still sell it for a tidy sum ($600). But get this; the birthdate, name spelling and phone number can be changed at any time by the user. So you can make their profile on you worthless for resale to data brokers by changing those details before deleting your account. I did exactly that and am banned for life. They were pissed.

Re: Is my Facebook activity fucking my finances?

#38

Post by mysterypie »

GaryTang wrote: post #13
tedunangst wrote: post #10

I would like a more specific, a much more specific, example of a bank rejecting a loan applicant based on their google search history as the article implies.

Is this really far fetched? Did you not see what Biden is proposing? Anyone with more than $600 in their bank accounts will have their transactions monitored. They will be mining that data asap.

> Anyone with more than $600 in their bank accounts

I hadn't heard this, but there is indeed such a proposal[1] by the Department of the Treasury dated May 2021. I'm quoting the proposal here from the PDF:

"This proposal would create a comprehensive financial account information reporting regime. Financial institutions would report data on financial accounts in an information return. The annual return will report gross inflows and outflows with a breakdown for physical cash, transactions with a foreign account, and transfers to and from another account with the same owner. This requirement would apply to all business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts, with the exception of accounts below a low de minimis gross flow threshold of $600 or fair market value of $600.

Other accounts with characteristics similar to financial institution accounts will be covered under this information reporting regime. In particular, payment settlement entities would collect Taxpayer Identification Numbers (TINs) and file a revised Form 1099-K expanded to all payee accounts (subject to the same de minimis threshold), reporting not only gross receipts but also gross purchases, physical cash, as well as payments to and from foreign accounts, and transfer inflows and outflows.

Similar reporting requirements would apply to crypto asset exchanges and custodians. Separately, reporting requirements would apply in cases in which taxpayers buy crypto assets from one broker and then transfer the crypto assets to another broker, and businesses that receive crypto assets in transactions with a fair market value of more than $10,000 would have to report such transactions.

The Secretary would be given broad authority to issue regulations necessary to implement this proposal.

The proposal would be effective for tax years beginning after December 31, 2022."

[1] https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/131/General-Explanati...

Re: Is my Facebook activity fucking my finances?

#40

Post by loeg »

tylermenezes wrote: post #34
tryptophan wrote: post #12

>Credit scores aren't perfect, but at least they're based on information relevant to the question at hand: whether you could repay a loan. Well if other (non-financial) things are correlated, how are they not relevant? Should we actively hide information from loan providers, making loans more expensive for others to "protect"( I say protect with quotes, because really it is just a naked handout to people) a few? If t…

For one, correlation != causation For two, it's arguably a good public policy to judge people on the basis of what they've done, and not on the basis of statistical correlation to what other people have done. Can you imagine i.e. having to post to Instagram regularly to get a loan, because some algorithm noticed that people who pay back their loans happen to post frequently on Instagram (when in reality the correlati…

> For one, correlation != causation

> For two, it's arguably a good public policy to judge people on the basis of what they've done, and not on the basis of statistical correlation to what other people have done.

Existing credit scores are based on non-causal correlation models derived from the behavior of others. Social-media based credit scores would not be any different in this regard.

I agree that credit scores based on social media posting are nonsense, but mostly because (1) it's so invasive and (2) I don't think it actually usefully correlates with anything.

> Can you imagine i.e. having to post to Instagram regularly to get a loan, because some algorithm noticed that people who pay back their loans happen to post frequently on Instagram (when in reality the correlation is because people working salaried jobs have the time to post lots on Instagram, and people working minimum wage jobs don't)?

Yeah. Some of the biggest factors in existing (US) credit scores are: on-time payment history; credit card use as a percent of limits; and average age of credit.

All of these correlate to affluence/wealth. Affluent/wealthy people can easily pay bills on time; affluent people are given higher credit limits, which makes the "use %" ratio lower; and age of credit is obviously related to age, and older people are wealthier than younger.

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