[Edit: no longer relevant, see replies] No it doesn't? This is the only part of the post relevant to the headline: > The second and most complex problem is that certain kinds of people, like new entrepreneurs, innovators and many informal workers might not have enough hard data available. Even a well-paid expatriate moving to the United States can be caught in the conundrum of not getting a credit card for lack of cr…
Submitted title was "IMF says credit score should incorporate browsing history". That was egregious editorializing. Submitters: please don't do that! Cherry-picking the most sensational detail and making that the title is definitely not ok, and fabricating something the article doesn't say is right out! https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html When a title buries the lede in favor of bland corporate rhetoric,…
The submitted title was very clearly editorialised. But both the original title and the entire article text are so anodyne as to make an accurate 80-character precise of the submission as HN requires all but impossible.
The implied violations of personal privacy, third-party doctrine, intellectual freedom, and more, are staggering. I'd hope (though I also begin to doubt) that search engines, browser providers, ISPs, and even online merchants would rebel at all aspects of this proposal.
At the same time, the article highlights numerous issues that seem to be reaching a breaking point:
- Wage-based or even salary-based compensation, during time of global pandemic and lockdown, aren't sufficient.
- Credit is (and has for decades) been used to supplant sufficient living wages for vast portions of the population.
- A necessary foundation of a global p2p or b2c commercial system is sufficient trust on both sides of that transaction that parties will uphold their ends of the bargain, and that neither side has been conmpromised, internally or externally, in such a way as to commit fraud. In-person, cash-on-the-barrelhead transactions solve many of these problems. Local-dealing similarly. Globally we're trying to supplant intrinsic trust mechanisms with mediated ones, with varying degrees of success and tremendous amounts of unintended consequences.
Rather than put all my article responses in this subthread (which likely will and should get reaped to the bottom of the discussion), I'm hoping to write up my thoughts separately. I just want to make clear that this is as subtle a proposal as, oh, say, "Proposal for large-scale passenger handling logistics using IBM tabulation equipment in the central European region" would have been in 1939. This is absolutely horrific, and an exquisite example of Arendt's banality of evil.
Arnoud Boot, Peter Hoffmann, Luc Laeven, Lev Ratnovski are names that should appear in business and privacy case-history courses for decades.
"Browser, hardware, search and purchase history in Fintech credit assessment" is my best spin. 77 characters. Kinda-sorta falls out of that buried paragraph number 6.