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Comment by aurelianito | Hacker News Reader

It seems quite natural. If you are able to fulfill your obligations you are able to fulfill your obligations. It separates responsible people from the ones that are not.

OTOH, it may become quite lucrative to hack your own phone in order to make the risk assessment company believe that you are low risk!

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Answering the phone is not an obligation. Maybe people tend to call when you're in meetings, so you send it to voicemail and you call them back later. Maybe your number got on a spam list somewhere and a bunch of calls are just telemarketing.

When you take thousands of variables and compare them all against each other, you're going to get some spurious correlations.

Yeah, I answer nearly zero calls from numbers that aren't in my contact list. If it's important they can leave a message. If it's a local number I'll google it, and maybe call back even if there's no message and it seems to be someone I want to talk to. Out of state? No way. Most people I know—even my tech-unsavvy parents—have resorted to a similar policy. Multiple spam calls a week—more than calls I actually want to take, certainly—will do that. I'll start treating a ringing phone as necessarily worth paying attention to when junk calls drop to one or two a year, like they were for a while after the Do Not Call registry first came around.

It might be a good filter to find people likely to answer collections calls though, I guess.

I wish there were a way to tell the dialer app to not ring if the number isn't in my contacts on android.

I do this ever since I started getting a bunch of spam calls, and it's amazing. The dialer does still "ring" in the sense that it takes over your phone and you need to swipe-to-decline or wait it out, but it won't vibrate/sound except for those in my contacts.

For my particular phone (Droid Turbo) it's here: Notification bar > swipe down again on notification bar > Do not disturb > Priority only > Until you turn this off; More settings > Priority only allows > Calls > From contacts only.

There's even an option down there (sibling to Calls, in the flow above) called "Repeat callers" which, when on, allows a not-in-contacts call to ring if they called twice within 15 minutes. None of my spam callers ever call twice in a row, so it's brilliant for making sure I see (repeat) calls from food delivery people, uber drivers, etc. (although I feel bad that I missed their initial call).

Of course YMMV depending on model and version.

https://www.howtogeek.com/260225/androids-confusing-do-not-d...

In my opinion, it is dangerous to draw conclusions about responsibility from phone usage only. Even if the conclusions may be correct in 95% of all cases, what about the other five percent? To me, the imagination of a company that does not provide any or only superficial customer support which will not help me in case their algorithms do not match is creepy.

In this case it might not be a big deal because you might be able to find another loan provider but it might become one if this kind of automated scoring gets more common.

I don't think anyone is actually suggesting that. The very first line of the article states that the company in question looks at 1200 different metrics, one of which is phone charge cycle.

The term "charge" only actually appears in the article twice: mostly the headline is clickbait.

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