IMF would use your search history for credit scores
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
So this
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/03/...
https://www.techlicious.com/blog/price-discrimination-by-ope...
But for your entire credit history?
Sounds pretty awful to me.
You're gaining or losing credit from merely the way you exist or live. It's essentially a hidden tax on life itself and everything you do.
Every thought, belief, action, piece of information you read, media you consume, basically every single thing you do will have some kind of value placed on it.
In my opinion, this goes far beyond social credit.
Is it a comedy writing? Lender can't have "a more intimate relationship" with anything because today it's a computer. Automated sociopath.
Pricing of sovereign debt, particularly of more "problematic" countries, yeah - that's their purpose/business.
You are right. They do not, directly. But, never underestimate bureaucrats hunger for control. This "just research", if it can be used as a cudgel, it will. The IMF dictates many many things through its financial tentacles that impacts individuals to the extreme. Just look talk to some who are from countries where IMF came and helped out.
This quote from the article is very illustrative:
> institutional banking system is facing a serious threat from tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. The researchers identify two key areas in which this is true: Tech companies have greater access to soft-information, and messaging platforms can take the place of the physical locations that banks rely on for meeting with customers
This tells me that there are people in the finance industry that think that they are the underdog. They just want the same access to information big tech companies already have so that they could cut the little guy a better deal. If only governments and regulators could see that. Wouldn’t we live in a better world?
They don’t think that this could usher in a financial version of 1984 because they’re optimistic in the same way that Mark Zuckerberg was optimistic that making a social networking site to connect people together would be utopian.
These researchers are going to impart this idea on students and their colleagues, eventually someone is going to go into government with complete faith that giving financial institutions very fine grained information on citizens is in everyone’s best interests. That is what is dangerous about this.
There are no 'students' at the IMF, and their 'colleagues' (e.g. the World Bank staff) similarly do not deal with the internal policies of first world nations.
Simply put, this isn't a slippery slope to anywhere, its just a research paper.
Currently: Friend of mine had HepC. And then liver cancer. Reading up on that online? The blowback was just some annoying targeted ads.
IMF Future: You get denied a loan or have to pay higher rates because you were reading up on HepC.
Actually it wouldn't be illegal to have privacy, it would just become so expensive only the very wealthy could afford it. So the internet would mirror the real world ever more.
Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but it really does feel like the powerful are chipping away at every aspect of the internet and its empowering of the common person.
It's not just you; that definitely seems to be the trend. Already, privacy is only really available for the wealthy or technical.
It’s only available to technical people with good understanding and the will to pay in convenience and time (which the wealthy do not have excess of either)
A lot of the privacy invasion stuff assumes you don't have multiple devices or multiple platform accounts. It's just a matter of cost to have 2-4 different devices and accounts and vpn routers if you want to keep from being tracked across platforms and use cases.
Where I pay dearly, and it’s a cost even billionaires can’t avoid, is convenience. carrying 5 phones around, or remote controlling one from the others, is far from convenient.
Consultant can only take you so far. If you have an aid carrying the 5 phones so they are always available to you, then you have no privacy in a different way.
I have worked with some extremely high wealth individuals, and none of them practices any better OPSec than your average person; some of them inquired but balked at the non-monetary cost (e.g. seeing me with multiple phones, often off until use so they are harder to correlate, etc). These are people who would easily buy 10 iPhone12 max per year if it gave them convenient privacy. But it doesn’t.
A lot of stuff in the name of anti-fraud / anti-bot is also anti-privacy. Try buying or subscribing (ex: patreon) to many things online with a prepaid card of some sort, you'll find out you cannot. Try accessing etsy from a data center or VPN IP and they just serve you a blank page. Make your browser hard to fingerprint and it looks like automated chromium and you hit bot wall after bot wall.
I think a reason why it isn't like this already is because many old people just don't use the internet that much at all, so there isn't that much data to rate them with, but they are valuable customers so they keep the legacy and more private way of doing things open for them. In 20 or 30 years, that might not be available anymore as the last of the people who didn't learn how to use desktop computing in the 90s die off.
Be careful what you wish for. The replacement might be worse.
Seems we're moving towards a system with Central Bank Digital Currencies in which people own accounts at central banks and governments can use policy on an individuals' central bank account to incentive people to do the "right" thing.
Programmers will be the first luddites.
Creditors' low risk manifests as low interest rates, which everyone loves until they create bubbles and other forms of hyperinflation, which burst, and the costs are socialized.
The IMF was a pernicious organization from its very beginnings, basically using "cheap" subsidized debt from central banks to subordinate developing economies to a neoliberal order and force social policies that enabled globalized businesses (resource extraction and financialization) to in-effect loot them. This used to be a major progressive cause, and one that I supported, but it too seems to have been co-opted by the same interests. Now anti-globalization is abandoned by progressives, who used the activism as a stepping stone into institutional power, where now it's no longer necessary to have the popular support of maker and builder classes. Trade tariffs and economic borders have been banished to the backwater of right-wing populist causes, where people still believe in unfashionable things like nations and the responsibility of government to secure a perimeter for growth.
This IMF scheme would seem like a troll, but it's not. The people behind it have an institutional contempt for anyone outside their power games, and to them we're basically livestock. The difference between the 1990's and 2020's is that leftist led populist revolts against this exact kind of IMF driven policy were largely performative, critical, and non-violent because they were carried out by feckless flower children, whereas in the 2020's, I'd predict they will be carried out by men with little left to lose.
If that sounds scary, it should. These IMF people just don't get it.
I’d only do it if I control access to data, and can allow an auditable one-time no-copy access to get 0.X% off my mortgage. But no handing over data to banks between banks / social media companies.