Is my Facebook activity fucking my finances?
foundation.mozilla.org
foundation.mozilla.org
This has always been the case since before the digital age (hollywood, cable, video game, sports, even news). These industries feed on humans paying attention to things that don't matter in their life.
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.
Well, historically, bad actors haven't needed to "hack" Facebook because it has made it possible for them to access user data without hacking.
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/986005820/after-data-breach-e...
> In response to the reporting, Facebook said in a blog post on Tuesday that "malicious actors" had scraped the data by exploiting a vulnerability in a now-defunct feature on the platform that allowed users to find each other by phone number.
It's not a vulnerability, it's a "feature".
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.
Are we talking about the same Facebook? The mob with some bloke called Zuck are hell bent on selling ads. They absolutely use you.
Please explain 8)
"Walled garden" is a fairly common colloquial phrase, often applied to the iOS ecosystem in the context of the app store (genuinely not sure what you meant by your comment otherwise).
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.
It's strange to see Facebook and Google being invoked in these hypothetical examples when neither company sells user data. Big advertising companies aren't interested in releasing their proprietary user data to other companies. They sell ads on their own platform, but they don't sell user data.
Meanwhile, financial institutions openly share your personal information with "business partners" unless you opt out. The FTC has done a decent job of forcing disclosure of these data sharing arrangements and giving consumers a standard form to opt-out [1] These companies are actively selling user data as much as they can get away with, but Facebook and Google are getting demonized for something they're not even doing.
As for this blog post: It's a fine example of Betteridge's law of headlines (and yes, I know it's not actually a law).
[1] It looks like this: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/rules/privacy-con... inside of your mailed statements. You can also find it on the financial institution website if you search long enough.
Facebook in particular always states they do not sell data. There are plenty of documented examples about how various datasets are used to target people in different ways. Google was contracted to deliver anti-extremist messaging, data from insurance claims, insurance background checking and web behavior has been used for opioid diversion.
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 these models are wrong, that is just a business opportunity for others to fix and price loans better.
I support privacy laws, but that argument has always seemed to be a strange way to argue for it.
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.
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)?
> 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.
The IRS thinks it loses $600 billion in revenue annually from owed, but unpaid, taxes ("tax gap"). The Biden admin thinks they can recoup about $46 billion a year in owed, but unpaid, taxes just by adding this reporting measure -- without increasing tax rates at all[1]. This represents something like an additional 2.5% in tax revenue from individuals (which is about ~$1.7T annually).
If you don't illegally evade taxes, (1) this reporting is no threat to you, and (2) you should be mad at your underpaying neighbors who would pay more because of this surveillance program. And if you do illegally evade taxes, you should stop doing so.
[1]: https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-case-for...
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...
Yeah itll probably happen, just gotta get your talking points correct
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.
Seems unlikely. Which countries? I'm pretty sure in the US it's the entire credit report, not just the score.
There was a whole big fad [1] of social credit scoring around 2012 - 2015ish which just kind of went away because... it turns out it doesn't work very well. The more signals you use, the more you open yourself up to adverse selection and I think pretty much every social credit scoring startup found themselves unable to offer a more compelling rate without going bankrupt and they all either pivoted or shut down.
AFAIK, there isn't currently a widespread deployed social credit solution in any country (including China). But it continues to be the favorite doomed pitch in fintech.
[1] https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-social-credi...
But, I do think this is kind of where the whole surveillance capitalism thing is headed. It is interesting to me everyone always points at China as this dystopian nightmare, but even major media outlets are now admitting all their articles on China's evil "social credit score" were kinda BS [2]. Seems to me the real nightmare is with our own oligarchs.
[1]: https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/extraordinary-pierre-omidy... [2]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-sys...
Perhaps someone who works in that area will know more.
My boss and I would take turns maxing out our credit cards (mine were rather meager having just graduated) to purchase equipment for the company and then being reimbursed.
However, credit score isn't really a measure of how likely you are to pay back a loan, but rather how profitable you will be doing so. My understanding is, the ideal customer always pays his bill in the end, but may take some time doing so to rack up extra interest charges.
That isn't true. It's purely a measure of how likely you are to repay a loan on time.
> My understanding is, the ideal customer always pays his bill in the end, but may take some time doing so to rack up extra interest charges.
This is true, for credit card customers in particular. Banks want people who make exactly the minimum payment on time. Everytime you pay less than the full statement balance, you're essentially taking out a new high-APR loan for the balance. Banks love customers that do that. It doesn't increase your credit score.
If you are so young that you don't have a history of paying your bills on time, you probably should not be borrowing money anyway.