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Comment by causal | Hacker News Reader

Again, missing the point - it is a system that has become a centralized digital scoring mechanism. This is dangerous because it centralizes power, giving institutions that are not even under democratic control the power to punish individuals or groups as they see fit across all sectors of life.

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This is sensational. You said

> Credit scores are used for a lot more than finances.

but you can't provide a concrete example.

> giving institutions that are not even under democratic control

Which institutions? Banks? Landlords? Other people trusting you with their property?

> the power to punish individuals or groups as they see fit across all sectors of life.

Where? How?

Is it reasonable to expect concrete examples of ephemeral decision making that happens within opaque organizations, given that the overwhelming majority are not held to explicit disclosure of their decision, let alone a verified paper trail held to such a rigorous standard to count for reasonable proof?

The best you can hope for from a potential employer is to be told they hired someone else. The default experience in America seems to be that they'll simply ghost you.

Many examples were given, please read the linked article. And again, in a society where everything is monetized, you can argue that creditworthiness is a just proxy for anything. So if basic water and electric access or housing access can be, so can anything else where you pay money for a service. You could argue dating apps should have access to credit scores and I wouldn't be surprised if some tried.

> Which institutions?

Credit bureaus...

What do you think credit is? Anytime someone gives you something and you pay later on, that's on credit. They have to trust you to some extent. If every vendor had to perform due diligence of every potential client I would expect things to get even more expensive or just altogether deny service to people outright.

Then in a subscription economy- where having a poor credit score can result in loss of housing, insurance, and more- opaque unelected beureaus are wielding tremendous power. Perhaps they are not evil or even unfair, but if you'll recall the context of TFA, it bears many of the same failure modes of a social credit system, and will only be as good as the people regulating it.

But it will always be opaque, unelected bureaus, wouldn't it? If credit bureaus were dissolved tomorrow, the decision to extend credit would go back to the opaque, unelected operator of the business.

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