People are always terrified of the Big Brother from government, but any time I have to verify my identity with questions like "What street of the listed have you lived on?" or "Which of these banks do you have a loan with?" it makes me realize how much aggregated data private (especially financial) companies have. I can imagine these corporations selling that info for good money, like how many transactions you make at a fast food restaurant in a given month to health insurance providers.
As an European who've tried the American way. I have to say that it is clearly worse.
In the EU country I was, when i get a job/flat/whatever, I give a copy of my national ID and tax statement, and that's alright.
In the USA/UK, when I get a job/flat/whatever, noone trusts me or the government. I have to give plenty of documents and 5 years of history to a 3rd party shady check agency, that's gonna resell the data and spam me.
You can be sure that after a few years of your life, everything about you have been resold by these agencies and is available to the world: all your addresses, jobs, income, family situation, etc...
You American guys have hundreds of private big brothers incentivized against you, all because you wanted to avoid trusting a government. That didn't go well.
The US has a such an anti-government attitude that the Republican Party becomes the majority party instead of being laughed out of Congress. A party whose members frequently advocate cutting healthcare for the poor, reducing education budgets, scaling back environmental policies, etc.
Americans distrust national ID. Several administrations have floated the idea and have quickly learned that fact. We do have a de facto national ID in drivers licenses. If we had a medicare for all health system we would than have a national ID and a lot of those problems would go away.
It really seems that americans do not want a functioning government.
But maybe its just the curse of large countries to have disfunctional governments, and it can't be fixed.
I would say that the United States does not want a functioning government and that is by design. Remember the Federalists? They argued for a better government than the US had under the Articles of Confederation (kinda EU like body before our current Constitution). Many Americans read these guys and agree. What we often forget is the AntiFederalists, amongst them was Jefferson. As a result of the Federalists and the AntiFederalists, the US has the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Guess which side brought what to the party.
Our current problem is that under FDR the government got too big, but we didn't ever try to clear it up later. As a result we have a pretty shitty hybrid of big government and Republicans running around not doing their jobs of removing the root. This leads to a hodgepodge of restrictions and regulations that make it hard for big government to streamline/be efficient. It also makes it hard for small government to take root since everything has to be done in the bureaucratic manner.
You're very right, although that method of authentication (known as "Knowledge Based Authentication" or "Out of Wallet Questions" more specifically) is highly ineffective. Users can't answer the questions reliably, hackers can reliably steal the info. Look for that method to be entirely out of the industry within the next 5 years. There are better ways.
First of all, basically any way is better than Out of Wallet Questions because they don't work on both ends. They don't really prevent fraud and most legit people fail them.
Better techniques involve data / device triangulation, lighter weight Knowledge Based Authentication via data matching, and deeper fraud scoring to detect potentially stolen identities. It takes a real strategy and real time to implement something that actually works which is why many people just default back to OOQs but that will change.
I don't say this often, but this observation is pure garbage. People who live in terror of "big brother" aren't in terror because they may be offered an unwanted credit card, or because it's their precious privacy that they value. They're in terror because their government wants to silence them and kill them. Maybe for who they associate with, their religious belief, sexual orientation or their political beliefs.
On the topic of Big Brother, there was a law passed called The Patriot Act that required stringent KYC regulations.. Meaning financial institutions are required to ask these stupid questions and keep tabs on you. The government is forcing companies to keep tabs on you, along with telecom and other industries - so they can siphon this data..
But whatever. Stupid conspiracy theorists. Probably dumb libertarians or something.
A visit to many internet forums will yield people fearing that "big brother" will expose their emails or internet history--though not life-threatening, the damage of embarrassment or job loss is still a real fear in their eyes.
Also, do you not think financial companies would naturally aggregate this data in this day and age even if not required by law? Facebook has no mandate by law to collect information on their users for advertisers, yet they do. I imagine that financial companies in the business of understanding users' spending and lending habits would naturally gravitate to compiling and selling this data even without that mandate since humans and their data are the commodity of the 21st Century.
It's just historically ignorant to lump people who fear an all knowing state with people who want privacy online. I know that you personally don't fear your government - but please, let's not write off the entirety of history because you can't personally relate.
> Facebook has no mandate by law to collect information on their users for advertisers, yet they do.
In the age of NSL requests let's just admit that you don't know that. We have secret laws and secret courts in our "post 9/11 era". It's entirely possible that FB is secretly considered a national security resource and is compelled by threat of law to collect and relay all their data. Considering an early backer of FB was an investment arm of the CIA and that FB tracking cookies are used by the NSA to target attack vectors on the internet.. who knows, maybe I'm officially nuts :P
It's pretty terrifying how much information CreditKarma (TU-
and Equifax-backed,) Mint and such have, and what that turns into when it's shared and combined.
True. Recently I logged into Mint for the first time in a few years, and was quite disturbed to realize they had been importing every debit or credit card transaction, and every student loan payment I made. They know my financial health better than my bank does ...
What's surprising to me is how many people are surprised by this. You gave them the credentials to all of your accounts, and then are shocked that they used them? What's more incredible is that you haven't changed the credentials for any of your critical accounts in that time.
Why are you disturbed ? The whole point of Mint is to track your spending so that you have a unified dashboard of your money ? If it didn't import all of those things you wouldn't have much use of it. Also you can remove accounts from it if you don't want it to track.
Since they store the actual passwords and lose the connection as soon as you change them, I'm shocked that you went years without changing those passwords..
GNUCash is scriptiable (in fact IIRC much of the out-of-the-box functionality is written in guile), but http://ledger-cli.org/ is much more of a text-based system than GNUCash.
Concentrating all my credit and financial information into one company does concern me. However, I do want some insight into and options for my finances and financial health, and I know I don't have all the information to do that.
I used YNAB for a bit, and I found it pretty stressful to do all the bookkeeping. I went back to my heuristic budgeting. I don't need to track every penny.
CreditKarma is really helpful for monitoring. I've gotten some good card recommendations from them and my credit score has gone up 60 points with little effort. I did my taxes through them this year (more data for them!), but I was disappointed when my state return was incorrect and I got less money back. Given that my financials are getting more complicated, I'll likely be using an accountant/attorney this year.
Most people, including myself, seem willing to give up their privacy and confidentiality in exchange for convenience. I try to play it as a zero-sum game. I've deleted all my social media accounts, because having that info plus my financials floating around seems like a bad idea. In regard to my financial data, I'll probably freak out in a few years and move all that to a professional to handle.
This whole "social" experiment with tech is, in my eyes, a frightening failure. Given how slipshod the security and data handling is at most companies (including my workplace), it's only a matter of time until there are millions of digital doppelgangers running around committing fraud.
The "web" link isn't working for me anymore, even in an incognito browser. Is it working for anyone else, or is there some other solution to read WSJ articles?
Let's also not forget about the traditional finance companies (Chase, BAML, Citi, Wells Fargo, Amex, etc.). They sell your data and are a large source of the random credit card offers you receive. And you can't opt out.
That sounds like PressReader to me. I pay them $30/month and can read all of the newspapers from around the world that I want. (A lot of libraries also offer access with a library card; another good reason to visit your local library.)
This is the wild west of information rape I guess. Companies buy companies who buy other companies. As an average customer you just don't know who has what interests and where your info is getting used.
Even companies that started with noble goals like whatsapp ended up selling out to Facebook troves of private info.
The only way I see things change is a holocaust level fuck up because people think they have nothing to hide. I predict the next generation terrorism in the digital form
