So, on the assumption that this might start happening before it gets outlawed: Anyone know what queries my bot should be plugging into search engines to game this particular system? Shouldn't be too hard to have a machine ask Google 3000 times a day "what to do when you're super rich and deserve unlimited credit", right?
I did Google “how to invest $2 million” a few times from different devices to see how it would change my search history.
It’s hard to tell systematically but my YouTube ads became super douschey. And my iheartradio ads and Spotify ads were also related.
Is there a site of funny search poisoning? Or a practical joke set of how many times you have to search “domestic abuse defense attorney” a friend’s phone to surprise them?
Do you have adblockers or did you turn them off for this experiment? I would assume most people on HN have adblockers and other browser ad ons to prevent the malicious tracking that so many companies are hell bent on using. It's an anomaly for me to see any ads on my devices.
presumably, the people who seriously have $2M to invest are not just googling how to do it, so you may just be getting the set of ads for the people likely to actually put that in Google
as far as practical jokes go, it would probably be a lot easier to sign up someone to an unsavory email list.
> presumably, the people who seriously have $2M to invest are not just googling how to do it
If I sell my startup in a few years, it would be worth 4-10m$, and I wonder what I might do with the money. I find it funny that you dismiss the idea of not knowing how to invest millions of dollars, but when you’ve worked all your life, you don’t have time to build a network of people who can receive your investment, and you’re not used to actually having this money outside of the startup vehicle. And given 86% of billionaires of this generation are first-generation, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the same for millionaires. I keep hearing stories of:
- Youtubers,
- Startup founded,
- Dropshipping, but not dropshippers, just people who sell services to gullible get-rich-quick dropshippers.
Most people that have that problem don't Google "How to invest $X million", they google for things like "best clean energy stocks" or "best index funds" or "should i buy Ethereum or Bitcoin" or "bay area financial advisors" or "angel investing getting started" etc.
Yeah, I'm not saying that people who come into money are investing geniuses, but you will lose your money pretty quickly if you type in how much money you have into Google and click the first link promising a get even richer scheme.
Nah, it takes a lot of attention to keep $10 million under control. Unless you want to risk running out suddenly.
Having $10 mil in a bank account somewhere is pointless. No matter what philosophy you want to apply choices must be made. Investment, consumption or hedonism. The money will quickly vanish (decade or two) if the balance is wrong or the millionaire goes all-in on indexing at the peak of some bubble.
Investment, consumption, and hedonism: unless you have a broad sense of “investment”, aren’t all of those selfish?
I suppose my valuing the health of an ecosystem of other lives is selfish, too. I’m writing to push for a broader sense of what it means to invest, as in increasing the carbon content of soil for the health of future life, and promoting regulation towards cleaner air and water.
Giving money away to worthy causes is pretty easy. But FYI I'd class that under my broad definition of hedonism. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan .... and all that.
So that your escape money doesn’t get eaten away by inflation. You could put it in a low-ish risk portfolio composed of some bonds, indexes, etc so that it continues to make some amount of money.
It might not be that focused; ~nobody with $2MM asks Google for investment advice, but "how to invest" and "how to invest to make millions" are searches worth targeting (and would match that search).
Of course that too. It’s not exclusive with search poisoning.
> $2million
It seems that way in that it’s either stupid advertisers that think rich people Google that. Or people thinking there’s a mindset of get rich quick, crypto scams who Google that.
Not to say that it is, but email lists being sold around is table stakes for advertising and search, so that might be faster and easier than trying to change ad results via search queries.
Try Googling mesothelioma symptoms if you want to see how deep this particular rabbit hole goes (and cost some ambulance-chasing law firms some money while you're at it.)
It might be harder than it seems, Google is incredibly AIcist. I hit their threshold manually sometimes (it's like a dozen or so queries per minute) :D
Those "we have detected unusual traffic" messages after unusually heavy (hey, we're not all average in our usage patterns) but very human usage are kinda evil. I wasted so much time wiping the machine and reinstalling the OS etc after getting paranoid that I had some undetectable kind of malware before I caught on.
Nah, happens quite often when Google refuses to serve the results you're asking for (ignoring a keyword, using something it believes is a synonym but is actually not in this context etc.), and one therefore do many successive almost identical searches with small tweaks.
Of course they're not idiots. They're googlers, which means they have a very specific worldview and a work environment that focuses their perception of the universe into a very specific way of looking at things, where "scale" is both the cause and solution to all problems and of course attackers use whole subnets at a time and need to be shadowbanned appropriately.
Yeah, I have seen that as well... Usually when I try to actually find something and start tuning my query. Don't know if when you start building complex queries does it just get heavy and they have some threshold after which it doesn't make money anymore for them. So they block you...
I wonder if we are looking at the motivation for such a scheme backwards.
The 2008 Banking disaster happened because banks were happy to give out tons of loans to people who couldn't pay them back. The response was to tighten various parameters that should have made it harder for banks to give out bad loans.
I wonder if this is a way to break out of those handcuffs and allow banks to go back to giving out more loans. "Yeah this person has a terrible credit score, but look at their browsing history. They are looking at healthy diets, they are comparing prices and shopping cheap - all signs of a responsible adult. Why should we deny this upstanding member of the society access to credit and help them become homeowners?"
Update: Thinking about it some more, looking at browsing history is a fantastic way to identify vulnerable members of the society who can be talked into signing themselves up for new loans. History shows that bankers have loved to do this.
> "Yeah this person has a terrible credit score, but look at their browsing history. They are looking at healthy diets, they are comparing prices and shopping cheap - all signs of a responsible adult. Why should we deny this upstanding member of the society access to credit and help them become homeowners?"
Oh god, that could be my browsing history but it's not me nor what I do and they would be in for a rude awakening.
I have no agency to back my claims but yeah, I would also like to advise against using deeply personal stuff to determine anyone's effective social score.
Oh, you eat too much, or the wrong things.
Oh, but smoke, drink.
Oh, you're exercising enough.
Oh, you're exercising too much.
Oh, you're just exercising the right amount.
I've not even touched the browsing history yet. Surely the end goal here is not simply exploiting big data they have on everyone. Outrageous as that may be, that would also mean the very final end of any pretence of privacy online. Everything finally tied to our legal real personas. Ugh...
Wait a second, the article suggests that a credit reporting agency could simply engage with google or other data brokers and obtain browsing history, NOT simply statistical target demographic roll-ups, but browsing data for actual specific named individuals.
For the majority of people it is doable if you start gathering enough data (from all sources you can) to link devices and browsers that one person owns. Not easy for the average person but with the size of some of these behemoths... 100% possible.
But has any entity (outside of the CCP in China) ever done this on a large-enough scale that it would even begin to make sense for a "customer" like a credit reporting agency?
OK, but is Google's ability to "share user-specific data" with an credit-reporting agency or any high-enough bidder, merely a matter of changing a policy clause and turning on the spigot?
The only way to realistically enforce this is through software developers refusing to implement, like that’s gonna happen, or by whistleblowers, but by then, it is already too late.
Really? Because the obvious way to "realistically enforce" this is by passing legislation banning such practices and demanding transparency in credit score calculations. And then massively fining credit companies which use those factors in calculation.
Not sure how the heck would a single developer refuse to implement a system that earns boatload of money.
I'm now expecting someone to claim they accidentally left the Chinese tools on for their EU accounts and only noticed when those with an interest in "squares" got hit with higher loan rates.
Exactly. Regulation is the primary method necessary to ensure that the market doesn't do an unethical but profitable thing.
The other approach, which is employed by other specialties, is to have a professional trade accreditation group create certain standards that must be upheld by all people in that group. Doctors and lawyers are examples of how this works, and in what ways it fails too.
This is pretty obviously a bad idea. Credit agencies already have all the relevant information, whether you take out loans or credit cards and whether you pay them on time.
Anything else is at best correlation, which as we know is not the same as causation.
Unfortunately, while that may be enough data for you as a (presumably) relatively affluent position, there are a _lot_ of people who aren't able to get loans today because they don't have that sort of history. For the subset of those people who would in fact be able to pay back loans, they have a ton to gain from improvements in credit score accuracy.
I had a friend at a startup trying to close some of that gap by reporting one-time rent payments to credit agencies, and the sheer scale of benefits they were trying to bring their users is hard to overstate.
I guess my point here is that there are in fact large portions of the population that are not well served by credit scores today, and just because you are not among them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Correlation is plenty if your goal is to be right most of the time and have the loans you sell be slightly more profitable than a competitor.
People forget that all these big data schemes are rather inaccurate at the individual user level, and that doesn't matter to the companies that use the data.
Where I am from in Europe, in Estonia, we havr a negative credit score system and when you want to get a big loan then you have to give the bsnk your account transactions from the last 6 months so they can see what you are spending on. Casinos and such are frowned upon. But nobody uses Credit cards. There are talks about creating a positive credit registry also, but it is for the short term lenders who should be able to see that you took out a loan yesterday and then they should not give you one today
I don't get it: How do credit scoring companies in the EU even get access to browsing data or my search history?
Wasn't the GDPR introduced to prevent data sharing like this in the first place if I don't explicitly opt-in to this particular use case, like, as a separate toggle and not "by using our service you agree to our privacy policy".
If you read the linked article by the IMF you start to get it, bunch of ECB economists exploring innovation in financial products and writing a meaningless blogpost about it. Bunch of buzzwords, nothing interesting.
In their defense, they write:
“Fintech resolves the dilemma by tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases.”
So it seems they’re not recommending this usage of data persee, but just say fintech is already doing this.
Some members of the European Parliament have probably been lobbied to implement something like that and asked for an opinion of their in house experts on the matter.
> Fintech resolves the dilemma by tapping various nonfinancial data: the type of browser and hardware used to access the internet, the history of online searches and purchases. Recent research documents that, once powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, these alternative data sources are often superior than traditional credit assessment methods, and can advance financial inclusion, by, for example, enabling more credit to informal workers and households and firms in rural areas.
No research is linked, but assuming this kind of statistical data is roughly accurate in the first place for the sake of the argument, feeding that in some black box ML "AI" system is likely to produce a fair amount of inaccurate results, and since it's all a magical system you can't really argue with it; it's just "computer says no". Even employees high up the food chain (if you get that far) won't be able to really help you either, because insight in these systems is hard and deal poorly with exceptional situations (and turns out there are a lot of those, it's just that all of them are different).
Without going in to all the privacy aspects and other problems, it's a good example of the dehumanisation of our society. At the end of the day you just can't beat human judgement and "common sense", but the possibility for this is increasingly taken from us. Sure, humans are not perfect but just because a few mistakes are made doesn't mean taking away the entire human aspect is desirable.
This Italian startups does exactly this kind of Orwellian credit scoring - like checking what browser, email provider and how old your computer is: https://www.fido.id/
I always tought a credit score was an American ism, maybe including UK and Ireland for the EU. Does anyone know if there exists something like credit scores in Belgium, and how you find out what yours is?
In some countries credit score registries are restricted by law to only holding information on delinquent debt, so an average person has no entries in the credit score registries. This is the case here in Finland currently, though a national positive credit register is being planned for 2024 (https://www.vero.fi/en/positivecreditregister/).
I count 5 countries of the 27 eu countries in that list, and it seems half of them have a gov based system. So the situation seems different from the US.
I always get orwellian vibes from the US system. Some random big brotherish corporation looks at you in any way it can, then runs some completely untransparant system to produce an unreliable number, with no appeal. That number determines your chances in life.
Then again, my governement keeps track of how well I do on repaying my loans and tells that to lending orgs. I assume someone with a US style 'gubberment' thought process might recoil in horror even if I rather like it.
The craziest thing about the US system is that you have to use credit (and pay it back punctually) as opposed to debit just in order to convince future creditors that you're a good customer. Migrants to the US can run into a Kafkaesque situation where they need a credit score to get a credit card, but they need a credit card to accumulate a credit score first...
It's especially crazy because in most of Europe I am pretty sure a mere possession of a credit card is correlated with being more likely to get into financial trouble.
I never had a credit card. Among my friends who do well financially most don't have a credit card or just got it because their bank offered a crippled debit card that wasn't accepted at hotels and car rental. They never use the credit line. On the other have out of the financially irresponsible people I know most have multiple credit cards and use them as a credit line in regular basis.
Most people around here only have a credit card to deal with USA focused internet shops. I never used the credit possibilities of mine, felt worried when using it, and cancelled it when iDeal etc became more common on the net.
Can confirm your experience. Although in my circles credit cards are more common due to kickbacks - big discounts at places you'd normally go to anyway, or straight up financial incentives. Everyone prefers debit however, and credit cards are definitely not the norm.
If you already have an Amex card from your country of origin, Amex will get you one based on the score of your country of origin, or at least that is what I had heard
They'll also let you get a secured loan for something you were planning to pay for in cash (e.g. a car), but instead you dump that cash into an account which automatically pays down the loan balance every month. I did it. The interest rate for the loan was a fraction of a percent higher than the interest on the account.
It's monumentally stupid, though, and says nothing about my ability to pay off future debt.
It says you're able to manage your cash flow well enough that you were never tempted to prioritize something else over the repayment, for months, probably years at a time.
IMO that says a lot about your willingness to pay off future debt.
Does this really happen? I migrated to the US and had no problem getting a CC. The limit was low, just a few Ks at first, but it gave me a chance to start building credit record.
It certainly does, depending of course on where you migrated from. Someone from a first world country and who has established assets is going to be in an easier position than someone who doesn't. And unfortunately, in this country credit isn't really an option, everything from potential landlords to employers can use it against you.
Say what you want about FICO scores, they are a lot of things, but they are not "completely untransparant," FICO tells you exactly what makes up the score:
You conclude that most EU countries have a credit score by linking to a Wikipedia article showing that almost none European country has a credit score?
It's not like the US system. It's a negative credit score meaning that you start as a good lender and then you can only fuck it up by not paying your bills.
In the US we have positive credit score meaning you have to show you are a good lender to get a better score.
> You conclude that most EU countries have a credit score by linking to a Wikipedia article showing that almost none European country has a credit score?
The Wikipedia article does not show that almost no European country has a credit score or credit reporting system. It simply provides examples from various countries and is obviously not exhaustive, like most lists in Wikipedia.
If you want to just see how many EU countries have any credit registries, these World Bank links have good data:
They show most EU countries have such registries. I did go through a dozen countries manually before finding the above handy links, though...
Of course one could argue whether or not those systems which only allow negative entries (and thus most people will have no data there) for a credit check should be considered credit score systems.
Credit registry =/= credit score system. You are moving the goal post here. Your previous assertion is just false. the US system is brutal, unfair and shouldn't be reproduced anywhere else in the world at first place.
In Germany, there is SCHUFA, which is a credit score.
To rent in Germany, I had to have a SCHUFA check and a letter from my previous landlord saying I didn't have any outstanding debts, the "Mietschuldenfreiheitsbescheinigung."
Yeah, but "negative" credit score (ie. the only information they store is whether you have been a "bad" customer) is different from the US-style credit score system.
Ignore the media spin, it's the most capitalist country in Europe, where unequal contracts rule supreme and you get fines and prison time for nearly anything.
I'm surprised the socialist policies stuck around, although there's still time to get rid of them.
What, other than a contract that complies with the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, should be more supreme between two parties freely trading with each other?
Somehow you replied before my edit. I meant unequal contracts, where one party has more power and the other is screwed if they, for whatever reason, cannot fulfill it.
Which is to say, most contracts.
The requirements and punishment for breach of contract are rather nutty even compared to the US.
I don't get the media spin in the UK. I don't expect Germany to be anything other than capitalist, or as they say "ordoliberal", which is a market with strong state regulation.
Considering their socialist policies started with Bismarck, I think they'll remain. But I think perhaps US-centric media somewhat over-eggs "socialist Europe".
That's a weird take, meaningful fines are rare, except for parking/speeding tickets (because it's an easy way for cities to get cash), prison is very rare, you have to really go for the large crimes to not get probation. The one exception is coercive detention ("Beugehaft"), which they hand out instead of fines. It's a dumb concept, but it's also not that common.
I also generally disagree that Germany is capitalist. Most markets are heavily regulated and full of subsidies, taxes are extremely high, and there's a fundamental mistrust of individualism.
Fines are neither extrajudicial nor cruel and unusual. It's in everyone's interest for you to pay a fine if you don't file your taxes than for you to receive a prison sentence.
Again, it's rare. The state is financed via very high taxes in Germany, not by abusing fines as a money grab. Some local admins get overzealous with speeding + parking violations, but even that is pretty cheap. And what's the alternative? Would you prefer your car to be towed and your license invalidated? Paying 20€ is cheaper for everyone involved ... and if you're really allergic to paying money and the picture isn't perfect, you can usually get out of it by claiming "that person could be anyone".
Funnily enough, despite the advertising, there really is no such thing as a Credit 'Score' in the UK.
Lenders get information about you from a Credit Reference Agency and will have their own internal systems to make decisions based on that. You can ask the reference agency for a copy of your credit report.
The three "score" sites are partnered - and possibly funded - by Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax.
The "scores" are only loosely related to actual credit ratings, which are somewhat context/application dependent.
In reality the sites are mostly just marketing fronts for various consumer services - credit cards, loans, mobile and energy contracts, and so on.
They're notoriously aggressive about getting you to log in and keep checking your score. Partly because this looks good for partner engagement metrics, but also because it trains you to keep checking your score in an obsessive and gamified way.
I briefly worked in that space for my first job; a small company that would essentially resell you your own credit report for a 'not insignificant" monthly subscription.
The TV advertising for credit score checking was just about to start around then as far as I could tell.
In Sweden it is common for companies to check on income and payment records before accepting purchase orders. Income data is provided by the tax authorities while payment records are available through the enforcement agency (state bailiff, "Kronofogden"). If your income is deemed to be too low or you have a derelict payment on record (these records are in place for 3 years after the payment has been completed) you will be denied credit in which case you'll have to pay up-front.
But this is more like based on government data rather than, I know this is very American, private data shared by companies (and usually handled badly, whether in cybersecurity or identity correlation terms).
Also, a credit checking association boasted that their members' data is 95% accurate - so that means that around 15 million Americans do have devastating errors on their credit score (through no fault of their own).
Specifically for Belgium there is the CKP, which keeps track of all loans, including how timely they are paid, and which credit providers have to consult before granting any loan or line of credit.
Finland only has a negative credit system (basically a record of payment delinquencies) but there are plans to introduce a positive credit system similar to the US.
I'm not aware of a good English page describing the current system in detail, though. The Finnish pages of e.g. the Asiakastieto registry are more detailed.
If you want to get the average suburban Republican to lose their shit, all you have to do is tell them that what they do in private will affect them in real life. Imagine trying to explain to your wife that, when she takes care of all the household bills expenses, that your credit score never budges above 700 because of the weird late-night things you do when nobody's watching.
It just boggles the fucking mind. How are credit score companies even legal in the first place? Isn’t the point of GDPR (and all the other data protection laws) to stop companies collecting your personal info and then sharing it with other parties against your own interests? Can I call up Experian and demand they delete my file? Please someone just class-action sue these guys into oblivion.
