Comment by TrackerFF
3 years ago
Remember that recent case where a lawyer was denied access to Madison Square Garden, because their in-house facial recognition software recognized her being an employee of a law-firm that was litigating against another subsidiary / child company of the owner of MSG Entertainment?
Between this, and that case, I can't say I'm looking forward to the future (ab)use of tech.
Imagine walking into a Walmart, only to get escorted out by security because someone you've been associated with caused a brawl, or shoplifted at Walmart (or some subsidiary of Walmart). Or that you get checked every time you try to use their self-checkout machines.
It's not that the US won't have social credit scores... they just will be privatized and opaque.
Kind of like the credit scores we already have.
Oh I'm sorry you're on the Moody's blacklist, there's nothing we can do. Corporate policy, we can't make exceptions, maybe try somewhere else.
I would prefer privatized credit scores to centrally controlled. I would prefer i was on one bad person list as opposed to the only bad person list.
This coordination already exists on some level. If you rip off a hotel they may inform their competitors and share information. Generally they don't care so much about tweets or politics as they are just trying to run a business. But if it was state controlled it runs the risk of beung used as a tool to suppress dissent or wrong think.
Large tech unicorns like social media are kind of inbetween state actors and private businesses as we have seen from the high amount of communication between state actors and these businesses
To concur: We have been living with private, decentralized social credit scores of varying sizes for most of our social history. Imagine you are asked for a $1000 loan from: a family member/a good friend/an acquaintance/a total stranger. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with being selective.
These only get scary when they are centralized. You can live without Airbnb. A government-mandated no-sleep list would be life changing.
Agree. The other upside of private companies doing it is that they might shoot themselves in the foot if their business interests misalign with their "credit scoring" ones, and intuition shows the former will take precedence and subsume the latter. That is, Airbnb might find the limits of its own risk-scoring scope when normal people will get upset and not be able to consume their product, which has happened quite a bit already. The cool thing is that in a place like the US, the open market will then adjust itself and propose a new competitor which will happily take Airbnb-banned users.
Why are you splitting hairs? If you're choosing between the two you've lost.
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> It's not that the US won't have social credit scores... they just will be privatized and opaque.
We already have a social credit score and it's privatized now. It's background checks.
From the story:
> While she does not have a criminal record, her boyfriend does, she said, telling Motherboard it was “a white collar charge,” though she did not go into specifics.
I find it a bit odd to let private companies do background checks when this really seems more of a function of government where as a society we can have input and reform the process.
In some European countries, people don't have credit scores, but when they're applying for a mortgage, they also need a collateral which costs about the same as the house or apartment they're trying to buy.
I'd rather have credit scores, tbh.
[citation needed]; which countries? Obviously a 100% deposit is an exaggeration, and 5-10% more normal depending on the market, so what's the true deposit number?
That collateral is usually the house or apartment that your are trying to buy. You can use something else, if you want, but usually it is the thing you buy.
Yeah, and basically Americans can purchase so much more on credit, and Europeans complain they can't buy shit.
Yet somehow the mortgage and lending industry manages to exist in Europe despite lack of a credit score.
every one rightly derides china's social credit scores yet here we are implementing our own them via entirely privately owned fiefdoms
It's not right to deride their social credit scores, when we've had them for decades, in the form of actual credit scores plus criminal records plus a no-fly list.
All these new developments are just slight changes to the system at its edges, the core of it is quite similar. But our society is myopic to its own problems.
Sorry, but it is absolutely right to deride their social credit scores even if we have our own similar system. As others have pointed out in this thread, ours have a completely different set of issues. Yes, they exist and should also be criticized, but saying that we can't criticize someone else's problems until we fix our own is bullshit. If that were the case, nothing would ever be fair to criticize.
Bollocks. This isn't a social credit score, this is one company blacklisting bad clients, and doing their best to ensure said bad clients don't game the system by using someone else's account.
Yeah I don't love the potential for ubiquitous tracking and judgment, but this isn't central government, it's AirBNB -- use VRBO, or Mariott, or Days Inn instead. Most hotels have, and have had for a long time, blacklists, too.
With the number of people who strongly advocate for stealing from Walmart, with seemingly no repercussions at all, I'm not sure that'd be such a bad thing.
People love to pretend like stealing from "big companies" is some robin hood adventure where the C-Suite is going to look at the numbers at the end of the year and decide they all need to cut their annual bonus to make up for the loss. When in fact prices go up for the paying customers, and jobs that used to help everyone (attendants who help restock, locate items, etc.) get converted to more "Security" jobs, where the worker does nothing but "look mean".
Where do people advocate for stealing from Walmart?
Common trope on TikTok/Instagram.
At least all my tech skills are slowly becoming life skills. Like oh, I have to work around some random bs so I can use X service ;_;
Imagine walking into a Walmart, only to get escorted out by security because someone you've been associated with caused a brawl, or shoplifted at Walmart
Society was much more liveable when that was considered common sense.
It was never considered common sense.
Some variant of what you're thinking about might've been possible in a small society (say, when the shop owner in a village knew all his customers, and was able to keep an eye on the troublemakers).
But in modern world it would basically mean that you might get banned from thousands of stores across the entire country because a cousin you barely know is an idiot. Or more likely, you'll just appear on the "do not serve" list without even knowing you're on in or finding out why.
So yeah, treating these two as the same thing is dishonest.
It was more livable for the more socially acceptable and/or wealthy segments of society not for the lower segments. Someone who is poor or otherwise on the margins of society is much more likely to be associated with people society considers "the wrong sort of people".
Similarly, those in the upper levels of society are discouraged from associating with the lower levels for fear of being associated with the wrong sort of people.
It would be normal for an individual known for shoplifting or assault to be blacklisted. Not some associated with an unsavory individual, which can be involuntary - coworker, family member, neighbor.
You're confusing "you" with "someone you've been associated with".