Comment by bko
3 years ago
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.
I like having a reputation. I pay my bills on time and im happy for my creditors to share that fact to others. Similarly i don't trash hotel rooms, get into fights or engage in other antisocial behavior. A reputation make things easier as service providers can focus efforts on higher risk individuals
I do have a problem if I get thrown on a general bad person list based on something unrelated (e.g. criticized [politician]) or the state telling private parties they should not associate with me for whatever reason
You like sharing that you’re a reliable citizen with anyone. You (presumably) don’t like sharing every bit of information that goes into making that assessment, such as what you buy, when you sleep, where you go, how your heart rate fluctuates, whom you interact with.
What’s missing, in my opinion, is being able to prove that you have a good credit rating without revealing your bank statement. That your life insurance should be cheap because you live a healthy, low-risk life without revealing biometrics. That your car insurance should be low because not only did you never have an accident, you never break suddenly or travel near where accidents happen, but without revealing GPS or acceleration data.
And so on.
Zero-knowledge cryptography is not mainstream. I hope it will be.