“Germany’s leading credit bureau, SCHUFA, has immense power over people’s lives. A low SCHUFA score means landlords will refuse to rent you an apartment, banks will reject your credit card application and network providers will say ‘no’ to a new contract. But what if your SCHUFA score is low because there are mistakes in your credit history? Or if the score is calculated by a mathematical model that is biased? The scoring procedure of the private company SCHUFA is highly intransparent and not accessible to the public.” - https://openschufa.de/

"[SCHUFA] is a German private credit bureau supported by creditors. It has its headquarters in Wiesbaden, the capital of Hessen, Germany. (…) Schufa has 943 million records on 67.7 million natural persons, and 6 million companies. Schufa processes more than 165 million credit checks each year. Of those, 2.5 million are self-checks by citizens.

(…) At the beginning of the 20th century, the Berlin city electric company (BEWAG) offered household appliances for sale on installment plans. At the time, the financing was compared with electric bills and only regularly paying customers would be supplied with appliances.[5] This started a system for assessing payment behavior." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schufa

  • DessalinesA
    6·
    4 years ago

    Its even worse in the US, where apartments require you to pay a non-refundable application fee so that they can run your credit score, and the 2-3 big credit score companies have no accountability to anyone.

    You also have to have proof of income (most recent paystub / bank statement), last 3 rentals history, a valid drivers license, and sometimes personal references.

      • DessalinesA
        1·
        4 years ago

        I’m sorry to hear that, most of us still here have your same plan, and are looking to get out asap.

  • k_o_t
    4·
    4 years ago

    oh wow, non-china countries also have surveillance systems and needlessly spy on its sitizens?

    can’t be

        • adhocOPM
          2·
          4 years ago

          IMF directly pushes for social media and google search credit score. “(…) Platforms like Amazon, Facebook or Alibaba incorporate more and more financial services into their ecosystems, enabling the rise of new specialized providers that compete with banks in payments, asset management, and financial information provision.” - https://blogs.imf.org/2020/12/17/what-is-really-new-in-fintech/

          "“Banks tend to cushion credit terms for their long-term customers during downturns,” the paper’s authors write. This is because they have a history and relationship with the customer. Now, imagine the kind of intimate history that Facebook could have with a borrower and suddenly its digital cash initiative starts to make more sense.

          But how would all this data be incorporated into credit ratings? Machine learning, of course." - https://gizmodo.com/your-credit-score-should-be-based-on-your-web-history-1845912592

    • adhocOPM
      13·
      4 years ago

      "A few hours before Adolf Eichmann was executed, a prison warden asked him, “What should the Jews have done? How could they have resisted?”

      Eichmann replied “…We would have been at a loss if they had disappeared before being registered… The number of our commandos was very small, and even if the police had helped us with all they had, their chances would have been at least fifty-fifty. …A mass flight would have been disastrous for us.” (17)

      A few thousand Jews survived in Germany through it all, to see the Nazis out. Predominantly, these were people who avoided identification by changing address and identity at the time of registration. Those who escaped identification and ‘isolation’ in ghettoes generally escaped altogether." - https://www.globalresearch.ca/id-cards-an-historical-view/15231

  • Ephera
    3·
    4 years ago

    It’s also very obviously illegal under the GDPR, but as per the usual with law things, you still have to sue them and wait for a multi-year lawsuit to conclude.

  • halo
    2·
    4 years ago

    The whole idea of credit score is based on limited access to information from an individual, but then goes on to affect an increasingly significant part of someone’s life in unlimited ways. It also assumes invisibility of your activities is a problem that should be punished with less credit score, in effect coercing you to make yourself visible. Some societies use dynamic and contextual reputation to rate how trustworthy someone is and if they should enter into a contract with them. But this model does not scale for socially un-invested but economically interested setups (capitalism in many of its shades). That is why this coercion is needed – deanonymize people to reduce your risk. Hidden in plain sight.

  • Ephera
    2·
    4 years ago

    I like how on that example form, which ranks the liquidity of a given company, the rankings 100 – 500 all say that they have no information, but still magically rank this company a certain way.

    Only between 500 – 600 do they have any information at all.

    Sure, just because you don’t know about concrete problems, doesn’t mean they’re saints or that they won’t cause problems in the future, but maybe you shouldn’t assígn 4/5 of your scale based on no information.

  • Redstone
    32·
    4 years ago

    It may look like it, and criticism is good. But china’s social credit system is on a whole other level.