[pktgen]

I hope we can differentiate "I want the New York Times to remove an article about me" from "I want Equifax to remove its business records about me because I don't consent to them collecting my data for commercial purposes."

The former would clearly run into 1st Amendment concerns, but I'm hopeful the latter can be allowed without the same concerns. Does the EFF oppose the latter type?

[closeparen]

The foundation of the American economy is the fact that the financial industry, and not you, owns the records about your credit history. Disempowering data subjects is essential to making credit history a useful signal about risk. Without that signal, lending would disappear overnight. This would crash home prices and wipe out almost all middle-class wealth. It would also probably eliminate the auto industry and severely curtail retail as consumer credit disappears. A less indebted society might be good in the long term, but that’s one hell of a shock you’re proposing.

[theseatoms]

You're right about the way these things currently work. But you'll still be able to volunteer information about yourself in pursuit of a loan. Exactly who will validate that information is another question. (Dare I suggest a distributed credit ledger? :) )

There are quite a few startups in the lending space. But most I've encountered rely pretty heavily on existing, underlying infrastructure, i.e. legacy finance.

[closeparen]

A Blockchain is much worse than a credit reporting agency. Instead of one entity having your records, everyone does!

[theseatoms]

Yes. Storing financial records themselves on the blockchain would be pure insanity.

But I’m imagining a distributed reputation rating scheme. There’d have to be some PageRank-analogous feature (I think that’s how PageRank works), so that a high rating from an entity with a high rating is worth more.

Still plenty of issues to remedy... spam, sock puppets, etc. But I’d bet that a distributed credit rating system could be built.