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by nimrod0 2899 days ago
I understand the impulse to distinguish the two but there simply isn't as much distinction as you perhaps would like to believe. An apartment or a job aren't strictly financial, and while credit bureaus construct your scores out of mainly financial transactions at the moment, they have started out as much more, as I've mentioned, and they've always been looking for other non-financial but correlating variables from your life activities; can't find the link right now, but there was recently an internal whitepaper on such an algorithm using non-financial data.

And again, the US government does care about dissent and goes to great lengths to build files on what it considers potentially subversive forces that are essentially political dissidents. The same controlling impulses are there. And since the scaffolding is all there, the only things safeguarding against a dystopia are, firstly, the clear-headed and astute attention against various soft forms of social control, secondly the maintenance of decentralization as a virtue, and lastly the robust exercise of checks and balances that are nominally provided institutionally, and not, as your answer seems to imply, the intricacies of how certain scores are constructed.