Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by closeparen 2342 days ago
Blacking out credit history would obliterate lending, which would in turn collapse asset prices and lead to a complete restructuring of entire industries and society itself. If that were on the table, you would’ve heard.

This is primarily about the companies that buy your phone number from your gym membership or supermarket loyalty card and sell it to telemarketers. They won’t be missed.
2 comments
progval 2342 days ago
> Blacking out credit history would obliterate lending

Credit history companies like Equifax are very much an American thing; lending still works everywhere else.

They are such a non-topic in France that I only learned about them last year, and the French Wikipedia page on the subject is very short, and only documents the US, Canada, and China: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89valuation_des_risques-cl...

And IANAL, but it seems to me that credit history databases are made illegal by Article 5 of the 1978 "Computing and freedoms act" https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFT...

link
closeparen 2341 days ago
A quick Google search suggests that the Bank of France itself tracks defaults.

As I understand it, the American weirdness is that this is a private sector function rather than a service of the state. Not that it exists.

link
progval 2341 days ago
Yes, and it only tracks defaults; and you're notified 30 days before being added to the file. And you are removed from the file as soon as you repaid what you owed.

Source: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F17608

That's nowhere near the amount of data Equifax collects.

link
bonoboTP 2342 days ago
I don't think society would need to be restructured.

Many countries do fine without private third party entities managing people's credit history and score. Instead, you have to provide data on your credit worthiness each time you request credit from a particular bank. Such as bills, income proof, assets etc.

link
closeparen 2341 days ago
In which countries can you default on a loan and then go get another one like it never happened? Sure it might be the state hosting the mechanism instead of a private company, but that mechanism is pretty important.
link
bonoboTP 2339 days ago
Yeah, if you default on it and there's a court decision etc. then it gets recorded in a government system and you are on a blacklist.

It's quite different and a lot less fine-grained than feeding all your credit-related and non-credit-related history into some ML model to estimate your credit worthiness.

link
closeparen 2339 days ago
Sure, and nationalizing or limiting the scope of credit reporting are both fine ideas.

It is still a third party collecting a fact about someone and repeating it to others, to the data subject's detriment and against his will.

link