Blog 10: Collateral damage

In Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Destruction, She talks about how the 1950’s Banking model works. She talked about how it was mostly a small town or that the banker would likely know who you are, and what your family dealings have been. They don’t often want to make these judgements but subconsciously it will happen based on them needing to trust you to give you the money that you are looking for on these loans. But when the FICO credit scores came out this all changed. They found better numbers to look at to see who was likely to default on certain loans. They were judged fairly; they didn’t look at color or at background. Fico just looked at the numbers, and even more than that FICO told you what your scores were based off of so that you could see why you received the score that you have. These scores are private so not everyone can look at them. This causes companies that want to sell people things not to have access to these numbers, which overall is a good thing. However they proceeded to look at other things that were unregulated and that you don’t have control over to see if you were a big spender or if you had money. The people that have a high E-score would talk to humans on phone lines while others go to overloaded centers where they got automated messages. In short this is just another version of a WMD. These were not fair numbers they take into account race, search habits on the internet, religion, and family. All things that should not go into account for people trying to sell you things. Drawing yet another line that makes it unnecessarily harder for people in a lower social class.