OpenSCHUFA – Reverse-engineering the algorithm of the German credit score agency (opens in new tab)

And stealing identity isn't really a thing here. Like to open a bank account you still need to go to the post office with your ID which they then confirm, so knowing the things that schufa knows won't get you far.

As far as I understood it credit data companies in the US have a lot more info. Schufa has very basic things: "Opened account at X bank", "Got approved loan of 10k", "Signed a phone contract".

They don't have any insight into loan payments, individual transactions, or anything else really.

2. see below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16391885

Nevermind, just read it below: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvato

Also, you will get data from a very skewed demographic.

AFAIR there is an upcoming EU law which requires (at least some) transparency on how scores are evaluated, in expectation of algorithms making life changing decisions. We'll see how that's panning out.

EDIT: to clarify, I'd love to see this working out. But I never would give data of this kind to an unknown organization.

- OpenSCHUFA was initiated by Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland and Algorithmwatch, two independent and established NGOs.

- Algorithmwatch is supported by a foundation/trust called "Bertelsmann Stiftung".

- There is also a company called "Bertelsmann", which owns Arvato Infoscore, a competitor to SCHUFA.

- The Bertelsmann Stiftung (which is supporting Algorithmwatch which is co-initiator of OpenSCHUFA) owns a majority of shares of the company (that owns Arvator Infoscore, a competitor to SCHUFA), and some people say the foundation and company are tightly tied together.

- And last but not least Schufa now places in the press, that this is a big conflict of interest.

Any EU citizen needs a passport or equivalent in Germany. One needs it already when entering Germany. Though you don't need to carry it all time with you. But you need to have one.

In Germany as German you are obliged to have a valid identification document and as EU citizen just the same in case you are being asked for it. Wikipedia hast the links to the relevant laws https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausweispflicht#Deutschland

I guess it is just a dark pattern to sell their "premium" products.

I'd expect the logic backing a legacy/old school company like this would turn out to be an expert system. If that's the case, and you have a LOT of data, you'd likely get very far by just feeding a bunch of SCHUFA applications and resulting scores into SKL's decision tree classifier.

They are easy to visualize, they likely model what's going on behind the scenes, and it takes very little effort to give it a try.

While this MAY be true in a lot of cases it certainly is not all the time. From my experience 50/50.