I only agree in the sense that there are no good things when it comes to consumer credit reporting in the United States. This is just an example of systemic problems that can and should be solved by increased automation and removing humans from the process.
There's not a ton of reasons that setting isDead = false in a table somewhere shouldn't "just work" other than too much human intervention in the processes of evaluating credit, reporting it to stake holders, and keeping information in sync.
I've seen this pattern fail too many times to take it seriously anymore. Programmers (myself included) tend to rather drastically underestimate the likelihood that data can end up in an error state.
Humans make more mistakes, to be sure, but they can also sensibly correct mistakes when they discover them (or have them reported). Automated systems make fewer errors but once they do, the problem can be nigh irresolvable. Just look at the endless trouble we read about every few weeks from people who get their Google accounts suspended. Those people are suspended incorrectly by automated systems, and the widely-responded best recourse is to be well-enough connected to be able to get a human who works for Google to bat for you.
Machines are great for increasing scale, but they are terrible for handling edge cases. If edge cases are important to your system, you need humans deeply involved.
Have you priced ECC DDR4 recently? That stuff is expensive.
What I find interesting is that the chances of a bit error is minute... but the number of bits in a common system is large. (Actually to a human mind I would say it is astronomically inconceivably large)
I first became aware that bit errors <=> memory size were colliding when I heard about large sun systems were doing something called memory scrubbing.
I've also seen automation fail spectacularly because of inconceivable edge cases during design. Almost universally it's because the process being automated was originally human, and the conceptual model of an automated process is as a human that doesn't sleep. If there's friction to structurally altering the process so it can be automated - including restricting the input data and output conditions - then you're going to see spectacular failures.
Automation isn't perfect but it really falls over when the stakeholders don't understand that it isn't perfect and the process needs to be altered for the project to succeed.
For to many times in LOB applications do I see error produced by users doing things "they were not suppose to do" or in an out of order manner or something like that
to many programmers go with the "well the user should not have done that" instead of understanding that their program should have never allowed the error in the first place.
Machine do as they are instructed by humans. Machines do not make mistakes, programmers do.
Someone has to verify that the person is in fact alive. And not, for example, their meth addicted grandson trying to get their social security checks. The difficulty isn't in setting the flag but in proving that the flag should be set.
I don't understand your comment. You seem to be saying that we should increase the amount arbitrary, opaque decision making that happens in consumer credit reporting, by increasing automation. Am I reading that correctly?
As for nothing being good about consumer credit reporting in the US, consider the old system what we have now replaced. It was all done on handshakes and personal references. That sounds really fair to poor people, doesn't it?
Apparently corruption is so bad you bribe a government official get someone declared dead.
There is no recourse for coming back to life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh_Association_of...
On a more local front, a friends social security card lists him as female. After a months effort he finally gave up on correcting it.
Heck my owns wife’s birthday is wrong. By a few days. We inquired about it and were told to just go with it. Multiple years of effort would be required to fix it.
The US Social Security Administration? It took me years to get the IRS to tell me why they were rejecting my electronic tax return filings. Once I found out it was the birthdate on file with the SSA, it took less than 5 minutes to fix at the SSA office in the nearest federal building (which was conveniently across the street from my work office at the time). Perhaps it is very challenging or impossible at the benefits offices that are in just about every city and town across the US. If you don't live in a big city with a complex of federal offices, maybe next time you go to one bring along a bunch of documents and get it done.
I always have to verify which document she'll be showing at the airport when buying airline tickets (in the before times, anyway).
I even got in an argument getting my public service card issued, where she told me quite sternly "It has to match your birth certificate". Except I've seen my birth certificate and she hasn't.
So the taxman, drivers licence, public service cards all have one spelling. And my passport has the correct one. I'm not entirely sure if I'm two people or not.
Don't keep reading if you don't want a spoiler.
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The gist of it is that the customer says "this sounds like a bank robbery, not identity theft. I have my identity, but you don't have the money, so it sounds like they stole your money, not my identity".
In the US banks have managed to pass laws so they're entitled only to upsides of risk taking but pass on all downsides to customers and the public.
(1) standard security protocol stuff: - identity: I am person X
- authentication: I prove that the person claiming to be X is actually X (in the US, this step is almost always skipped because, hey, they lobby government and you don't)
- authorization: the person that has been confirmed to be X has permissions to do the task they're attempting to do
From a short publication on the "Fair Credit Reporting Act": "Defamation, privacy, and negligence claims. The FCRA specifically bars defamation, invasion of privacy, and negligence claims that concern the reporting of information from being brought against any CRA, any user of a consumer report, or any furnisher of reported information, except for false information furnished with malice or willfully intended to injure the consumer (15 U.S.C. § 1681h(e); see, for example, Thornton v. Equifax, Inc., 619 F.2d 700, 703 (8th Cir. 1980)). For a state-law claim to stand under this provision, a defendant’s misconduct must be truly malicious and not simply careless (see Ross v. FDIC, 625 F.3d 808, 817 (4th Cir. 2010))."
See [1] for the whole document: https://www.jonesday.com/files/Publication/e42f45d6-a8c6-43f...
Of course in real life I bet they "realize" you're alive all of a sudden.
Which does make me wonder if that's not a legitimate way to "come back to life". Like if you commit a small crime are they just going to consider you a John Doe or kick you out of the country? Or are they going to do the leg work to declare you alive?
Or for that matter, maybe you can just turn yourself into the IRS for evading taxes. Would that make things better or worse?
That is, there's no inherent reason the system must have a consistent view of you as alive or dead, so the reasonable conclusion is that it won't, so you'll be alive to the parts of it responsible for punishing you, but dead to the parts of it you want to be alive to. After all, the jail won't burn down because it's holding a person some government database considers to be dead.
Maybe they do like the movie Brazil when Jill was legally dead.
Sounds a lot like the ISP help that tells you to fill out a form online if your internet is out...
