Wouldn't it make more sense, from both financial and technical standpoint to accept raw images then do the OCR server side? Server side OCR probably has more resources, and can utilize better OCR software. And you can re-run it after some time on every image if the results aren't that accurate.
I still find it to be lesser "evil" than schufa - which, I'm pretty sure, is also extremely discriminatory towards people who move to Germany and giving them worse score by default. Hopefully you'll get enough optional data to be able to prove that too.
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.
Otherwise comments here about this project funded by competitor is making this a bit fishy.
2. see below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16391885
Nevermind, just read it below: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvato
TV http://www.tagesschau.de/inland/schufa-101.html https://www1.wdr.de/mediathek/video/sendungen/wdr-aktuell/vi... https://www.n-tv.de/ratgeber/Aktivisten-wollen-Schufa-Code-k...
Online https://www.wired.de/collection/life/openschufa-macht-bonita... http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/kreditwuerdigkeit-w... https://www.golem.de/news/openschufa-reverse-engineering-der... https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/OpenSCHUFA-Projekt-w... https://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/openschufa-algorithmu... https://www.futurezone.de/netzpolitik/article213448091/OpenS... https://netzpolitik.org/2018/jetzt-mitmachen-wir-knacken-die...
most motivational video, ever https://youtu.be/HBsD8BdXSCY
2 current related article worth reading http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/regierungsberater-gerd... http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/dass-wir-ueberwach...
(disclaimer I'm part of the team)
- 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.
there is a big difference between passport and normal ID, EU citizens dont need passports.
No passport required, but it might be useful, since many online services require a passport, for example activating a SIM card.
We want to change this intransparency with the project OpenSCHUFA. Open Knowledge Foundation together with AlgorithmWatch want to reconstruct the Schufa algorithm with "reverse engineering".
They also have a legal arm (Haas & Partner) in the same building (again "independent"), who collect legal fees on top of Infoscore's debt collection fees -- a practice that has been deemed illegal by several federal courts.
The legal arm is largely automated, so the "lawyer" fees are questionable.
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.
Here are the live stats from the requests https://selbstauskunft.net/statistiken
Skewed demographics are on the radar (we know we are in bubble). EU regulation 2016/679 GDPR with May 25th is also on the radar.
For more related projects see http://mydata.org
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.
> For this purpose we call for data donations:
> Everybody can request their free SCHUFA-Score from Schufa under selbstauskunft.net/schufa and donate the data to our project.
c. "The SCHUFA is the best known credit reporter & market leader. In our project description we ask: The SCHUFA & other credit bureaus must publicly and permanently explain how their score works and which models / assumptions are based on it (traceability)"
Partnering with Bertelsmann here was a huge mistake. It questions not only data security it questions this first line of defense.
Think about it, how am I supposed to tell somebody to give their data to you when I already told them to look for the money first? I'd make myself and my methods unbelievable, incoherent and probably corrupted.
This is really terrible because this research is necessary and important but I hope you understand that I will neither support it nor recommend it...
again the data is first delivered only to the user, afterwards he/she can decide what to do
glad we agree that the issue is important
Here's the law: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/freiz_gg_eu_2004/__8.html
EU citizens in Germany have to carry a passport or equivalent.
..and no one has the right to demand explicitly passport if one is able to produce an equivalent and valid document e.g. national ID.
But when I moved to Germany, I was under the impression that potential landlords just want to make sure you don't have negative entries, and didn't care much for the actual score. Luckily I managed to find an apartment belonging to a Russian investor, who didn't ask for my record at all. In the end I never got myself to even request a free report.
However if you try to get a phone contract, credit card, internet contract, or anything else that requires payment in the future then your score is pretty much the only relevant part.
And that score is (maybe it varies by country) completely abysmal by default if you've moved to Germany - and it improves very slowly (<1%/yr).
As for credit cards, that's pretty common, traditional banks want to see your salary landing on your checking account for a few months before they issue you a credit card. Comdirect gave me a prepaid VISA in the meantime.
Anyway I ended up using a debit card (the MasterCard from N26) for almost everything, and later on I got a Gold credit card from Advanzia (I believe they do get information from the Schufa, but you also start with a pretty low monthly limit and need to prove them you pay your bills before they raise it).
It's worth watching. They show how they where able to take over accounts and such.
The farcical reason to scrap them comes from a government who's police force holds a large percentage of their population's faces - who are innocent - in a huge database and refuses to delete them. So yeah, it's dumb on all levels. Tease away at those muppets.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/27/theresa-may...
As a EU citizen you can settle in Germany without owning a passport. It's not up to private companies to redefine what consists in a recognized official form of identification.
This is notorious and infuriating violation by many service providers in Germany.
And that makes sense. You can be denied a passport, but not a personal id.
The passport is simply the international baseline.
There is - they are nosy, invasive, predatory fuckers.
