So not what their running debt is but only whether they can take on a new, specific one.

I knew the criteria was out of the hands of EU-based lenders, but didn’t realise the data is also out of reach to the lender. I suppose it makes sense that the lender would get no info other than a yes or no, if lenders have no discretion.

I noticed A shop had a rediculously priced phone (like €800+, something I would never buy) but advertised something like €9 if you take a contract. So it’s effectively a loan factored into a locked-in phone service plan. IIUC, the phone shop must arrange that with a bank and does not have the option of taking on risk, and then the bank asks the central bank if customer X can handle that loan, correct?

You can reverse payments through the bank in the EU as well but it’s seldom necessary, since the companies tend to revert the charge willingly when confronted by the consumer protection bureaus.

I’ve only had to resort to bank reverse a couple if times.

One was when I ordered a pair of shoes of what appeared to be an Italian website. It later turned out it was a scam site that listed popular models that were not made anymore and then sent you a ridiculously poorly made knock-off copy from China. I explained the issue to my bank and showed the knockoffs I got and a week or so later the charge was reversed.

That’s quite a surprise. I heard SWIFT/IBAN transfers were permanent and irreversable. I heard of mistakes being corrected but it required the two banks to collude and the bank of the recipient to do a money grab on their account, which I suppose would be impossible if a criminal closes their account. I wonder if your bank took a loss or if they colluded with the other bank. IIRC, banks have a minimum “investigation” fee of like €25 plus an hourly rate to pay bankers to deal with bad transactions. Did your bank offer that service for free?

The only similar things I know is the central bank keeping a listing of “unpaid credit” which make ban you from getting any new credit for a certain time.

Indeed that’s what I’m talking about. In Belgium it seems consumers have no control over whether a creditor can access the central bank’s records. Apparently the central bank simply trusts that creditors are checking records in response to an application for credit. I would like to know if any EU countries make use of an access code so consumers can control which creditors can see their records.

I don’t mean to imply anything about scoring, but certainly there must be some kind of mechanism to expose bad debtors to lenders.

In Belgium, there are no private credit bureaus but there is a central bank. Belgian banks are obligated to report loan defaults and cash transactions to the central bank, and creditors are obligated to check the central bank’s records. Consumers have no way to control creditors access to their records in the central bank. It seems to be trust based. The central bank apparently trusts that a creditor is checking a consumer’s file in connection with an application for credit by the consumer.

eclic.ro is an exclusive Cloudflare site just like change.org is. Exclusivity is obviously quite lousy for democracy. Better alternatives are here:

https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/140

privacytools.io always was shit show even before the infighting. They put their own endorsement site on Cloudflare. Despite a collossal pile of dirt emerging on #Signal:

https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/issues/779

PTIO continued endorsing Signal non-stop, refusing to disclose the issues. That was also before the breakup. Dirt was routinely exposed on PTIO endorsements and it never changed their endorsement nor did they reveal the findings on their website.

Now both factions are hypocrits just as they were when they were united. The original PTIO site is back to being Cloudflared (nothing like tossing people coming to you for privacy advice into the walled garden of one of the most harmful privacy offenders), and Privacy Guides has setup on a CF’d Lemmy node. The hypocrisy has no end with these people.

Interesting, but that does not help because Mint jails all their docs in Cloudflare.

Also worth noting that #Ubuntu and #Mint both moved substantial amounts of documentation into Cloudflare (the antithisis of the values swiso claims to support). I have been moving people off those platforms.

BTW, prism-break is a disasterous project too. You know they don’t have a clue when they moved their repo from Github.com to Gitlab.com, an access-restricted Cloudflare site. There are tens if not hundreds of decent forges to choose from and PRISM Break moved from the 2nd worst to the one that most defeats the purpose of their constitution.

It might be useful to find dirt on various tech at prism-break, but none of these sites can be trusted for endorsements.

The prism-break website is timing out for me right now. I would not be surprised if they were dropping Tor packets since they have a history of hypocrisy.

If you look in their bug tracker, it actually reveals that they ignore dirt that has been dug up on their suggestions.

As others have mentioned there is little in the way of justification for these suggestions, and while I happen to agree with plenty of them, I’d personally like to see more reasoning, if not to appease people that already have opinions then to help newer users understand their options.

Indeed. In fact it’s actually worse than you describe. Swiso witholds negative information. They don’t want to inform people. They want to steer people. For example, swiso’s endorsements for donation platforms have some quite serious problems:

https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/141

swiso is also aware of the serious issues with Qwant and the serious issues with DuckDuckGo. Not only failing to remove them but also failing to inform. Qwant and DDG are both Microsoft syndicates!

(if anyone is interested, one of the most privacy-respecting search services is Ombrelo¹, which is largely unknown to the world because PTIO, swiso, and prism-break don’t do the job they claim to do)

And swiso is aware because that’s their bug tracker.

/cc @Imprint9816@lemmy.dbzer0.com

¹ https://ombrelo.im5wixghmfmt7gf7wb4xrgdm6byx2gj26zn47da6nwo7xvybgxnqryid.onion/

There are a few good alternatives and swiso has been aware of them for ~4+ years:

https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/140

Self-hosting is a different scenario than the way most users reach the fedi. Self-hosters certainly have fewer reasons to have multiple accounts. But obviously the one unescapable reason is privacy. If all activity is under the same account, doxxing risk is pegged.

Another reason a self hoster would want multiple accts is followship. Someone might want to follow you because they love your French posts about oil painting, for example, but since you do everything with the same account they also have to see posts in English about politics, religion, phones, movies, etc, they may not want all the other noise. Compartmentalisation improves followship.

Young voters did this, ironically enough, according to BBC World News. Young people struggling to get jobs after graduation think that right wing parties will fix that.

So as older generations are trying not to hand-off a burning planet to the young, the young are signing up for a burning planet under some delusion that right wingers will get them jobs. Schools have apparently failed to teach kids that the jobs they get under conservative governance are shit jobs – lousy pay and lousy benefits.

My god… “Consumer power” is a myth, there’s no evidence of it working for anything significant.

I guess you are not following Gaza. McDonalds in Israel decided to give free meals to Israeli soldiers. McDonalds customers who boycott Israel impacted McDonalds’ bottom line. And it’s a franchise. The McDonalds shops in Israel had different ownership than McDonalds outside Israel (where the boycott was impacting). So in response McDonalds HQ directly bought out all Israeli branches in order to stop the support to Israeli troops, just to protect their brand.

Lidl and Aldi both started taking a hit in Europe because their produce from Israel was being boycotted. Aldi got caught removing the origin label from their produce when Israel was the origin. Lidl got caught falsifying the label by displaying a different region. If the boycott was insignificant, there would be insufficient motivation for a grocery chain to commit fraud against their customers. So I boycott the whole Lidl chain and Aldi North, not just Israeli products.

Organize your workplace

Or boycott without organising, as this person did:

https://slrpnk.net/post/4687232

Indeed. And it’s worth noting as well that Cloudflare encourages admins to deploy heavy websites, pushes graphical CAPTCHA (which adds weight), and makes text browsers less usable. So I boycott Cloudflare, as well as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Lemmy.world uses CF, so changing instances to get off Cloudflare is also a climate action.

It seems anti-immigration is driving all these right wing votes. And xenophobia manifests from the naïve idea that immigrants will somehow reduce incomes.

Well, you can vote harder. The polls are not the only place you vote. Every purchase is a vote. Most people neglect their consumer power. I’m boycotting hundreds (if not thousands) of harmful companies and products, including Amazon. You can always vote harder by investigating the shops and brands you support. You can investigate whether your bank invests in the fossil fuel energy and change banks (or better, become unbanked). You can follow the !climate_action_individual@slrpnk.net community.

E.g. certainly one small thing @lurch@sh.itjust.works can do is ditch sh.itjust.works for a different instance. Website weight has quadrupled since Cloudflare took hold because CF encourages web admins to create heavy websites. sh.itjust.works is CF-based.

Indeed. What a setback. I will continue practicing individual climate action (!climate_action_individual@slrpnk.net), which is the only control we have now.

Ungoogled Chromium with uMatrix running over a Tor circuit gave Yahoo’s typical blurred out paywall yesterday. Today (likely on a different Tor circuit) it gives “Too many requests – error 999.”

Engadget/yahoo is fully enshitified. If you can read that article it probably means your browser is insufficiently defensive. A tl;dr bot would be useful here.

I think it’s too hard for many to grasp the full consequence of surveillance via forced banking. They link cash to privacy which they then mentally reduce to “confidentiality”. It’s a lossy reduction but in the naïve brain privacy=confidentiality. They don’t realise privacy is about /control/, not just purely infosec concept of confidentiality, which then leads to the mental short-sightedness of thinking they’re dealing with “paranoia” (which is hinted in vzq’s next reply).

From there, I don’t have the answer as far as how to convey the full depth of the whole concept of privacy within the span of a post or comment that’s short enough to not be automatically ignored.