So uncomfortably true!
I recall spending a (large) number of weeks struggling through Elementary Stochastic Calculus, which had an incredibly misleading sticker on the cover proclaiming:-
“This book is suitable for the reader without a deep mathematical background.”
The first report I looked at was Entrust refusing to revoke certs because their clients’ manual processes would make applying reissued certificates inconvenient.
Quite fun reading, surprisingly - a mid thread revelation that they’d pulled the exact same shit 4 years ago, an attempt by Entrust to kill the issue because unattributed legal advice said they’d misreported the error. And then, just when their chutzpah seemed to be wearing everyone down, a good ‘fuck you’ from Apple forced them to revoke the certs after all.
I’m not surprised Google had enough & yanked their license to print money.
This. Exactly the same response where I worked.
I’m not sure how much money they’ll actually get from this.
The (50,000 employee) company I worked for had very slow IT processes at the time, but when the licensing changed they treated it like a critical security vulnerability because of the amount of money involved: they very quickly migrated their software packages to include non-Oracle OpenJDK builds & rolled out an update to uninstall Oracle java from all PCs. And all server owners were given a deadline to migrate or start paying recovery costs.
I imagined it’d be smaller organisations which would’ve sat on this issue.
I think life insurance is already pretty grabby with data, behind the scenes. We had a ton of data on some high value life policies we’d bought - down to records of all doctors visits. And even for lower value policies they can currently just ask you the important actuarial questions (e.g. are you a poor obese guy who smokes, rides a motorcycle & lives alone) and then deny the payout if you lied.
Given how disgustingly evil the US health insurance system is, my hope is that NZ resists the temptation to go there. I don’t have health insurance since moving back to NZ and it’s been fine. All the things I was told by the doctor “go private or the wait will be too long” turned out to have reasonable waits after all.
Europe has GDPR, so you’re not legally allowed to collect data unless it’s necessary for the actual service you’re providing your customer, and you’re not allowed to use data for anything else once you’ve collected it for the purpose you stated.
Having said that, your customer will always have to prove who they are, how they acquired funds, and where funds are going. This is to prevent bribery & corruption, money laundering, terrorist financing, tax evasion etc.
I was working as a software developer for an EU investment bank when the EU implemented GDPR, and the amount of paperwork required to collect and hold personal data meant we destroyed a ton of data & documentation and rewrote a lot of software. And every spreadsheet containing personal data or which was used more than once had to be recorded in an EUC register with signed commitments about GDPR compliance. Even if data wasn’t strictly forbidden by GDPR we’d be very wary asking for any information which could theoretically be misused to discriminate against protected classes.
The NZ Privacy Act 2020 looks broadly similar in intent to the GDPR, so I imagine there’d be the same disinclination to collect information which can’t be proven necessary to perform the requested service or satisfy regulatory requirements.
I have several NZ insurance policies and they had no interest in transaction history. Same with my mortgage. I sent bank statements, but only as proof of address.
Only my credit card application wanted to drill into my spending, which is not unexpected considering it’s unsecured lending. For sure I’d rather approve the API access than try to find where I can download (& probably pay extortionate fees) for copies of historic statements
And working in finance (in UK & Europe), they generally collect and keep as little data as is necessary anyhow - personal data is a pain to safely manage these days, and I’m always keen to be responsible for as little of it as possible.
They’ll already insist on whatever information they feel is useful. This just saves them from scanning in your statements.
It sounds similar to the UK’s open banking system. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/517885/open-banking-how-to-opt-in-and-out-of-the-new-payment-system
I use UK open banking often. I’m always asked to approve the specific access requested, and this takes place at my bank’s website or app. This could be permission to take an amount of money; or for apps which manage multiple accounts (e.g. Emma) this could be all historical transactions; or my accountant uses an open banking service provider (Armalytix) to request transactions for an explicit date range. So far, touch wood, there’s always been an alternative - for example I can use open banking to send my transactions to my accountant or I can manually download a CSV statement from my bank and upload it into their portal.
Or, from the 99PI podcast a month ago…
(Tweaked) Verdana FTW.
I liked proportional fonts for reading code - several of my favorite programming books used proportional fonts for code examples - so when Verdana was released in 1996 I switched to using it in my IDEs. I’ve had 27 years of pleasantly ergonomic coding - it has a high x-height, different 0/O, I/l/1, and impeccable hinting and kerning. ❤️❤️❤️