(07-29-2015 05:43 PM)UCF08 Wrote:  

(07-28-2015 08:27 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  UCF,
You are omitting the other side of the argument. At least two points need to be made:
1) You are obviously well aware of unscrupulous practices by banks and businesses. Unfortunately you ignore the fact that there are equally unscrupulous people on the other side who can cause great harm by using this information in inappropriate ways. You are correct that the mere gathering of this information is harmless. But it isn't being gathered just be gathered. It is being gathered to be distributed and used. And the potential for improper use by rogue martinet bureaucrats and ambulance-chasing plaintiffs' lawyers, among others, is immense. And you can't segregate gathering from use and debate one while ignoring the other.
2) Even if no unscrupulous individual ever gets his or her hands on this information, even ethical use has significant attendant risks of unintended consequences. You may have read my comments about how the black letter law of CRA ended up vastly different from the regulations written to enforce the law, and more importantly, from the way those regulations were enforced in the field. It didn't matter that you had a fully effective and compliant CRA program at your bank; you had to make at least X loans in ZIP code 12345, or you were deemed out of compliance. The result was that the system got swamped by an enormous number of high risk loans that defaulted at unprecedented rates and blew up the system. Once those loans were in the system, the crash was inevitable. Criticize Wall Street all you want, but the problem was inevitable regardless of what Wall Street did. What Wall Street did started out as a hope and prayer (totally approved by the bank regulators by the way) attempt to work out of the system, a Hail Mary that failed. This program is that CRA problem on steroids. Banks will have a choice between making loans that will surely default at record numbers or being branded as racist and getting hit with massive punitive damages in litigation. That will not end any better than it did the first time.

Did not omit them at all, I stated clearly that "argue all you wish about how this data is utilized", and in no way did my argument even touch on the issues that the utilization can bring. I'm simply responding to the many posters here who clearly stated that this information should not be collected or that the very act of collecting this data is wrong. It isn't, and it's needed.
Neither one of your points, which quite frankly seem to be the same argument, really addresses my claim.

And you've said nothing to address mine.

If data are not going to be utilized, then aren't the cost and hassle to accumulate them wasted? If they are going to be utilized, then isn't how they are going to be utilized a relevant issue in discussing whether to gather them? If there's no reason to gather the data but to use them, it seems pretty disingenuous to say, "Oh I only want to talk about gathering it, not how it's going to be used."

As to your point about my two points being one, they do both get to the same result. One involves actual unethical behavior by regulators and others, the other says that even if everybody behaves ethically, problems will still result. If you want to make them one point, I have no problem with that.