• 0 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: September 27th, 2023
  • ms264556@beehaw.orgtoAotearoa / New Zealand@lemmy.nz•Open banking: How to opt in - and out - of the new payment system
    2·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • ms264556@beehaw.orgtoAotearoa / New Zealand@lemmy.nz•Open banking: How to opt in - and out - of the new payment system
    1·
    6 months ago

    This is the real problem. And this ship has already sailed - google and data brokers are already creepily tracking your every online and offline move and tying them together.

    Your financial providers are covered by a much, much more restrictive set of regulations preventing them from screwing you over like that.

    Open Banking seems generally aimed at attacking the nasty behaviour banks have been getting away with, where they gatekeep your financial data in order to prevent you from getting any useful utility out of it unless you pay them extortionate fees.

  • ms264556@beehaw.orgtoAotearoa / New Zealand@lemmy.nz•Open banking: How to opt in - and out - of the new payment system
    3·
    6 months ago

    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

  • ms264556@beehaw.orgtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Trying to ditch windows
    1·
    7 months ago

    Linux font rendering is generally very good now, so I think they’ve gotten past that. Apart from a System76 desktop, which was terrible, I haven’t hated the rendering for many years. It’s just that Microsoft’s font rendering (maximizing clarity at the expense of destroying the font metrics) is exactly what I want to look at all day if I’m staring at code. When I look at screenshots of vscode on Linux and Mac the code looks beautiful, because the font renderer hasn’t beaten the characters with a big stick to make them fit the pixel grid, but when I switch back to windows after using Linux/Mac then it feels like someone fixed the focus and de-blurred everything.

    And now that I can have as many Linux installs as I like running concurrently via WSL2, I get to use Linux all day without losing the stuff I like about Windows.

  • ms264556@beehaw.orgtoLinux@lemmy.ml•Trying to ditch windows
    3·
    7 months ago

    I don’t play games, but I do plenty of dev work including a lot in Visual Studio & SSMS. I always have a few Linux boxes running & try every few months to live on Linux rather than Windows.

    Visual Studio can be swapped out for Rider. Rider is quite different feeling than VS, but I guess a lot of devs use another Jetbrains IDE of some kind, in which case it’s a fairly easy switch.

    SQL Server runs happily on Linux. But SSMS is harder for me to do without. I have Aqua Data Studio & Jetbrains DataGrip, but they don’t feel as seamless as SSMS.

    In the end though, it’s hard to beat Windows + WSL2 now that Windows VSCode & Jetbrains IDEs seamlessly connect to Linux projects. And if you enable nested virtualization and MAC address spoofing then Hyper-V can run anything WSL can’t.

    Usually I end up moving back to Windows because of font rendering. I far prefer Windows cleartype font rendering on 2160p desktop screens. One day Linux fractional scaling will be perfected or 200+dpi desktop screens will become affordable. Then I might stay on Linux.