Everybody knows it in the sense that a debt collector knows that they're ruining people's lives, but it's kinda swept under the rug. We also had the experience of people saying "yeah, we don't really know how well our algorithms our doing, so if you can develop software to tell us, we'll pay you big bucks." (Though, last I heard, nobody had actually paid big bucks for the software we did develop.) But it's the kind of truth that nobody really wants to face, so they just kinda acknowledge it and then go about their business.