French bureaucracy is infamous for a reason and it's not just the state itself. A CDI is a certain type of employment contract, and a CDI is a CDI and everything else isn't, and a CDI is required for almost any significant loan. Workarounds are possible for smaller loans IF you have a personal relationship with the bank officer servicing that area. But if you didn't grow up there, or don't normally bank there, or they're suspicious of your race or tattoos, or were your bully in high school or or or. This sort of thing is more or less exactly what the credit reporting setup was meant to eliminate.

It doesn't matter what it "should be" proof of or what a reasonable person could infer from this income or documentation of it. If you don't have a CDI, which even many full-time employed people don't, you're in a hard spot.

Again, I don't see anything here that requires a third-party as intermediate. If you have a system broken in another way, go right ahead and fix that. But it is not sufficient justification for incredibly bad actors such as Experian et al to exist.

That's the thing, based on my experience living in different countries like France as described above or in Japan for a few years (where I was systematically rejected for credit cards when my ex who was a student with significantly less income than me was approved), I find that having third parties as intermediate setup a reporting credit system with clear rules like the US is so much better.

The US system has issues but it's less broken than every other countries I've lived in.

But what about the other 99% of us that aren't living internationally in multiple countries we have no history in?

The idea that everyone is forced to create a public profile so you have the option of getting a mortgage sucks. You have no right to a mortgage at other's expense. If you want folks to trust you, get a co-signer, put down roots and stay a while.

Ok, granted, living in different countries is not something that most people do, so let's talk about the other big advantage that a system with a credit score has. It protects against racism. If you don't have that, it's very easy for a bank officer to reject a mortgage because you're the wrong colour. You'll tell me there's law against discrimination but what often happens is people discriminates and then find other excuses to justify the rejection. Are you going to tell me that this isn't a problem?

Without a credit score that follows simple algorithmic rules, how do you want to prevent this from happening? A credit score that has rules that people know in advance may be gameable but it also creates fairness by making it easy for everyone to know what to do to get a decent score.

Now, the fact is that the credit score could be managed by government agencies (although honestly, I'm not sure any government is much better in term of data security), there could be stricter fines in case of data breach (that sounds like a good idea), but those are implementation details.

Lofty goals but too many degrees of separation I'd say. Not my responsibility to fix the problems of society. I'd go farther and say ubiquitous credit is not a human right, to the extent to force its drawbacks on the rest of us.

That said, I'd agree that both of our plans could be implemented a lot better.

Yeah but having to wait a year or three (three actually because as someone working remotely, you're self employed and self employed always require 3 years salary for anything) during which 80% of apartments reject you because you don't fit the criteria of the "garantie loyer impayé" is more than frustrating. It's downright hostile. Getting a mortgage is a pipe dream...

Being a French national and not being able to get a mortgage to buy an apartment for my mum is also more than a little frustrating. And that's despite having quite a bit of money saved.

You getting a mortgage is not a problem I'm willing to pay for with my privacy. (Not that I was given a choice.) Buying property here is a pipe dream, period.

I've rented apartments without credit by showing paycheck stubs and bank balance.

Also, I'm kind of confused, why do you think you'd have more privacy in other countries or with other systems? Even without credit scores, you still have credit cards, debit cards etc and all this can be tracked? There were massive data breach at places like Target, wouldn't you be impacted without credit scores and those 3 companies?

Outside of living off the grid, paying everything in cash, how do you want to have privacy about how you spend your money in this day and age?

Well, I'd say having a soon-to-be expired credit card transaction revealed here and there is a lot less worrisome than a single entity hoarding everything over my lifetime, combined with an utter disregard for security. They also sell it without knowledge and usually consent. At least CC processors have PCI standards right?

Bulk surveillance is a problem as well, but a big topic for another day.

Having done PCI compliance audits and talked to QSAs who told me about pretty serious breach from a well known payment processor owned by Visa, I wouldn't put too much faith in the PCI compliance process when it comes to protecting my data.

I guess where we differ is that between banks having lousy security, social medias and search giants selling all our data, the cat is already out of the bag when it comes to privacy and won't be put back until law is updated to have teeth, so I see that as a separate problem (which does bother me) that's orthogonal to the 3 companies credit scoring system.

That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be solved, I believe Equifax, Experian and Transunion should be heavily fined for any breach of data especially considering how important the data they have.