Meyer: Could there be a technical resolution to disparate impact where Facebook—I’m trying to figure out how this would work as I propose it—where it says, this person belongs to this ethnic group, they live in this neighborhood, and therefore we’re essentially going to handicap the score we hand off to the credit bureaus to specifically account for disparate impact—or does that then get into a whole other set of worms because how do you quantify that?

Rieke: Yeah. That’s a really hard question. I apologize because this is gonna get super, super, super into the weeds, and this probably doesn’t belong to a story that you want normal people to read about this, so there’s a regulation called Regulation B. So you have the Equal Credit Opportunity Act which is the statute that Congress passed. Regulation B implements a lot of the requirements of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in more detail. And I’m pretty sure Regulation B prohibits any consideration of race in any scoring system, period. So I’m not even sure you could take race into account in a strategy like that. But I think a strategy like you proposed may honestly be part of the toolkit of how we deal with this type of thing. I don’t think that that’s a solution that is gonna happen right away, but I can certainly imagine a future where, for these types of scoring systems, if you want to avoid disparate impact, you actually explicitly consider the factors that are important and as you say handicap them in a way that leads to different outcomes.

It’s actually really interesting—if you look back into the Congressional record, back to when Congress was passing ECOA, what you see is FICO arguing in front of Congress not to strip that data out of the decision. You see FICO saying, ‘if you want an outcome, just tell us the outcome that you want, and we’ll help you get there. Don’t take away the data. That’s not the way to do this.’

But that’s kind of far down the rabbit hole. If I were to make a prediction, I’d say 20 years down the road, we may be at a different place in how that data is actually used.

Meyer: Could I ask that you do get into the prediction game, because it sounds like the immediate outcome of this patent and technologies like it is that it would be very legally difficult for Facebook—and commercially difficult, and not really in their interest—to get into this game right now. And that the next steps for financial justice would be to consider more timely, regular payments that people are making. But when you look at 15, 20, 25 years, is this the kind of thing that you see play into people’s financial lives? And if so, does it have the possibility of being something stranger than just another consideration banks take into account when they look at mortgages and credit cards and student loans? That’s probably a larger and broader question than you feel comfortable answering.