Comments on: Discriminatory Lending Based on Your Browser Choice

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 12:01:51 +0000

FYI: IE users were being offered 2.7% (lower than Firefox-stable, higher than Chrome) according to a comment on the article linked by Slashdot. Nothing else to add here, but I thought I’d mention it as I’d already done the research.

By: Thomas Gideon

Thomas Gideon — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:08:17 +0000

What exactly the browser choice represents in terms of risk is interesting. I suspect you may be onto something in terms of user inertia except that Safari then would also suffer from a poorer rate, at least if the data is correlated to operating systems as it is just as much a default for Mac users as IE is for Windows.

My initial though is that risk here might have been correlated to security risks of browsers but I don’t think that fits the observed rates very well. Firefox shouldn’t be getting the highest rate, I would think, though I’d have to imagine the rates would fluctuated considerably on news of new vulnerabilities and changes in speed of delivery on fixes over time.

By: cbemerine

cbemerine — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 04:15:40 +0000

Sounds like Apple MacIntosh users pay more, after all they have bought into the licensing BS and pay significantly more for both their software and hardware than they should. So we can be disgusted with the banks/financial institutions but should we honestly be surprised?

My guess is the Internet Explorer users would have paid even more as the assumption would be that they would be to naive to look for better interest rate deals. After all they blindly automatic update as if that is the right thing to do, ever.