Improvements to borrower privacy

[Guest]

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[Skimmis]

Kiva has a strange way of dealing with anonymity issues that doesn't make any sense at all.  They really need to stop anonymizing people and instead anonymize the repayment issues which are certainly not anyone's business who wasn't a party to the loan.  This is just more of the same reactive nonsense.

Agree

[Ali]

Hi everyone,

I apologize for the silence from my end - I've been traveling for the past two weeks and haven't been as present on message boards. There will be a release tomorrow with another change to borrower privacy, and I wanted to make sure you were all aware of it ahead of time.

As you well know, we are constantly working to strike a balance between the needs of borrowers, lenders, and partners at Kiva, which can be difficult as the needs of these different communities are sometimes at odds with each other.

We seek to respect the privacy of borrowers who are posted on Kiva, and one of the ways we are trying to do that is by offering borrowers similar privacy options to those that lenders have. We've done quite a bit for this, and a lot of it has been discussed earlier on this thread. Up until now, the default setting allows lenders to see borrowers’ last names on the website. We’ve taken some steps to make borrowers’ profiles more private, but in order to protect borrowers’ privacy further, we have decided to remove all borrowers’ last names from Kiva. If everything is on schedule, this change will go live on the site tomorrow afternoon.

We’ve been working with our engineering team to make some improvements to the Portfolio section so that it’s easier for you to track and find your loans without borrower last names, and I'm really excited to share these improvements with you soon.

If you have any questions about this change or suggestions for features you’d like to see in the Portfolio section, please let me know. I'll be checking back on this thread and will be glad to answer and address what I can.

Ali

[Mysteron347]

Since the decision has already been made and the programming is complete, there appears to be very little point in making comments about this change.

I'm a systems analyst, albeit an out-of-work systems analyst. I sit here watching the sad parade of expired loans, unable to do anything about it for lack of income. Still - my training kicks in on occasion.

I got a notification about a month ago that a borrower had applied for a second loan having paid off the first to which I was a lender. Fine and dandy, lend again.

Then a second "repeat" loan appeared. I remembered the name but found it odd that no reference was made to the previous successfully-completed loan - in fact, every repayment on the first loan had been more than contracted and it had been paid off four months ahead of schedule. I would have thought that this performance was an excellent advertisement for this borrower, but no reference made to the previous loan.

I investigated further. The borrower was 32 on the first loan and 30 on the second; "His farm produces maize, eggs, and vegetables" on his first loan. Then he took out a loan for poultry and then for the second loan he produces "milk, maize, and beans" (no eggs) and the loan is for a dairy cow... The accompanying pictures weren't much help.

I pointed out these anomalies to Kiva a week or so ago. Acknowledgement, but no response.

The first borrower's second loan was quickly fully-funded. The second borrower's second loan is languishing at 7%. Sure - I'll put my little oar in when this month's repayments are available, but that's not the point. I believe that funding on this loan has been adversely affected by the absence of a reference to the prior superlative performance.

It all hinged on the NAME. In this case, a very unusual first name and the availability of the second name - although the second name seems to disappear once the loan is funded. The chance of being able to do the same with "John" or "Joseph" or "Mohammed" alone is far more remote - but this is the apparent purpose of this change.

I've also queried Kiva two weeks ago about a loan where there is no apparent connexion between the NAME shown on the loan header and the name used in the support text. No response beyond an acknowledgement. No change to the loan-details page - and no, it's not a cultural "doesn't want a photograph to appear" issue either. There's simply no connexion between header-name and text-name. Nevertheless, it's fully-funded.

As for the names themselves - well, is "Review" really a name? Is "Loice" a person's real name or a valiant attempt by someone to render "Lois" in their second language? Is the name being used simply chosen to be more familiar to the Western ear - like we're used to with call-centres, for instance?

So, personally - I'm not particularly impressed. To me it smells distinctly of gratuitous political correctness. I'd prefer that the time and effort had been spent on NOT making loans that have been fully repaid in the local currency "anonymous" because only 99% was repaid in $US due to exchange-rate fluctuations, for instance. I also used to like the 'fully-funded' notices that seem to have disappeared lately.

[howard]

Perhaps less detail on names can allow us more info on location. Less 'location undisclosed', but at least a province/state. Many FPs do give us this info at present, but many do not, and 'Maria in Oaxaca state' does not give away much privacy. There are probably a million of them!

Howard

[DoubleR]

As for the names themselves - well, is "Review" really a name? Is "Loice" a person's real name or a valiant attempt by someone to render "Lois" in their second language? Is the name being used simply chosen to be more familiar to the Western ear - like we're used to with call-centres, for instance?

As a volunteer member of the Review and Translation Team, I want to address the situation regarding the appearance of "Review" in the name field.  This is an isolated incident with one particular Field Partner that marks their loans with the word "Review" in the name field as part of their internal process, but the word "Review" should have been removed prior to submitting to Kiva.  Many of the volunteers who have reviewed loans for this FP detected this error on several of these loans and subsequently submitted error reports so that the names can be corrected prior to being posted on the Kiva site.  Unfortunately, there were a few that slipped through and got posted with the word "Review" as part of the name.  The volunteers have already informed Kiva staff of this problem and they are working with the Field Partner to prevent this from happening in the future.  

Regarding the second point you made regarding "Western sounding" names, I not sure of the point you're driving at.  Are you saying that someone from a non-Western nation is supposed to have an "ethnic" name?  A taxi driver from Peru whose name is "Jhonny" instead of "Johnny" is no different than someone who spells their name "Kelli" or "Kellie" rather than "Kelly".

Regards,
Ronan

[Mysteron347]

Review? Here's a couple more:

http://www.kiva.org/lend/423020
http://www.kiva.org/lend/423758

The point is that if you only have one opportunity, you'd best get it right.

People can be quite precious about how their names are spelled. I had a customer at one time who would bin any communication addressed to "Jeff" because his name was "Geoff." This was compounded by the fact that his surname was a similar homophone.

There is no compulsion for people in non-Western countries to have an "ethnic" name, of course. However, people who work in call-centres and have "ethnic" names are encouraged by their trainers to use a Western name when dealing with Western callers.

I saw "Jhonny." Is that a variant or a simple typo? Is that a loan for Boniface or Bonface? Is the spelling used that that is used on the borrower's birth certificate or other paperwork? Has it been correctly transcribed?

Frankly, the English spelling system is complex enough without the deliberately-introduced vanity-spellings we've become used to seeing from "celebrities" and wannabes. We also have the "duzzunt mata" crowd who have been taught that it's the reader's job to make sense of the writer's poor skills - they even ignore the hints that their word-processor gives them. Most appear not to even know what the red underline means - and are arrogant enough to declare "itz rong" if they do know. Must be an absolute nightmare for those whose first language isn't English.

It all becomes more important to get this right from the get-go when there's but one name to use - Unless, of course, we just go by the loan number - and we really wouldn't want to do that, would we, number six?

[DoubleR]

Frankly, the English spelling system is complex enough without the deliberately-introduced vanity-spellings we've become used to seeing from "celebrities" and wannabes. We also have the "duzzunt mata" crowd who have been taught that it's the reader's job to make sense of the writer's poor skills - they even ignore the hints that their word-processor gives them. Most appear not to even know what the red underline means - and are arrogant enough to declare "itz rong" if they do know. Must be an absolute nightmare for those whose first language isn't English.

It all becomes more important to get this right from the get-go when there's but one name to use - Unless, of course, we just go by the loan number - and we really wouldn't want to do that, would we, number six?

Based on what you wrote, it sounds like you would be telling "Geoff" to switch his name to "Jeff".  Are you going to tell a Swedish man named "Mikael" that he should spell his name "Michael" for the sake of someone who can read English?

This leads me to the fact that reviewing names is a tricky proposition.  When there could be 20 different variations on how to spell a person's name, those of us who volunteer to review loans for Kiva are not in a position to determine the correctness of how a person's name is spelled.  However, we do check for consistency to see that a name is spelled the same way throughout a loan description and matches the name on the heading.  When we find these discrepancies, we send them for further review by Kiva Staff and the Field Partner to determine any corrections to be made. 

It's funny that you mention people whose first language is not English, because most of the loan descriptions you see on Kiva that do not require a translation were written by MFI employees who are not native English speakers.  When the volunteer reviewers go over these loans, we only edit for spelling, punctuation, grammar, breaking up the occasional run-on sentence, etc.  Sometimes you may see a description that has clunky sentence structure, yet it gets the point across.  I say this to make the point that the volunteer reviewers do not re-write loans, only perform cosmetic edits that will make the loan readable to the Kiva lending community and still preserve the voice and the flavor of the MFI that wrote it.

Regards,
Ronan

[Amy-in-PHX]

Perhaps less detail on names can allow us more info on location. Less 'location undisclosed', but at least a province/state. Many FPs do give us this info at present, but many do not, and 'Maria in Oaxaca state' does not give away much privacy. There are probably a million of them!

Howard

 

[David2051]

This seems to be another change that further reduces transparency.  We know that all previous loans now are not being disclosed now and this change will make it more difficult to do any research about that.

[Ali]

I've also queried Kiva two weeks ago about a loan where there is no apparent connexion between the NAME shown on the loan header and the name used in the support text. No response beyond an acknowledgement. No change to the loan-details page - and no, it's not a cultural "doesn't want a photograph to appear" issue either. There's simply no connexion between header-name and text-name. Nevertheless, it's fully-funded.

This is likely an issue with the posting and review of the loan. I'll try to track down the loan you reported and make sure it was appropriately reported to the RTP team, who manages the review of all loans before they're posted on Kiva.

I've also reported the "Review" names you found to RTP. Thanks Ronan for explaining the issue behind those loans!

Perhaps less detail on names can allow us more info on location. Less 'location undisclosed', but at least a province/state. Many FPs do give us this info at present, but many do not, and 'Maria in Oaxaca state' does not give away much privacy. There are probably a million of them!

Howard

That's a great suggestion, and I'll certainly pass it on. I wonder if Field Partners will be more comfortable with sharing additional location info now that the borrower's last name is not shared.

This seems to be another change that further reduces transparency.  We know that all previous loans now are not being disclosed now and this change will make it more difficult to do any research about that.

You're pointing out one of the tensions that I mentioned - transparency is often in tension with respect for borrower privacy. We often have to make decisions to balance these two needs, and in this case, we slightly favored the need to respect borrower privacy over the need to be transparent with all borrower information. It sounds like the main issue involves relisted loans, and we're working with our partners to improve their process for doing this so that they aren't connecting a new loan with an older, less recent loan. It's an ongoing project that our field support staff is working on, and we hope to see improvements in the future.