When a government agency has a massive failure, we're of stuck with it, short of hoping politicians might do something about it.
This contrasts pretty heavily with, say, Facebook – where even though they collect and share plenty of information about me, I'm at least both consenting and continuing to feed them by using a service I presumably find worth the trade-off.
If you are the type of person who gets upset about this dynamic of Facebook, then Equifax should be completely next-level.
I do agree that handling of data could be regulated to some sort, though. Much like how we have agencies, etc. for keeping tabs on companies that handle other things (hazardous materials, food, etc.)
Dont you consent to credit reporting when you sign up to get credit, though.
You can "choose" to not use Equifax by not getting credit from people who report to equifax.
No, I consent to allow creditors to do their due diligence to see if I'm a viable candidate for their product. Equifax is not required in this transaction, it's just beneficial for the creditor, their customer, to use them to streamline that information collecting process. Loans and credit existed prior to credit reporting agencies and will exist long after.
you do much more than that though , from my card agreement
"We may obtain and review your credit history from credit reporting agencies and others. We may, from time to time, obtain employment and income data from third parties to assist us in the ongoing administration of your account. We may also provide information about you and your account to credit reporting agencies and others. We may provide information to credit reporting agencies about this account in the name of an authorized user. If you think we provided incorrect information, write to us and we will investigate."
> Equifax is not required in this transaction
Thats upto the business to decide, not you. You choose to not get credit from them if you have objections to how they run their business.
Regardless of what the business decides, no, Equifax is not required to assess my credit. If the business decides to go to McDonald's to get lunch while they are doing this process, that's not required regardless of what the business decides. It may be nice for them, it may make their process easier, but it's not /required/.
When a private company has a massive failure that impacts someone other than its customers, then the impacted parties have no recourse whatsoever.
You're not an Equifax customer. Banks and big businesses are, and they don't really have a strong incentive to punish this sort of behavior.
IANAL. This is absolutely not true. You don't have to have a direct relationship with the other party in a negligence case. An easy example would be that you can sue the manufacturer of your transmission even though your Civic was sold to you by Honda. Equifax would have to somehow argue that they owe no duty of care to the people with private information in their database which just isn't going to happen.
This has always struck me as an odd anti-regulatory argument, though. "Governments shouldn't use their power to distort the market. Therefore regulations are inherently bad. Instead we should distort the market using a different branch of the government, but in a much more capricious and unpredictable manner."
I think the key point here isn't the system, but 'proper functioning'. In the event that no system is ever properly functioning, what's causing the least damage?
I'm reminded of the many stories I've seen claiming that people given experience of both, preferred 'bread line' communism to free market capitalism.
These people were never the lottery winners of capitalism: they're always just worker bee types, and their observation was that communism sucked but was stable and consistent. Small dreams, small risks, reasonable safety for the worker bees.
When they experienced capitalism, they had no preparation to competitively attack their fellow workers and win, and as a result they didn't win, they became worker bees under capitalism, and dropped below their previous living standard. Granted, this provided an environment where more ambitious worker bees could prevail and get rich, and that's the system working as intended, but for the less motivated ones, their experience told 'em communism took better care of them… in spite of the litany of horror stories we've all heard over and over (I live in the USA, so I've been indoctrinated against communism all my adult life).
I think it's pretty important to examine how these systems work when they're NOT properly functioning. It seems like free market capitalism produces some pretty spectacular damage when it catastrophically fails, but it's more abstracted. When something like communism catastrophically fails, it's in the form of state genocide, with more intentionality.