As Equifax Amassed Ever More Data, Safety Was a Sales Pitch
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1. Freezing your credit is meaningless thru Experian. You or anyone can obtain your freeze pin using your personal now public info via their tool https://www.experian.com/ncaconline/freezepin
2. If you freeze your credit with Experian they send you a letter in the mail saying you will no longer receive credit cards offers for five years. Also that they notified Equifax and Transunion to halt any and all offers to be sent to me. WOW who are these people the mafia? I just wanted to freeze my credit thru them.
Now I'm intrigued...
There you go. Enjoy.
Not necessarily true. I have a friend who had a $10k limit credit card opened by someone when their credit was frozen. The company never checked their credit because they recently had a card with them.
> Does a credit freeze stop prescreened credit offers?
> No. If you want to stop getting prescreened offers of credit, call 888-5OPTOUT (888-567-8688) or go online. The phone number and website are operated by the nationwide credit reporting companies. You can opt out for five years or permanently. However, some companies send offers that are not based on prescreening, and your federal opt-out right will not stop those kinds of solicitations.
This is a big bucket of liability just waiting for Experian.
It can be recovered via all 3 in various ways. Once your identity is "stolen", a credit freeze is completely ineffective if the attacker chooses to use the recovery options and/or contact them via the phone.
There is no "security" in the credit system from the debt collectors to the credit cards to the credit agencies.
It is really unfortunate and proof we can't trust corporations to self-regulate. I wish we could live in a world where people could be trusted to not to fuck over their fellow human beings in the pursuit of money but alas, we do not.
How? Is it all from the Talx acquisition?
If not, that is impressive. For many companies payroll is the most or even only really sensitive information.
Seriously, Hollywood screenwriters couldn't have come up with a plot this complicated. My favorite part is often overlooked. Earlier this year, they lobbied to remove what few rights we have in case of breaches/losses of PII. As in, they lobbied to not be held accountable or have to give notice in case they were breached. I think that was back in May of this year. There has been so much new information, I can no longer keep track.
If this were a movie, it would suck - because it's too far-fetched and unbelievable. If someone were telling me this story, and I didn't know better, I'd assume they were lying. It has almost reached the point where it is comedic.
Kroger has a large union workforce. It will be interesting to see if their unions make this an issue and force the data handover to stop.
My guess is they did something devious, like doing work for a payroll processing company, in order to obtain this information.
That really just creates a lot of little credit bureaus, which fixes the centralization issue at least.
(If you're not laughing then you need to admit you have a problem)
Recognizing the most repeated joke on HN?
In the longer run, you can imagine not just credit history data being exchanged (with the permission of the borrower perhaps) but also the ability to trade the loan products themselves, most of which is done OTC right now. Fixed income contracts can be described as "smart contracts" [1]
Edit: Assuming the colloquial use of the term "blockchain", a public database. In the sense that a blockchain is simply a data structure it's not necessarily a problem but also not a solution.
Please tell me how a blockchain works then.
Love it, man. Pretty soon I won't have a job anywhere because of some erroneous data Equifax reports in their background check of me.
I guess my principal source of income in the future will be recycling cans!
All my bad debt will seem better when everyone else's is inflated with fake debt!
(p.s. Being sick in America is not a fun time financially.)
If you're sick enough to be paying a large fraction of a years salary in healthcare expenses, the better bet may be to stop working entirely and get on Medicaid, SSDI, TANF, etc. until you are back on your feet.
But you did say debt which means it's likely you're well past this point.
Additionally I can't remember if I hallucinated it, but a lot of lenders have stopped looking at medical debt! Seriously! I read it in a few different places but I don't have official info for you. Lenders would have nobody to lend to if they considered medical debt.
I once had a psycho hospital misbill me using fake insurance codes and etc for routine work. My insurance company refused to pay because of the codes the hospital billed me for. So I said lol I'm not giving you $800 for a free physical. They screamed and shouted that they'll see me at collections.
Three years later and it never showed up on any of my credit reports. Get you some of that!!
Most of my large medical bills end up going to a debt collector and they tend to 2-3 times a day per collector. But, they're not jerks on the phone at least, and try to setup a payment plan.
However, I had one MRI that was ~$2000 (typical) and after ~6 months they lowered it to like $400-600. That's the only time any medical provider cut me a deal. Oh, actually, one debt collector gave me a large discount for paying it all in a one-time payment.
But I've never had someone simply "not" attempt to collect their debt.
53% of disability claims are denied, and the average SSDI payment is $1171/month. Having helped my mother through the disability process, as well as helping build tooling for disability advocacy non-profits, I can tell you how little government assistance is available to sick people in the US.
Are there services available? Possibly. Can you count on receiving them? Absolutely not.
Medicaid at least, the only qualification is not having too much income. Medicaid I think is way better than Medicare, at least in the states I would live in.
These credit agencies are nothing but harmful for the majority of consumers.
Houses wouldn't be so expensive if nobody had access to credit. Nobody would be betting with 5-7x their yearly income.
The financial world lost its collective shit and cut Iceland off from the global credit markets. Iceland doesn't seem to be suffering to me.
And their prisons are nicer than club fed :)
What I'm talking about isn't the actual data leak but rather what equifax did or did not do before and after the leak. That is the real crime here. I don't see the CEO and the board facing prison which means we need to change something.
We're a nation of laws, not pitchforks.
We are a nation of what we choose to be laws and right now it feels like we are a nation where there's no responsibility for the people at the top. Plausible deniability has gone too far. As with everything in life, we need to seek balance and the balance is making sure the board and the CEO have an incentive to ensure the organization isn't systemically violating the spirit of the law.
We are a nation of laws but laws aren't something we got from the mountaintop. We need to tweak things sometimes.
This means creating new laws.
It makes it technically true yet completely useless.
So maybe Jim Bob knocked off a web site for fans of My Little Pony and got all their plaintext passwords. He offers the list of accounts for $5 on a Tor hidden site. Steve the CSID employee guesses that Jim Bob is too lazy to change the password each time he does this, and types in "opensesame" to get the data for $0. CSID (and thus Experian) tells the MLP fans their account data was compromised.
Now they have my attention! If the hackers got that data, I really hope they make it public. Imagine the shit storm that would follow. Those women who are "bad negotiators" would know EXACTLY how much less they were making for the same work. Please please please, dump that specific info! It would also teach all our companies a lesson about selling that private data too, wouldn't it?
In fact, I think one way to do more consumer-safe credit reporting is to make it so that agencies are ONLY allowed to give a person's report to that particular person. When a person applies somewhere for credit, they would need to ask a credit agency for their report, and then give it to a prospective lender (the report would be cryptographically signed). That way you at least control who has access to your information.
With so many security breaches around does it mean that currency is losing its value rapidly? Is a dollar on a credit card worth less post-Equifax?
Examples of this sort of failure might be a hyperinflation scenario. Governments could try to place controls on wages or prices, but might (and will likely) still fail. Many historical examples of it.
(And even Bitcoin’s value is in part based on trust in government - specifically, that various governments won’t ban it. A ban might not be 100% effective but would clearly decrease its utility and thus its value; recent events wrt China are a small-scale demonstration.)
... and that other people will accept it in exchange for goods and services. Scarcity alone is no guarantee of that. For the vast, vast majority of people Bitcoin is literally worthless - the only thing you can do with it is attempt to convert it into real currency so you can actually use it for something. And they would rather you did that rather than trying to fob them off with a bunch of numbers.
The Financial Services sector is heavily regulated because of the importance of trust and correct information. You can bring the system to an immediate standstill since most of the automation in the sector relies heavily on credit bureau data.
I believe Amazon, Tesco, etc actually would hold now the most accurate information about customer repayment ability in the retail segment.
Luckily I was able to easily get the error removed, but it seems absurd to me that a clear system error of some kind had simply persisted on my report for years.