New Service, Same Old Equifax: Credit Locking App Freezes Up
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
>Equifax’s new app offers a lock instead of a freeze. Locks works similarly to freezes — both restrict access to your credit file — but it should be easier to unlock your credit file since you can do it from your phone with a swipe, and doesn’t require a 10-digit pin or a fee.
>What is not clear, however, is what disadvantages may come with locks. Many state laws exist that govern freezes, offering consumers protection. By creating locks, the companies avoid them.
Looks like it's a nice end run around existing laws. I don't understand why they are allowed to do things like this without any consequences.
And it's not like they did away with freezes. They just added a alternative alongside. I've never frozen my credit because I didn't want the pain of having to unfreeze it at an inopportune moment. The concept (if not the implementation) of having locks as an alternative might convince me to actually use them. I hope it catches on.
But, really, what should they have done instead? Do you think they shouldn't have implemented credit locks at all? Because I'm sure then you would get articles about how they weren't doing enough to help consumers secure their credit, just the same old inconvenient credit freezes (and I would agree).
I think that, for a person's criticism to carry any weight, there has to be a course of action that that person wouldn't criticize.
Let me opt out, dammit. Permanently delete my data.
It's not like I'm alone in that thought:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/your-money/credit-scores/...
"And though the words differ (and some are unprintable in this space), the messages all end with the same demand: I want out."
Even better, require opt-in, thus driving the credit raters out of business. These enablers of identity theft cause more misery than they provide value, it's just inconvenient to sue them. They should not exist.
Now if it is opt in, well then you have the issue of free speech. If someone takes out a loan and doesn't pay it back, why wouldn't the institution lending the money have a right to tell others about that (through a third party)?
If this isn't the case, where we have opt in by default, and it destroys the credit industry, that may also not necessarily be a bad thing. Because a lot of necessary items (housing, car ownership [for certain geographical regions], college) would fall in price to be more affordable if people couldn't get loans for them.
Of course, the real issue that most people have with credit reporting agencies is the fairness of a credit score or credit report, in that it may not actually reflect the risk of a given loan. This is an area where I feel they can and should do better. After all, if a lender is turning away customers that they shouldn't, then they are leaving quite a lot of business untapped. What would be better is if credit items were categorized based on credit type and circumstances.
For example, if you fall behind on sudden medical bills, but keep up on your mortgage and car payment, well that shouldn't affect your ability to buy a house or car on credit. In fact, if I was a car dealer I'd be happy to extend someone credit that treated their car payment as more important.
Or, if credit cards fell behind during an unemployment stretch. In that case if your credit report shows that payments pick up again as soon as you are back on your feet, then if I was a credit card issuer, I would lower interest rates during unemployment and only bring them back up a month or two after you got a job. And as long as the record shows that someone is employable (was only out of work during times of a down economy, but otherwise could hold down a job and make regular payments while working), I would think that they would be a good credit risk.
Another situation -- lets say you are a cosigner on a loan, and the person you cosigned for fell behind on payments, and you refused to pick up the payments. Well, that should only affect your ability to cosign in the future, but not anything else (assuming all other lines of credit are showing good).
So this is where I think that the market is ripe for disruption, in using extended information to bring in credit customers that are otherwise left behind by the current situation. But this requires much more tracking details
That’s blatantly false. People have been able to get loans for literally thousands of years before credit bureaus existed, and you can do it today as well. The industry term is ‘manual underwriting’ and plenty of people and businesses have loans issued that way.
Many of those loans should not be made. See the subprime mortgage crisis. See people living with unnecessary credit card debt.
The existence of the credit agencies is a symptom of the financial sector corrupting our government at the expense of the populace. They don't care how many lives they ruin through their devastating irresponsibility.
> So this is where I think that the market is ripe for disruption
You haven't addressed the central problem, which is identity theft and all the individual lives blighted or destroyed by it.
If they fuck up a freeze, that becomes a legal issue I can use to go after them. If they fuck up a lock, I have to dig through their Terms of Service to find out how they're going to fuck me on a secondary basis.
So, no, I don't think they should have implemented credit locks, given that the protection afforded is dubious, and my ability to get any recourse is now in their hands.
I don't understand why you believe they're entitled to any benefit of the doubt from us, consumers who have no choice but to play their game.
Made credit freezes easier to turn on and off. It's not in their financial interests to do that though, and my suspicion is that they purposefully make them cumbersome to discourage people from using them.
No, the law says nothing specific.
It would take a lawsuit to determine whether this is lawful. It's way too expensive for consumers to go against a big company with unlimited time and budget.
It takes year to settle, during which Equifax can make a lot of money. They have nothing to lose really by playing on the edge.
Consumer Reports provides a sum-up of what they believe the differences actually are. I would say the very fact that Equifax is being so hazy on the differences is proof enough that the "freeze" is the way to go.
https://www.consumerreports.org/credit-bureaus/why-credit-fr...
This bit from the article strikes me as odd. They wonder if the credit agency will market more aggressively to people who opt for the credit lock, something that freezes do not allow. From the article:
"However, Consumers Union doesn’t recommend paying for credit monitoring. “What it does, consumers can usually do for free,” Tetreault says.
Plus, with a credit freeze you won’t be targeted by ads.
“These services may allow the credit reporting agency to market to consumers more aggressively for products that they may not need and/or shouldn’t pay for,” Tetreault says.
Initially, software could only be distributed over physical media like disks. And because of this, it had to be stable enough.
Today, software is distributed over the internet, and you can amend mistakes.
This has enabled the release broken of software, that over time becomes better.
This doctrine is seen as efficient, but is not good faith and not the best interest of the user in some cases (e.g: Equifax).
Yes.
> that over time becomes better.
Debatable.
Pay stubs aside, if your employer uses it then they likely also have your direct deposit account, all your personal PII, and your W2s among other things. It's a goldmine for fraud.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40468811/heres-why-equifax-yanke...
And, if the U.S. presidential election had gone the other way (however you feel about that), we might currently have an effective CFPB that was on its way to forcing these companies to perform freezes for free and to place control of access (for credit assessment) into the hands of those to whom the records pertain.
I don't care whether you're Democratic or Republican or Librariantarian (yeah, not real, but it should be!). This would be a good, cost effective means of at least partially mitigating a lot of current problems with related data theft and fraud / identity theft.
And to the extent it added a bit of cost, that would probably impact the current uses that are least beneficial. E.g. less hits to ratings for "excessive" credit checks, when a company can't perform them without first soliciting access from the target.
What on earth gives you the impression that either party cares about personal data privacy or free credit freezes? They’re both happy as long as the debt-driven economy continues to roll...
It was and still is heavily disliked by numerous Republican members and is being stripped of a lot if it’s powers by the current administration.
Claiming “both parties are the same” is just false in this case.