I think it's fair to view anything they do with suspicion after their mishandling of the leaks. They haven't shown me any reason to give them the benefit of the doubt, and ample reason not to do so.
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.