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Comment by avsteele | Hacker News Reader

You can't claim the $125 unless you assert you currently have credit monitoring and will for >= 6 months. You can't just go and claim $125 without lying or giving your info to some additional org to enroll in credit monitoring.

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If you have a credit card (I can say for sure, any Amex card and any Capital One Card), and you plan to keep those cards for 6 months, then you satisfy the requirement

I was thinking about that, do those count? If so, do you have a source other than a random-fish-child-on-the-internet?

Edit: Nevermind, "to the best of my knowledge" the free-for-everyone Capital One CreditWise service qualifies.

"Credit monitoring" is not limited to merely paying the surveillance companies themselves to give you a heads up if they're working on a new conspiracy against you. It is only within their own paradigm that the general concept of credit is subservient to their own databases.

My credit is self monitored. Any credit/contract taken out claiming association with my public identifiers (eg name, SSN, etc) but without legal notice to my longstanding address of record is prima facie invalid. So I review all of the junk mail that comes into my mailbox, which does cost actual time, primarily due to the negligent operations of these ambient-authority-demanding surveillance shitheads.

Does anyone know of any uber cheap monitoring services that last at least 6 months?

Also, I suggest billing Equihax for time spent changing emails, phone numbers, etc to make your identity less susceptible ("the time you spent remedying fraud, identity theft, or other misuse of your personal information caused by the data breach, or purchasing credit monitoring or freezing credit reports, up to 20 total hours at $25 per hour.")

Credit Karma, and many credit cards offer it for free.

Ive been enjoying Credit Karmas service. Great tracking and some cool tools. Their tax service is also very easy to use, much easier that when Ive used TurboTax's online service.

I just lied. shrug

It's okay, so did Equifax.

Is Credit Karma considered credit monitoring? They email me when any events take place.

No, Credit Karma is a data mining front operation that takes the access you give them about your finances and sells them to other companies.

Reliable financial data is hard for marketing companies to gather about individuals, CreditKarma solves that problem.

If you read their privacy policy and ToS you'll learn they are able to sell your data as part of all the free services they provide you.

You are correct on their business model, but I would think receiving alerts from them would count.

Despite their business model, I'd still recommend signing up as a fraud prevention measure. If you don't sign up, someone with a trivial amount of your info can sign up for an account and get more of your info, with the ultimate goal of identify theft.

> If you read their privacy policy and ToS you'll learn they are able to sell your data as part of all the free services they provide you.

So my choices are let a 3rd party pay the credit agency for that info and I get nothing, or let CK pay the credit agency for that info and I get something for free.

Sounds like CK is still the better deal.

most credit cards give you credit reports for free

different cards (banks) have relationships with different credit unions, if you have a diverse portfolio of cards, you can get more reliable data than CK direct from the Credit Union for free (or for the annual fee of your card)

Why would Credit Karma need to sell your data to other companies? Other companies already have the same high level access to your credit without you giving them permission to it.

Credit Karma tries to sell you services based on your credit.

Companies like Credit Karma or even companies like Facebook and Google don’t sell your data. They sell access to you based on the data they have.

The distinction makes a big difference. If a law is passed saying that a company is not allowed to give out your data, it doesn’t really hurt companies.

I'm not talking about just the credit angle, which is not as big of a threat as their recent schemes to "file your tax filings for free" -- this gets them access to very sensitive information that no one else can get access to, outside the IRS themselves. This is very valuable data to sell (esp with your credit information and other data).

They did a MASSIVE campaign around the Tax Filings and many people simply 'opted in' because they had CreditKarma and it was Free, without realizing what they were trading away for 'Free'.

I wouldn’t go anywhere near their tax filing.

Most banks offer some sort of credit monitoring service, so you could leverage that.

A lot of credit cards offer credit monitoring now a days.

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