Equifax removed the $125 claim payout option after millions submitted claims

The agreements you sign when requesting and getting credit explicitly grant that right.

There’s no opt-in required because you’re not the one providing anything. The customer of the credit agency, the company extending you credit, is opting in to share what they know about you.

What's more bothersome to me is that these companies are scooping up every bit of information they can about me and selling it to anyone. Did I consent to TheWorkNumber? I definitely did not with the first few employers / payroll processors who have sold out my payroll data.

I Google my full name and the first hit is some background check site that shows my birthday, most of addresses I've had since the mid-90s, every family member I've shared an address with since 1999, information on two vehicles I presently own and one former, and that's just the bait to get someone to pay for whatever else they know about me...

'Credit' information is the tip of the iceberg.

Yes because it is. No because you want something that someone else has (£€¥$) and that someone needs some kind of assurance that they could ever get their money back.

And this is related to the reality that individuals are at a distinct disadvantage for being largely unorganized and unable to bargain collectively, or else they probably would blackball bad lenders and credit bureaus for a history of untrustworthiness.

But they can't; their only tool is the democratic process. We ought to ruin Equifax to the same degree any one of us would be ruined if we had been so careless.

There are ALL KINDS of regulations around banking and credit reporting. All of the wacky things you mention are already not allowed.

Just because you don't have options to cut essential parts of the contract out doesn't mean there is no "meeting of the minds."

I also think that whatever the lowest rung on the economic ladder who could plausibly buy property may also be made less well off by shutting them out of the housing ownership market entirely.

And this is what needs to change. I’ve known many successful people that moved to the US and then had problems getting services because they had no “credit history”.

My parents managed to obtain a loan for their first apartment thanks to my grandparents offering their house as colllateral. This is how pretty much everyone from my parents' generation got their first apartment.

Credit pretty much didn't exist in my parents' generation - loans were generally reserved for houses and cars, because of the strict conditions. Everyone saved up lump sums and paid cash. It's ineffficient, but far from "not participating in the economy".

It may be possible to negotiate different conditions on receiving credit, but I don't know if you can demand a modern economy without any drawbacks.

People in low income communities find it very normal to buy on credit, often allowing you to buy now, pay in a year. My friends from higher income communities think this is a strange thing to do.

What I'm trying to say is that some of these customs might not depend on country, but even on groups within countries.

On a related note, I've personally noticed that here in the Netherlands, there's a pretty clear split between low income and high income, very tightly connected with education. In 'High School', lower and higher education are split in different classes and often different schools. So friendships are often formed within these groups and not across them (sports begin the exception). Because of this, a lot of people think something is normal in the Netherlands, but it's actually normal in their environment.

Worst case, I move the cash to a 2% interest rate bank account and let it sit there. Best case, there are other investments I can make now with that capital, and end up paying less overall for whatever I was buying because having the money has made me money in some other way. Lucky case, the company bankrupts and I don't end up having to completely pay for the thing at all.

Being also European, it is rare to be offered interest-free financing, and when you are, is because you are already paying a premium and could find the stuff cheaper somewhere else. But occasionally, some shops do have the cheapest price and still offer interest-free rates. I always take it, and have no idea why I wouldn't do that.

Typically it works like this: people simply try not to spend their whole income, and save at least some part of it. Then, when they arrive at a significant amount of it they sit down and think: what can we do with those money? buy a new car? redecorate our living room? And if they decide to redecorate they buy furniture or whatever is needed with cash. Buying stuff on credit is pretty much unheard of.

[1] https://www.mysynchrony.com/mysyf/paymentestimator.html?intc...

Payday lenders don’t have limits on the amount of interest that they can charge for a given payday loan. Worse yet, loan applicants don’t have to demonstrate ability to pay the loan during the application process.

Legislation was recently passed to require payday lenders to loan only to those who could demonstrate ability to pay, but this was recently reversed after intense lobbying by the payday lenders.

Credit access is vastly predatory in the US, and feeds into our consumerist culture that believes in nice phones, watches, cars, whatever, and has created generations of debt slaves owing interest in excess of 20-30% that they’ll likely never be able to repay.

A former coworker once said to me: “those who understand compound interest earn it, and those who don’t understand compound interest pay it.” And generally, I’ve found this to be very true.

Places can report whatever they want to. And you can dispute it, but the person who report it will just say "no, we're right" and it'll stay up.

Does that not qualify as extortion?

policing people and make the poor to pay more.

My wife & I both have excellent credit scores, and we pay all of our bills in full every month. Nevertheless, I've noticed a ~50 point swing in credit scores from month-to-month, all dependent on whether airline tickets, furniture, or charitable contributions happened to make it onto this month's bill. Our debt-to-liquid-assets ratio is something like 0.1%, so there's never any real risk of not having money to pay it off, but of course the credit bureaus don't have information about our assets, so they evaluate us against what other people our age have, which (being Millenials) is not very much.

Knowing how the system works, we can take steps to game it, like not putting any major purchases on credit card in the 3-6 months before getting a mortgage. But still, it's slightly ridiculous that something that's supposed to measure your creditworthiness can swing so much over short time periods.

Is an oxymoron. Statistics exist when "you" is unknown.

Large organizations are astoundingly good at finding inefficient ways to spend money.

What we'd need to demonstrate your claim is for example some data linking credit scores at time of loan to default rate, adjusted for income and loan terms.

The gist was that if all their rates are based on a standard formula with no individual discretion, they are safe from regulation around (1) discrimination, (2) risky lending such as led to '08. That sounded more important to them than actually accurate risk modeling, especially since their competitors are all using the same formulas.

(edit: In particular, even if you offered them access to much more effective/predictive data points than the credit score, they would not use them because of (1) and (2) above.)

This isn't necessarily true.

A counterargument is that credit scores offer banks an easy way to outsource what often ends up being a very contentious, politically-fraught process. Yet many analyses have found credit scores barely better than random dice -- the guy with the perfect credit score has a perfect credit score, until he doesn't and there is a wake of delinquency in his wake.

It's also helpful to assess real world motivations. Extraordinarily few of the employees, including at the executive level, at a bank are legitimately concerned about the long term risk to the bank. Success is measured at the quarterly interval, and if you can justify your actions on a quantifiable measure -- even if it's a measure that has little predictive value -- then that's just perfect.

The biggest indicator that someone is a credit risk is that they are maintaining or growing higher interest borrowing products, such as carrying a balance on a credit card. This is an absolute flashing light indication that someone is over-extended, yet the credit monitoring agencies would not bite the hand that feeds them by making too big of a deal about this. Indeed, gross over-borrowing is barely a blip on a credit report, because the people who lend the money ensure that it isn't. The world is absolutely awash in cheap cash and banks are desperate to lend it.

In the wake of the subprime crisis everyone said "oh yes, of course there's a problem there it was the credit agency that was just marking these all wrong", but exactly the same thing is happening on personal credit reports. Of course it is, because the credit reporting agency is there to legitimize whatever the bank wants to do.

Also except for the risk that financial problems will force a cardholder into accruing interest, and often that interest will get a lot worse if payments are missed a 5% card changes into a 22% card if more than some number of payments are late and some number may be just 1.

Most companies giving you a credit of some sort (banks, phone contracts, ...) are required to do vetting of you.

To help them do that, they use credit rating bureaus.

In Europe, you as a private person just don't know it and don't have access to your own rating. But you are likely to be rated anyways..

Here is one danish example (at least three exists)

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&u=https%3...

Its more like someone I dont know got a picture of me naked through my house window and now has that copy of a photo locked in their secret house that nobody knows about. Violated, yet. Exposed, eh. Literally nobody else besides the photographer ever saw me.