Exactly. Most people didn't even get picked for payment. I don't want a shitty monitoring service I want to see Equifax bleed
This seems vindictive. Their behaviour should be corrected and other people deterred. We shouldn't be calling for blood!
But I did mention both parties. When I want credit it lets me understand my own risk profile and to manage it:
> They also let you know how risky you appear to be when you ask someone for a loan or credit.
> But general society is harmed by creating surveillance records that would make even the most staunch Stasi agent blush.
I think bad lending and borrowing is a major risk to society.
Bad lending is better attributed to a mistaken belief that borrowers can be perfectly modeled to reduce variance. The economic crunch we're currently facing has been directly caused by cheap credit based on such assumptions which, once again, turn out to be suddenly correlated.
If people had to just pay a small fine and go on with their lives for misdeeds, we'd see people hijacking sports cars every day.
I would be surprised if that did not happen here. The collusion between credit bureaus, banks and lenders is well known for its issues to consumers, but without consequences for adverse consequences to them, business will continue as usual. Will it be savvy fraudsters who place backpressure on the crumbling ability of credit bureaus to prescreen for credit-worthiness? Will upstart incumbents see high margin, low fitness targets ripe for disruption? Will corporate raiders see ossifying remains just ripe enough to be scavenged? Even if all answers to these questions were in the affirmative, I don't know if any of that would lead to immediate change. But, I'd be surprised if business continued as usual forever. The bar for a step function level improvement is quite low, if you could somehow retrofit a better way to pull credit into legacy underwriting processes.
Source: Early stage engineer and prior executive at $PREVIOUS_FIRMS that included two growth stage consumer lending startups.
At the very least, Equifax should be destroyed. And society would benefit more if it were destroyed in such a way to be an example for future organizations working in the space.