Experian is a pile of dark pattern garbage

The problem is that they don't blatantly violate any of the policy bullets in that FTC press release... all the terms are spelled out in the interstitial. The issue is that the design goes out of its way to give it a very mandatory vibe. I don't log in very often, but I always have to catch myself ("...wait, what is this? Do I have to do this?"), and then remember to go hunting for the NoThanks button. It has a very opt-out feel.

I feel like, if the government regulated the CRAs rather than the other way around, Equifax wouldn't exist or in any case have a license to collect credit data after what they did.

In addition, if they are sending email through a provider like Sendgrid, etc. you should send an abuse complaint directly to their provider.

Any system of regulation that depends on end users to police for violations and fill out government forms en masse to get results is a bad system.

"We only enforce if notified, and only if we are notified a lot by many different people of the same violations" is extreme negligence, in my view.

It's insulting because it reflects exactly how decision makers at Experian feel about you as a human being.

did it really solve the problem, or do 2 emails now go out on your behalf?

I've tried to do this, and everything seems oriented toward reporting fraud and scams, rather than CAN-SPAM violations. I had this issue with Comcast/Xfinity not honoring my opt-out requests for months, and only stopped it when I managed to get on the phone with some kind of supervisor (it pays to be nice to rank-and-file call center employeees!) and bluffed them with calm but stern threats of "legal action".

Do a password reset, then change the email.

It’s a shame this doesn’t apply to mobile notifications. I leave Uber and DoorDash alerts on for obvious reasons, which they use to tell me I have $1 off my next $70 order or whatever. I think they’re even time sensitive.

The "not a marketing email" blurb in the footer where they know you are looking for an unsubscribe button is the marketing email equivalent of "I'm not touching you!" (imagine this being said by a 10-year-old you've just asked nicely to stop touching you, holding a finger an inch from your skin). Not exactly the behavior of someone who thinks the recipient wants to be receiving these emails, is it? The presence of the "this is technically not spam" disclaimer alone tells me this behavior should result in big, big fines. Too bad I'm not the one evaluating these very clear cut cases. I wish terrible things on those pieces of shit who run Comcast.

The ones I'm seeing lately are legitimately neither marketing nor transactional. Instead they're teaching me how to avoid phishing scams and stuff (not asking me to buy anything, but asking me to do things). I feel like the rule ought to be "offer an unsubscribe link unless it's transactional" but instead it's "offer an unsubscribe link if it's marketing".

I've had the same issue! I went back through my email for the past 3 months and here's a couple with no unsubscribe:

* Google Calendar now shows less spam

* AT&T asking me to update my email preferences, when I explicitly opted out of and disabled a lot of things on that account

This was in the past 3 months. So they're quite rare emails to get but are so infuriating. They're usually from larger companies, with quite a few from Google et al. itself.

Your targets have hundreds of millions of dollars to thwart your group, whether legally or with counter messaging, or through lobbying. Your group, being paid by a trickle of donations, is highly dependent on maintaining high motivation in order to marshall the energy necessary to go at this day in and day out for what could be years or even decades of frustrating, unrewarded effort.

This is a fundamental problem with large scale fraud, which is that the fraudsters have the money and the established networks first, and everyone has to fight to claw it back from their grasp while also disrupting the networks that enabled the fraud to grow in the first place.

The "everyone" being those from whom the money is being taken, who are therefore that much less equipped to mount a sustained attack.

tl;dr you'll be battling the bullshit asymmetry principle, except with money

Thx for the share, I didn't know about this. Any idea if they're successful in terms of concrete results / awareness?

These are credit reporting agencies, not credit rating agencies. Credit rating agencies are primarily for directly assessing a credit report for the likelihood of the debtor to either pay back, or default, on a loan.

On the other hand, the 3 credit reporting agencies (Experian, Equifax, TransUnion) work by simply gathering credit information, and using industry standard (and usually shared[0]) scoring models to assign a FICO or Vantage score to individuals, after which the lender can use any of their own classification criteria to deny credit or assign an interest rate.

0: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sI6l_Z5SyJqx4xXwlLYL...

Do you think the NSA is bad at Cybersecurity? If so, what makes you think so? If not, do you think the NSA is a private entity?

Not everything government run is automatically worse. For a private company that is seemingly immune to bad PR over repeated full data breaches, security and security by design are costs. There are many private firms that should have an army of IT sec-ops, but instead have zero or close to it.

Meanwhile, government IT tends to be the bottom of the barrel. Though, many government contracted sites are just fine.

Overall, the incentives are not quite aligned for security and a company that does not have to care.

This sort of thing actually did happen not long ago in Canada, too.

Agree or disagree with the trucker protest, it's pretty messed up the government invoked emergency powers to freeze people's bank accounts over it.

It's definitely too much power for the government to have.

Instead, you get companies that aren't penalized for fixing mistakes, even though they negatively affect you.

The companies aren't technically deciding what services you are eligible for, and neither would the government - but they do give information to people that do. And they use a secret formula to do it. I don't know why you think that the government would do this with credit reports. I mean, all they have to do is pass laws to govern banking and declare that they need to not give folks with "bad credit" loans.

Can you explain more exactly how the CCP's version achieves "total social control"? I have seen many examples of Chinese people acting in ways that are not congruent with the CCP's morality.

> the credit system is only related to your ability to repay debts.

Your credit _score_ is only related to a subset of your ability to pay debts.

The US credit system is related to far more things, including housing and jobs.

I, as a person who made a software engineer salary, but never had a credit card or student loans or any other debt, have been bounced by credit checks due to not having a credit score.

That means some apartments won't rent to me, buying a house or car is harder, etc.

I haven't personally had any job issues from it, but it's entirely legal in the US for a potential employer to reject job applicants or rescind offers based on credit check result.

The fact that a private company controls my ability to rent apartments due to this dumb system actually feels far worse to me than if the government controlled it. If the government did, they could at least know that I'd paid my bills on time for years, and had sufficient salary to obviously pay for that apartment.

> And it is not centralised to the same entity that has a monopoly on force.

How is that a good thing? We already have given the government a monopoly on force, so they already have unrestricted power over our lives... why does then giving another unrelated private company _more_ power seem better? Since the government already has 100% power over whether you go to jail or not, them also being able to say you're a good or bad debtor seems better since it doesn't give them any additional power, just a more fine-grained way to use their power.

> [all that other stuff]

Does china actually do any of that? None of the things you listed sound very concrete, to say the least.

> the credit system is only related to your ability to repay debts.

Is it? In Australia things like rent, electricity and phone bills all have credit checks attached. If you fail to pay bills (which I guess is a kind of debt but not one that originated with a loan) then you need to pay a large bond. If your credit score does start to slip, life becomes increasingly expensive and limits your ability to meet ongoing obligations.

> It is neutral to, and cannot be easily and directly cooped for Government control of personal behaviour, morality, and relationships.

Yes it can, for example the behaviour of poor people in rental accomodation is much more heavily policed than wealthy people who own their houses.

Poor people are stigmatised and frequently held to a higher standard because they are seen as "relying on other people's money", and the slippery slope nature of for profit credit scoring exacerbates this problem.

> It is not a tool of total social control

You've clearly never been poor, nor had any problems with your credit score.

> And it is not centralised to the same entity that has a monopoly on force.

Again, you've obviously never had a problem with your credit score. Companies that can afford to pay legal fees are definitely aligned with the same entity that has a monopoly on force.

You should get out more.

Then explain why they also offer locking (for a fee), and what the difference is?

> If you don't like Experian then don't do business with people that use Experian.

Yeah… that’s not how that works. Generally:

1. You have no idea in advance what credit reporting agencies the lender or employer will use.

2. Even if you know, you’re now fighting two kafkaesque bureaucracies at once instead of just one. Enjoy that.

3. The consequences are life-altering.

4. For mortgages it’s often required to query all three credit reporting agencies.

5. If you make known your issue, most lenders take it as a sign you aren’t credit-worthy

6. All three agencies are huge sacks of shit. There’s no ethical reason to object to Experian but not to the others. They’re all utterly horrid in effectively every aspect.

7. It is literally impossible to opt out of your information being stored and disseminated by the credit reporting agencies, and their business is legally protected.

>Why?

It's what practically all major lenders look at. Some of the lower tier credit card issuers will look at Transunion/Equifax, as well as landlords etc. because they're cheaper to pull. But anything serious like a mortgage or personal loan comes down to your Experian score.

There's also the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

I like this.

I was thinking of disconnecting identity from transactions but I am not sure that is technically feasible without introducing anonymizing middlemen functions who know can verify and transfer the funds without releasing info about originating account holder. Pipe dream probably.