Credit bureaus should be illegal. You can’t opt out of them and they take no responsibility in protecting you. How is it that every tech company has to abide by all kinds of rules re: PII, but they get to do whatever they like?
If a lender claims you borrowed money, and they cannot conclusively prove it was you, it should be their problem and their problem alone.
The fact that you have to prove you did not borrow money because a lender says your social security number was inputted into a form is a travesty.
In the form of government issued IDs and lately some governments even provide something digital.
The US government doesn't provide that.
No ID is required for domestic travel, even at big airports. Just be pleasant and explain that you misplaced it. I have misplaced ID several times, and only once I signed a piece of paper which roughly said that I am I because I say so.
They checkpoint all the thoroughfares near Mexico and I reminded my Spanish fiancée to carry her passport as we traveled domestically, and I was completely correct.
Law enforcement usually has ways of checking ID by radio/computer, so it may be a short stop, but still.
> On May 7, 2025, U.S. travelers must be REAL ID compliant to board domestic flights and access certain federal facilities.
Source: https://www.dhs.gov/real-id
Normally, I'd have had my backup travel ID/credit card/cash kit but, hey, this was a last minute couple night trip so I went light.
Figured that was that. But as it turned out really wasn't a major issue much to my surprise.
What was an issue was getting checked into the hotel I had been able to find for the event near the airport (Travelodge). I even had a photo company security badge, credit cards, etc. Eventually they let me, with great reluctance pay cash, which fortunately fleabag was cheap enough that my withdrawal limit covered. Thought I was going to have to call SV friends and find somewhere to sleep--or at least pay some ridiculous amount for the last room at some hotel where I belonged to their loyalty program. But TSA was actually not a real issue.
Said DHS policy is not infringing on your right to travel. You can still hire a private jet or fly yourself. The airline companies will just simply refuse to fly you, which they have the right to do.
What?
It's the REAL ID Act of 2005. 8 USC 1101. It's absolutely a law. (Also 49 USC 30301).
That isn't true:
> What Happens If You Don’t Register a Birth?
> By law, newborns must be registered within 10 days of their birth.
> In terms of legality, not registering the birth of a child is a violation of the law and a punishable crime. Depending on the state, the parents may be fined, charged with imprisonment, or have to face other legal consequences.
The US is actually insane about how little identification they require from residents and also not great about how expensive it can be to acquire certain forms of ID.
I'm curious how one obtains a US passport without a birth certificate or SSN.
(But yes, issuance of a passport is "optional").
Really helpful to have birth listed in a couple church public registers.
For baby passport, basically the parents attest to the child being born as American along with "hey look at this public record". And a SSN is apparently never required and State Dept should probably not being relying on a tax agency number. I mistakenly transposed and messed up the digits for the SSN box ten years ago and the passport arrived. So they didn't even do a lookup on it.
There are administrative rules all over the 50 States. Most don't apply to typical Americans but nobody knows that or they don't care because 'merica#1.
Oof, this absolutely reeks of sovereign citizen bullshit.
How to obtain a US passport with neither a SSN nor a birth certificate is apparently left as an exercise for the reader...
Leading with Washington, where I reside and work as a healthcare provider...
RCW 70.58A.100 (https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=70.58A&full=tru...)
Specifically subsection 5:
> For an unattended live birth not reported under subsection (4) of this section, a report of live birth and an affidavit stating the facts of the birth must be filed with the department within ten calendar days of the live birth.
(whereby unattended means 'with no healthcare provider, midwife, or facility representative present or applicable'.)
(For bonus, RCW 70.58A.120 captures "delayed reporting of a live birth" and the "establishing of facts" around the birth.)
> How would they know for home birth
I was going to offer the comparison to driving, where "they" don't know you're driving without a license until there is some form of or need for government interaction. But I fear this will lead to some comment about traveling versus driving.
> and would they arrest the baby?
This is fatuous. "Depending on the state, the parents may be fined, charged with imprisonment, or have to face other legal consequences." (emphasis mine).
If I had a wife, I would ensure that she had all the rights and privileges of being my wife, and not have to jump through some ridiculous hoops made of red tape because some Sovereign Citizen told us it was optional to go see the JoP.
The only one you can't really dodge is a birth certificate.
The bank/lender/etc is the victim here. But somehow I have to take the fall. Well, next time they should ask me before lending money to "me".
> The bank/lender/etc is the victim here.
Actually you are the victim: you are a victim of the bank/lender/etc and they should be liable to compensate you with punitive damages for your any negative consequences to you.
If the bank or lender considers this unfair, let them try to recoup the cost of compensating you by suing the alleged fraudster who they claim "stole your identity" — but not before they compensate you first.
You are the victim of libel by the banks & credit agencies. They're the victims of fraud by the person(s) they lent the money to. There's no need (other than to protect the banks & credit agencies) to bundle both crimes together, call them "identity theft", and blame it on the individual victim!
But after a quick Google right now, it looks like they're just random private companies that get to do whatever they want because they have such strong established relationships with our major financial institutions.
CCPA was in the right direction, but AFAICT it explicitly carved out exemptions for credit bureaus.
We need to tighten the screws on these businesses; the only way we’ll see improvement here is if we hold them liable for damages and breaches. Right now they have very little incentive to care for this data, and all the incentive to try and monetize it as much as possible.
Still, people rarely consider the very valuable service they provide: without them, credit would be much more expensive in this country, or not offered at all. Want to see what a world without credit bureaus looks like? Go to a 3rd world country where everything is paid for in cash. This is not a good thing - it doesn't mean that everyone in these 3rd world countries are great savers while those in the first world live beyond their means. In means these 3rd world countries don't have institutions that can help to ensure trust between lenders and borrowers. As distasteful as it may feel sometimes, credit bureaus help ensure that trust by giving histories of the likelihood of someone's ability to repay a loan.
Again, to emphasize, this is not to say there are myriad problems with the way credit bureaus are currently run. It is saying the the primary service they provide (credit histories for individuals) is a good thing for society.
Other than that, the only other information a lender will use to decide whether to grant me a loan and under which conditions will be information that they will ask me to provide, such as age, proof of employment situation, and my last 3 payslips.
Absolutely, there are significant differences, and some are quite similar to us (Canada and the UK) others differ more significantly (France and Spain). But they all essentially have ways to record any black marks from your payment history and use that to determine your credit worthiness for new loan applications.
This is exactly what I meant in my first paragraph - yes, it's absolutely the case that the US implementation has tons of problems, and I think it's fine to say these should be public or quasi-public entities (e.g. only the the country's central bank has this info, like in France), but in general, all of these countries use some sort of analogous system to credit bureaus to determine your relative risk profile.