Why is it that in the US individuals have to band together and privately launch a class action to stop these types of parasitic behaviours. The government is supposed to represent the interests of citizens.
The biggest downside is the lawyers take a massive chunk of any award and the actual victims are often left with very little. Or, even worse, the victims get worthless coupons (like with many credit/PII breaches - the award will be 1-year of credit monitoring from the company that allowed the breach in the first place).
I told them that I will certainly not start to build a credit score at 40 yo so they will have to find someone else.
a) nobody has a perfect score b) FICO algorithms are proprietary from third-party companies, how would your potential employer have any influence?
I am coming from abroad with experience nedded in a US company (and therefore in the US at large) and I start my finance as if I was 18.
Then if there is a problem with my PII I have to worry about why it was lost. The company that lot it is going to give me a year of some kind of monitoring.
Well, no. I am not really interested to depend on some proprietary system that can make my life difficult just because someone fucked up. Or go through hoops to build it without consideration of my past outside the US or my job.
FWIW, as much as Americans complain about the credit score system, it's mostly not a problem (for most people, most of the time). It's not hard for a middle-income person to earn and maintain a top-tier score (800+) and the lowest possible APRs when borrowing.
And assuming a prospective employer would assist you with finding housing, it's not hard for an immigrant to begin building their credit score. Just make sure your landlord reports rent to the credit agencies and take out a credit card. 3-6 months later, you have a decent score.
Identity theft is a real problem, but that extends well beyond the credit agencies.
Then the bank will look at your current funds, the job you have, the earnings you have and after some abracadabra they will say yes or no.
There is no building of trust the assessment is on what you have and what you are capable of.
The credit is usually 1/3 of your salary (at least in France) and you novadays have to provide about 20-30% of the total amount.
In France, how doe a lender know if you have other loans/debt outstanding? Or if you have a history of non-payment? Those two make up the majority of a credit score (35% payment history, 30% debt burden). And the credit score is just one piece of an overall credit report.
Then you provide the bank with your last three bank statements and your salary. They match the money movements with what they expect to see (a salary coming in, a payment going out, ...)
Finally, there is a centralized database of failed payments.
It works well, we do no have special problems with credits and how they are paid off (what helps is that there are compulsory insurances and protections for the credit-taker)
There is the "trust" component first: in your request, you list all your credits and the fact that you have failed a payment. Then you provide the bank with your last three bank statements and your salary. They match the money movements with what they expect to see (a salary coming in, a payment going out, ...)
Finally, there is a centralized database of failed payments.
It works well, we do no have special problems with credits and how they are paid off (what helps is that there are compulsory insurances and protections for the credit-taker)
> there is a centralized database of failed payments
exactly what I assumed, and pretty much the same as how the US credit-check system works.
There is no history of credit and the note in the centralized database is removed when you actually pay (this is then rather a "database of people who are currently late in their payments")
The other thing is that we do not have the problem of "I know your SS# so I can take a credit" - it requires all kinds of bureaucratic gymnastics.
of course you have a score, it's just implied rather than explicit. how many missed payments? how much were those missed payments? that's the score.
> an implicit trust in your declarations
...but we still look you up in the central database ;-) sure, we trust you
Whenever there is a hack there is panic in the US about credits and credit scores. You are provided a "monitoring" for a year in case things south (and hopefully a way to recover).
You hear about what to do to have/keep a credit score in the US.
So this is something important.
These considerations do not exist in Europe, nobody ever discusses this. It means there is a fundamental difference about how credits are apprised in Europe and the US.
I do not even mention the fact that we virtually do not have credit cards. That is cards where there is a minimum amount to pay back and the rest is credited.
So this is really different.
2) The consumer protection laws we do have, and the bodies to enforce them, are relatively weak and enforcement is spotty at best. The most recent serious attempt to kinda fix this is the formation of the CFPB, and one of our two relevant political parties deliberately prevents it from working when they hold the White House (sample size of one, admittedly) and has been trying to totally kill it, in the legislature or (better, because it’s popular and this is deniable) in the courts.
IANL - however, in the US and in US States, many serious cases have been decided in favor of the consumer, over decades. It is the most recent waves of privacy versus ad revenue that are indeed, very weak. It is awkward to defend these regulators since their failures are sometimes glaring, however it is my impression that serious settlements against industry can have silence or "gag orders" attached, and they often do. The industry lawyers can argue that the news of the settlement alone constitutes additional commercial damage to the company, and of course they are right in a narrow sense.
I'm not sure that's ever happened in this country. They pay all sorts of lip service, but when challenged or under pressure, the US makes a lot of excuses for leaving its own people behind.
Thankfully we can repay that favor and see how they like it when there's nobody left to defend them.
The idea of private litigators is to complement the innate limitations of federal/state lawyers, by offering profit as an incentive.
Ideally yeah Americans would have stronger laws around TOS, customer privacy, data handling and security, and robustly funded state lawyers... but we don't.
Practically speaking, such gaps are not unique to technology. Every industry has this same problem, and your awareness of those problems is reflective of the general public's political engagement with this thread's topic. So having gaps that private litigators address is really quite normal and part of the incremental progress of legislation and state enforcement.
Do you need a longer list?