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Comment by varenc | Hacker News Reader

Excited to see this! Because completing the CCPA "delete my data" process for 300+ data brokers just isn't feasible.

Though I wonder what the second order effects of this might be. Imagine a service that vets tenants for landlords. If I've had all my data deleted, might I start failing background checks because the sketchy data brokers have no records of me? I fear a future where the complete absence of my data leads to bad side effects.

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It's the same as credit checks, I know people who no credit (because they don't own a credit card) get denied housing for rent.

Not all data brokers are sketchy, some are very good. Data brokers help assess who is creditworthy and lowers rates for more trustworthy people, and allow the creation of more specialty lending products.

Are Experian, Transunion and Equifax included in the one-click deletion?

They don't let you delete credit history data unless it's incorrect. But you can freeze it.

Well they should have found a more transparent way to run their business, so they are still sketchy to me.

The big US credit score trio, Transunion, Equifax and Experian, have all had multiple, massive data leaks. This is not very good at all.

and for the ones you know about, there's more you don't.

cough un-ecrypted experian backups getting stolen from a UPS truck at gun-point and nothing else stolen cough

Credit checks, and the 3 big companies that do it, are already pretty regulated. I don't think they're counted as data brokers that'll have to comply with Delete Act. Can anyone confirm?

update: Looked it up and this seems right. The credit bureaus have specific exemptions in the Delete Act, specifically because they're already covered by the "Fair Credit Reporting Act". But it does apply to adjacent "people search" features from the same credit bureaus.

Also you can't delete your own credit history data unless it's proved inaccurate. Though you can't delete freeze it.

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