The whole concept of these credit agencies infuriates me. I didn't sign up for it. You have a dossier on me that I have no part of. If you F it up, you'd better bend over backwards to make sure it doesn't affect me.
The credit bureaus are the equivalent of gross polluters. They have horrible externalities. The value you have received comes at the expense of innocent victims of identity theft. Who's going to compensate them? You?
I have no business dealing with "credit bureaus". I did not give them my information or consenting for them to store my information on their system.
So, I have been told constantly to "correct" my information with them - FUCK THEM! They bought/stole my personal information - I have no business with them.
Call me naive, but I wish more people would not give a damn about them either.
When I needed a loan to buy my house, I spoke directly to the loan officer face to face and told showed them all documents they needed and told them that if they need to consider my approval based on "Credit Score", I did not care.. I showed them the mistakes and mis-information they have in my credit report and -when he asked me to call them to fix it - I told him that I would not do that because I do not consent them holding my information. Two days later, the load officer called me to tell me my application was approved.
We are not their customers. Average Joe on the street is not their customer. No individual is their customer.[1]
Their customers are other businesses - mainly banks/credit card companies/lenders as well as background checking services. They have no reason to provide customer service to individuals in their database - they are required to provide minimum services by law.
[1] Actually, now some offer "credit monitoring services" to individuals, which are a cash hog because these services are absurdly overpriced and kinda scammy.
I don't mind credit bureaus as they ostensibly have a function.
However, the current model is so anti-consumer, it's not funny. EVERYTHING is tilted away from the consumer, the consumer technically has a right to dispute, but the process is a waste of your time most often, and magically, financial entities get to charge much higher rates when your credit isn't perfect.
Pay everything, and I mean, every. single. thing. on time, every time, for 3 decades. Get shafted by 1 business and that business slaps a collections on your report, -100 points, instantly, because fuck you.
Exactly. We are not their customers. Employers and lenders are, no more, no less, simple as that.
Even “fraud protection” / “credit monitoring”, ostensibly the closest we come to being customers, is in many senses “protect you from our customers and our fuckups” (forgive the language).
Precisely. And if you are denied something based on the credit bureaus' negligently constructed profiles, sue them for libel.
Their whole system is based on an antiquated idea of singular "identity" that only worked when it was one small part; it simply doesn't scale. Some arbitrary facts about a person do not form a legitimate authorization mechanism!
The only way things are going to change is for people to realize they have absolutely no responsibility for a third party being defrauded.
The problem is, as you articulated, they are required by law to provide credit reporting information about you to you. They have no incentive to do this because they make their money by collecting and selling data about us.
They have every reason to use this reporting requirement to collect more information about you.
They have every reason to conflate credit freeze with credit hold, and confuse consumers in order to extract regular payments from them.
They have zero reason to keep sensitive data about you secure. In fact, they have every reason to promote fear and uncertainty in the public that their sensitive personal information is in the hands of criminals as a growth opportunity for their industry to sell credit monitoring services.
They have successfully convinced the public that identity theft is a separate and distinct crime done exclusively by one person to another rather than simply fraud that they are aiding and abetting.
Consumers and credit reporting bureaus have a fundamentally adversarial relationship that no legislation can harmonize. They exist because they do serve a purpose for finance, which is to give an indication of how much money they can make lending money to someone. Regardless, this reporting does not have to be done by for-profit corporations. This can just as easily be done by non-profits or government agencies. Although these are not perfect, they are free of the perverse incentives driven by for profit corporate structures.
There's no limit on the outrage one can feel about that, the worst being the absolute absence of accountability from these credit bureaus, and the lack of recourse against these. They carry on handling your data like it's theirs, occasionally giving your social identity to hackers without so much as a "woopsy". You can't just switch, and you need them if you ever want to do something super crazy like buying a house, a car, or background check for a job. You know for a fact that nothing will ever happen to them until society crumbles altogether. It's hard feeling so powerless.
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