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I'm not following how authentication obviates the need for record-keeping. Credit reporting agencies are basically a data warehouse for financial event history
by adrianmonk 8y ago
I'm not following how authentication obviates the need for record-keeping.
Credit reporting agencies are basically a data warehouse for financial event history. If such a thing didn't exist in some form, how would a lender check whether you made previous payments on time? They can't contact every possible creditor that you could have interacted with.
Maybe a better architecture is possible than storing all the data centrally and creating a massive single point of failure, though.
- Eridrus 8y agoA super common complaint about Equifax is that everyone's SSNs were stolen, which puts people at risk of identity theft. With a national ID scheme where authentication is not based on knowing what is essentially a primary key, this concern would go away. This would do nothing about any other data, but to draw a parallel to merchant breaches, we mostly see stolen credit cards as a nuisance and a matter for the banks to deal with, rather than something we really worry about.
- luhn 8y agoThe problem is that SSNs are used for both identity and authentication. It’s as if your login was just a username, no password. Equifax et al only need to know your “username” and still allow for credit checks. But since all we have is SSN, Equifax has your “password” as well, turning a data breach from a theft of private data into a wide open avenue for identity theft.