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> Real personal responsibility is leaking as little information as possible to these fuckers in the first place. In the case of credit rating agencies, it's li

> Real personal responsibility is leaking as little information as possible to these fuckers in the first place. In the case of credit rating agencies, it's literally impossible to live as an American citizen who interacts with the modern financial system and not have your information end up in their databases. Your advice is unhelpful because most people are not prepared to drop completely off the grid, pay for everything in cash or cryptocurrency, and consign themselves to never taking out a loan owning a home.

mindslight 7y ago
That is why I said as little as possible. Your reductio ad absurdum is unwarranted. And yeah, it does take effort, and you will never get 100% of the way there. But there is plenty of low hanging fruit to pull back on, like relearning to visit the ATM and not use a credit card for routine purchases like groceries. Or when you receive your yearly privacy notice from a bank, actually call up and limit the sharing. Skip answering extra questions when they ask you to "update your information", and when signing up for something choose to perform verification via postal mail or only answer questions that Google can answer ("which city is Foo Street in") rather than confirming what is in their surveillance databases. And certainly don't sign up for businesses who's entire revenue model is based around facilitating access to your surveillance profile (CreditKarma, Mint, etc). Acting like it's an absolutely helpless situation because the reporting generally centers around the concerns of the identity verification industry itself (oh no, people's already-public SSNs are more widely known!) is missing the real damage these companies do to individuals' privacy. Also none of those three general of avenues (personal responsibility, collective action, direct action) is some immediate perfect solution - the only hope we have is long term culture change based on little steps in each area.

mindslight 7y ago

That is why I said as little as possible. Your reductio ad absurdum is unwarranted. And yeah, it does take effort, and you will never get 100% of the way there. But there is plenty of low hanging fruit to pull back on, like relearning to visit the ATM and not use a credit card for routine purchases like groceries. Or when you receive your yearly privacy notice from a bank, actually call up and limit the sharing. Skip answering extra questions when they ask you to "update your information", and when signing up for something choose to perform verification via postal mail or only answer questions that Google can answer ("which city is Foo Street in") rather than confirming what is in their surveillance databases. And certainly don't sign up for businesses who's entire revenue model is based around facilitating access to your surveillance profile (CreditKarma, Mint, etc). Acting like it's an absolutely helpless situation because the reporting generally centers around the concerns of the identity verification industry itself (oh no, people's already-public SSNs are more widely known!) is missing the real damage these companies do to individuals' privacy. Also none of those three general of avenues (personal responsibility, collective action, direct action) is some immediate perfect solution - the only hope we have is long term culture change based on little steps in each area.