14 ms·

How Equifax Became a Private IRS

• nimbius 4y ago
  A cogent argument could.be made that transunion, Equifax, and other big private credit clearinghouses act as direct agents of an unspoken american "social credit" system in which the credit score denies housing and employment to those who refuse to or cannot conform to a largely invisible tome of rules. These agents are then unpoliced as they serve capitalisms direct need for an underclass. Full disclosure: I am a communist, and recognize most Marxist state social credit systems tend to have the same effect. Transparency in the plenary party sessions seems to do little to reform this cudgel but the parallels in capitalisms version are neat to me.
  • quantified 4y ago
    I would argue it's not completely unspoken. But it's not spoken loudly enough. Pass it on.
  • xxpor 4y ago
    I see where you're coming from, but on the other hand, the biggest rules are well known and quite simple: If you take a loan and pay it back on time, you'll have high credit. If you fail to meet your obligations, you won't. The existence of an underclass which is constantly on the edge of not being able to pay their bills is true though.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      I agree with you on the current state, but I think parent may be concerned about future state where unelected, private entity determines your societal worth based on yet unknown rules; or known, but less bound by 'loan paid off' type of information. Right now, it appears to be mostly limited to various financial events, but current state is not guaranteed not to change in the future.
      • jolux 4y ago
        > future state GP's comment was written in present tense.
    • radicaldreamer 4y ago
      Those are not the only rules though... you can have low credit for not taking out enough loans and not having debt. You get dinged for opening and closing credit card accounts too quickly, even if you've never missed a payment. Your score goes down if you simply inquire about loans a bit too often... All of these are "rules" made up unilaterally by the credit bureaus.
      • BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
        I have a few credit cards that I no longer use. If I cancel them my score would go down because the average age/length credit history would go down. Not by that much, but it is surprising that leaving these cards open is incentivized whereas the more secure and less risky thing to do would be to close those accounts.
        • mattnewton 4y ago
          It make a a bit more sense when you think about it - Risk isn’t really the main thing incentivized here, making interest payments is haha. Risky lenders don’t make payments, but neither do people who never take on debt
          • medvezhenok 4y ago
            Credit scores actually are designed to measure risk, not interest payments. Otherwise high credit utilization would be a positive:) There are certainly edge cases where the score has low predictive value, but overall the correlation between credit score and risk is quite large.
        • medvezhenok 4y ago
          The closed card drops off your account history after ~10 years, so your score shouldn't immediately go down. Technically, I'm not sure that the credit scores can differentiate between you closing a card and the bank closing your card (the latter might be some sort of signal of potential change in creditworthiness) In general, credit scores are optimized for the average consumer - and so behaviors around the edges don't always make sense in terms of your score going up or down. If you think about the system that was replaced by credit cards (i.e. keeping a tab open with many different stores), you'd be hard pressed to say that the amount of credit extended is lower now (overall), than under the old system. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different question.
    • epgui 4y ago
      On the contrary, the actual rules and methodologies for credit score calculations are not documented anywhere public. Saying essentially "just don't do bad things to your reputation" is at most a very hand wavy "rule of thumb", but it's not a codified "rule" of the sort we should expect to see of such a consequential system.
      • gruez 4y ago
        > On the contrary, the actual rules and methodologies for credit score calculations are not documented anywhere public. The exact formulas might not be, but the general factors aren't exactly a secret. Hell, the "free credit score" service my bank offers even provides a simulator tool to estimate what would happen to my credit score if I did certain things (eg. get a car loan, or pay off an existing loan).
    • bix6 4y ago
      Many people I’ve talked to have very little idea what the factors affecting their credit scores are. Many are unaware or uninterested. I have helped many people improve their credit scores because I have spent hours learning how to game this system. Much of this information is not taught to people until they need credit at which point it’s too late to start establishing a history and your best bet is some bs predatory card that locks up more money than you can afford.
      • vuln 4y ago
        Have you thought about publishing your tactics in gaming the credit system?
        • medvezhenok 4y ago
          There are already tons of articles and videos that have already been published on this. And now Experian / other bureaus offer score breakdowns along with calculators where you can explore how hypothetical actions would affect your score. I think the space is pretty well covered:) (For an example, Google for AskSebby - How to Increase Your Credit Score)
          • vuln 4y ago
            Just tried it and received a 404 Google Search: AskSebby - How to Increase Your Credit Score First AskSebby result. https://www.asksebby.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-credit-score-long-term-as-a-millennial https://www.asksebby.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-credit-sco... I'll keep digging.
        • bix6 4y ago
          As someone else mentioned there is a ton of existing content. The problem is people don’t look until it’s too late because nobody cares about this stuff until it causes issues. Unless schools start teaching real life financial basics the problems will continue. Credit Karma has been one of my most useful resource for improvements because they break down the factors very well. Many banks have stepped up their game but some don’t give you as much detail.
    • sidewndr46 4y ago
      No, that isn't even remotely how it works. My credit score has gone down consistently after getting rid of all my debt.
      • gruez 4y ago
        If you understand how credit scores work, you'd realize that what you've experienced doesn't contradict the parent's claim. Specifically, having low credit utilization (ie. low credit used compared to available credit) and high diversity of accounts is beneficial for your credit score. Closing accounts is bad for both of these, hence why your credit score dropped. It doesn't invalidate the parent's claim that you can have good credit by just using credit and paying it back on time. FWIW I have a few credit cards that I pay on time every month, and my credit score is pretty good.
    • atdrummond 4y ago
      My credit is tanked from an ex opening up accounts in my name and running up the tab while I was being treated for leukaemia and Crohns. Six years later and I’m still fixing the damage.
      • sixstringtheory 4y ago
        Fucking hell, why are people such monsters? That’s terrible to hear, hope you’re doing alright.
        • gruez 4y ago
          [deleted]
          • tspike 4y ago
            I think it’s fairly clear the monster here is the ex that took advantage of a vulnerable person.
      • consp 4y ago
        Question from someone not in the us: can you legally open a creditcard in someone else's name or does it have to involve some form of fraud? I'm pretty sure my application was only valid when signed by the requester by that was in Europe and rules may differ. I do know you can open them for shared accounts, but that is not what I am talking about.
        • atdrummond 4y ago
          It was/is fraud, yes. Typically the way you open a card in someone else’s name on your account is by adding them as an authorized user.
    • lmm 4y ago
      > If you take a loan and pay it back on time, you'll have high credit. Unless you're on the Equifax blacklist. Journalists who wrote anti-equifax articles tend to find their way there, as do ex-girlfriends of upper management. And conversely women who do NSA hookups with a VP or above tend to find their way onto a whitelist that boosts your credit score by 150 or so - it's considered an unwritten perk of the job. (The above is purely speculation, I have no idea whether any of it is actually true, but honestly, why wouldn't it be?)
      • xxpor 4y ago
        This is a good reason for most finance companies to take the middle of the 3 scores.
        • lmm 4y ago
          That helps some, but realistically it's a small industry and there are lots of channels (formal and otherwise) linking the competitors. A lot of people working at one previously worked at another.
    • TheDong 4y ago
      My parents taught me that debt was bad. They told me that credit cards were traps to get you into debt, that preyed on poor impulse control, and that it was better not to have one. If you can't tell, my parents grew up in a time when the credit score system didn't really matter, and didn't understand it. I did not get a credit card. I did not have any loans, for school or anything else. My credit score wasn't even a number, it just didn't exist. Even the bank I banked with, which could see that I had more than $8k USD deposited monthly, that could see I had $30k in an account with them, would not give me a loan to buy a car. Even if I were to get a credit card and pay it back on time, my credit score would be quite low due to having no history, and I still could not get a loan. I'm fortunate that the apartments I have rented so far have not done credit checks, only background checks and looked at salaries / offer letters, but there are many apartments I simply could not rent since I would obviously fail their credit check, despite never having had any debt.
      • gruez 4y ago
        >My credit score wasn't even a number, it just didn't exist. Even the bank I banked with, which could see that I had more than $8k USD deposited monthly, that could see I had $30k in an account with them, would not give me a loan to buy a car. Right, because it's a credit score, not a finance score. I'm not sure what you want here. Do you want credit bureaus to collect even more information about your financial life so they can have a more accurate picture?
        • wmf 4y ago
          I see this as an education problem. People need to be taught the specific rules of credit scores in addition to general personal finance.
          • TheDong 4y ago
            I feel like my parent's point about credit cards and college loans being bad were correct though. Like, I believe they're right that going to college on a full-ride scholarship was better than going to a more expensive one on a loan. I also believe they're right that credit cards are bad. Like, banks make money on credit cards by: 1. hoping you miss a payment, and collecting interest, and 2. charging merchants, thus raising the price of goods for everyone (typically) I guess you're saying that we should teach people "Yes, use credit cards, these tools designed to put you in debt, but be careful. Why use something designed to put you in debt? Because there's another private company that will punish you by not letting you rent certain apartments if you don't use a credit card"
  • mbg721 4y ago
    It seems weird not to name Experian. Aren't there only three?
    • xeromal 4y ago
      There's actually 4. Innovis
    • MerelyMortal 4y ago
      There are a bunch of other types of reporting agencies too, not just for credit: https://www.consumerlawfirm.com/credit-reporting-agencies.htm https://www.consumerlawfirm.com/credit-reporting-agencies.ht... https://www.consumerfinance.gov/consumer-tools/credit-reports-and-scores/consumer-reporting-companies/companies-list/ https://www.consumerfinance.gov/consumer-tools/credit-report...
      • runnerup 4y ago
        Yeah I've had difficulty renting apartments for 8 years because "LeasingDesk" falsely reported that I owed a past landlord $36,000. No one ever told me this is why my applications always faced long delays, additional scrutiny, increasingly insane documentation requirements, and huge security deposits. Finally I asked my most recent apartment complex "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?" and they were like "uhh this report..." and I spent 3 months getting LeasingDesk to deny, deny, and finally admit/accept my claim that they had bad data. It was a nightmare to get it fixed. They just said "No, the data is correct because we called your old apartment complex and they said it was correct." Because LeasingDesk was acting in good faith I could only sue my old apartment complex for misreporting it, I couldn't use CFPB to force LeasingDesk to fix it. So yeah, its not just Experian/TransUnion/Equifax....there are dozens and dozens and dozens of data brokers acting as credit bureaus. Right now the only protections consumers have from them come from the CFPB but if that's ever abolished we'll only have lawyers and torts.
      • aidenn0 4y ago
        And before that large companies would keep their own records. My dad needed to put down a 3-figure deposit for his first phone line in the 70s because someone with the same first name and last name who lived in the same town as he went to college regularly racked up over $100 per month in long-distance bills.
  • refurb 4y ago
    If “paying you debts” is an “invisible tome of rules” then I’m all for it. Let’s be honest, credit score pretty accurately reflect what they are supposed to measure - credit worthiness.
    • corytheboyd 4y ago
      I would not loan someone thousands of dollars on a "trust me bro", so I wouldn't expect banks to either. Corruption of the authority judging trustworthiness is bad, but there just needs to be an authority doing this. The real problem is more likely that wages and living expenses are not in sync, which just fucks over the poor people. Using credit to avoid literally dying on the street is more a symptom of wages making no sense. It's sad. I don't like it either. I don't trust these people either. Equifax fucked me and millions of others, and I got a check for $5.21. There is no justice and there never will be.
      • epgui 4y ago
        > there just needs to be an authority doing this People will tolerate even the harshest laws if they feel like they are applied fairly. But in this case there is no published rule book, and no published methodology for calculating credit scores. There is not even the most basic transparency.
        • corytheboyd 4y ago
          Don't get me wrong I'd love to see the rule book too. Would you trust the rules though? There will always be the mysterious few with the power. I wish we could just have nice things without corruption :/
          • epgui 4y ago
            > Would you trust the rules though? Rules don't need to be trusted, they need to be written down and available for reading.
    • 33955985 4y ago
  • jessaustin 4y ago
    Even in our most dystopian RAND-suggested bedtime story vision of a "communist hellhole", those proles who happened to possess a ruble when they got to the front of the breadline could buy a loaf. In the supercapitalist future, all transactions will require the approval of more than the two involved parties. Good luck buying anything if you ever express skepticism toward the great and powerful credit bureaus.
    • nwiswell 4y ago
      Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something about the point you're making, but in 2023 the third party creditor already must approve any transactions where credit is extended (e.g. credit card) Credit bureaus remain uninvolved with cash transactions since, er, well, there's no creditor to be concerned about creditworthiness? I don't see how "supercapitalism" changes that
      • jessaustin 4y ago
        You haven't seen any of the anti-cash propaganda, some of it here on HN? The interests behind that are also behind several other disturbing changes.
        • nwiswell 4y ago
          Square peg, round hole. Has nothing to do with credit bureaus.
      • czbond 4y ago
        If you replace "Credit Bureau" with CBDC (Central Bank Digital Coin) it would ring very true or the probable future.
        • nwiswell 4y ago
          Alright, that's a little bit different, but doesn't that just imply that Bitcoin or Monero become "cash" in case you need to Do Some Crimes?
    • 4y ago
  • kube-system 4y ago
    The difference in the US financial system of credit and a "social credit" system is that these systems measure only attributes about financial credit, and in fact, the US has laws that specifically forbid many social factors from being used.
  • Tangurena2 4y ago
    Additionally, many executives are virulently opposed to people working multiple jobs and are using things like The Work Number to identify and fire remote workers who have more than one job.
• coderintherye 4y ago
  One thing Matt mentions but doesn't go into is how this could (should?) be a government service. In fact, there is the IRS's IVES program: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/income-verification-express-service https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/inco... but it is already fairly antiquated. There's a great opportunity here for the IRS to provide this service (with revenue from charging the requesting entities), with citizens being self-sovereign over what data is shared and who it is shared with. Especially because they could provide verified data in a very narrow scope (for instance only sharing Adjusted Gross Income and nothing else).
  • mindslight 4y ago
    Or rather than further entrenching the idea, we could work towards effective privacy legislation and relegate all of these commercial surveillance databases to the dustbin of history.
  • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Equifax collects data that isn't true and libels its victims by disseminating it to other parties. Having that power enshrined within the government would not be a good thing.
    • jasonjayr 4y ago
      Why? Government answers to it's people. Equifax answers to it's shareholders. IRS already has that info. The people have the power to control and influence how that data is handled, and distributed. We have no power to compel Equifax to do anything.
      • fragmede 4y ago
        Government is able to compel Equifax to do things, and is run by we, the people, so it seems like we should be able to something, for sufficiently large and powerful numbers of "we".
        • 4y ago
• piyh 4y ago
  I've worked on the data feeds for TWN in a large company's payroll system. If I remember right they don't just get how much money you made but the line by line check level data. Your pay data probably goes out to 14 different vendors on any given pay period. What amaze me about payroll was how accurate the data was on average, despite having wild amounts of new regulatory, healthcare, union, and pay program complexity. A surprising amount of money is directed by some lady in a payroll department making $40k with vlookup and 30 excel files on their desktop. But there sure are some dark messy corners of data quality in people's pay and benefits.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • hnburnsy 4y ago
    who are the other vendors beside the actual payroll company and TWN? thx
  • xattt 4y ago
    > A surprising amount of money is directed by some lady in a payroll department making $40k with vlookup and 30 excel files on their desktop. I wonder if these people understand their value to an organization.
    • maxfurman 4y ago
      In my experience they do not, or they believe that they are still not as valuable to the org as the org is to them.
• _gmax0 4y ago
  One detail the blog leaves out is that this employment and income collection extends to both Canada and Australia. Much of the data is noisy and I won't even get into the gory details of data ingestion. I was wondering the other day why hedge funds and etc. aren't using them as an early indicator and I can speculate why. On the other side of the spectrum, your average Joe is at times inconvenienced by Equifax's inaccurate record keeping.
  • smnrchrds 4y ago
    Is there a way to opt out of them too?
• kornhole 4y ago
  Since I can't opt out of this and all the scoundrels can see it anyway, I think I should just post my salary on my Linkedin page. If everybody did that, it would undercut this business and bring to light the inequities to the common people.
  • WaxProlix 4y ago
    They can and always do ask you anwyways. Equifax brings a 3rd party trusted account to the table - you volunteering some info isn't helpful, they don't trust your number.
  • hnburnsy 4y ago
    you can freeze it here... https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
  • xwolfi 4y ago
    You underestimate dishonesty in the population: having your pay exposed may force your company to reduce it to the lowest common denominator to avoid all the cries by people who simply shouldnt be paid like you (age, experience, output, knowledge criticality, all these things people dont wanna hear)
    • kornhole 4y ago
      I would love to see how it plays out. It will be more difficult to lower my pay than it will be to raise others.
    • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      While I don't like your point in general, feels like a scenario meant to scare people into not sharing information, I'm wondering how age or experience are factors independent of output that should define your pay. Seems to me if you're capable of producing equivalent output (considering both volume and quality) it shouldn't matter how old or experienced you are.
    • isleyaardvark 4y ago
• hnburnsy 4y ago
  you can view, dispute, and opt out of your salary info here... https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
  • landemva 4y ago
    Opt out ... maybe, until the next website hack. I recently interviewed and got job offer contingent on verifying work history, etc. After I cleared that, the link for docusign arrived. I called the recruiter and asked about payroll data sharing. She claimed to have never heard of it. A day later she said they don't do that. I explained my concerns, said I won't work for a company that does not respect employee privacy, and to go ask finance and HR. Just over a week later she confirmed they don't do that and she detailed exactly what is shared and when - State new hire DB, payroll taxes, medical plan, and by court order. I thanked her and signed the agreement to work for them. We only have a choice if we are willing to use it.
    • O__________O 4y ago
      While I sincerely appreciate your diligence, might be wrong, nothing you signed likely prevents your employer from changing their policies, nor was their accounting of what is currently shared by them likely legally binding. More importantly, inaccurate disclosures by the employer of their information sharing practices likely are not regulated.
• No1 4y ago
  Forget freezing the data, where do you make a CCPA delete request?
  • datavirtue 4y ago
    Not to mention the dire warning on the page about making it difficult to get a new job, mortgage, or obtain access to public healthcare benefits if you don't unfreeze before applying. Typical strongman shit.
• nextstep 4y ago
  The US is taking corruption to institutionalized levels probably never seen before in any society. However, the media is so tightly controlled by corporate monopolies that the people of the US still believe they live in a democracy.
  • HeckFeck 4y ago
    You do wonder how much further it will continue. Will everything just hit a wall soon?
• college_physics 4y ago
  The final act of the dystopic digital transition we are witnessing is when the (until recently ringfenced) information flows of the broader financial system start getting commingled with the other digital activity already being collected and monitored. With the headlong rush to eliminate physical cash soon there will be no opt-out whatsoever. As the world of old oligopolies dies and a worse one emerges, the grotesque and frightening outline of a handful mega-digi-corps that are the defacto rulers of the brave new world is already visible. There must be some escape hatch from this nightmare, some red lever behind a glass encasing with a label "break and pull when your society is in existential danger". But I don't see it.
  • debacle 4y ago
    Dick predicted all of this before many of us were even alive. There is likely no escape from an inhuman future.
    • oleganza 4y ago
      OTOH, was there really a time when humans were not enslaving each other in any form? I don't mean in a wide marxist term like "wage slave", but more specific kinds of bonding and control. Liberal changes in Europe in end of 18th century / beginning of 19th coincided with imported slavery from Africa and new colonies. That is freer factory worker would gain their productivity and better relative freedom while producing added value to raw materials produced by serfs elsewhere. In 20th century you either had direct serfdom in some countries like Russia, while countries like US owned slaves indirectly by setting up large-scale production in 3rd world countries and controlling their governments. Today we could probably breakdown the supply chain so that the lower you go by the ladder of "added value complexity", the more interchangeable and less free the people are. On the top of such chain there are managers, IT people, accountants and various service workers for the above who enjoy freedom while the bottom half of the supply chain is much more prosaic and constrained.
      • college_physics 4y ago
        I still hold the (maybe naive) belief that the path from the slave empires of previous eras to today was a benign one. The many deficiencies, setbacks etc cannot negate this relative ranking, even if (like Graeber and co might argue) we are conditioning on a particularly negative societal development some millennia ago. What is really disappointing is that today people have the illusion that somehow we have learned how to keep overbearing power concentration in check whereas it is manifestly not so. The informed and educated "middle class" that should know better (because it is its own existence that is at stake) is missing in action. [My take: A small fraction of it co-opted by the promise of joining the ruling elite, while the majority pushed down into the precariat] The result is that the same old monsters re-emerge, now in digital clothes.
• orev 4y ago
  While the Work Number is a horrible, anti-capitalist product, I can’t take seriously an article that keeps repeating the premise that having a monopoly is illegal. It just isn’t. It’d be illegal to use monopoly power to prevent others from competing, but that’s a different thing.
  • connor11528 4y ago
    That's why he talks about barriers to entry and market power because using those things to prevent competition is illegal. Sherman Act is actually a criminal statue that can put executives behind bars. There's also the Clayton Act and Robinson Patman act that ban forms of monopolization and price discrimination. It's up to the courts to determine what's reasonable. > Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for a company to "monopolize, or attempt to monopolize," trade or commerce. As that law has been interpreted, it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge "high prices," or to try to achieve a monopoly position by what might be viewed by some as particularly aggressive methods. The law is violated only if the company tries to maintain or acquire a monopoly through unreasonable methods. For the courts, a key factor in determining what is unreasonable is whether the practice has a legitimate business justification. https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
• Roark66 4y ago
  Seriously, is it true equifax in US "sells information about how much you earn" to anyone or is the article horribly misleading? I don't know about US, but some time ago I had dealt with Equifax in UK (when getting a car loan for example, then when renting a flat) and I was told by the paperwork I was given to sign authorising them to run "a credit check" they'll get the following info only: - confirmation of your details including an address. - then they plug in the amount you want to borrow and depending on the financial institution doing the lending your data such as - any bad credit you might have including arrears, court judgements etc - amounts of existing credit you have (including CC, overdraft in your bank account. Etc). - regular in-payments in your bank accounts Gets collated and they get an answer: either yes, or no, and if no, there can be a different lender proposed with more flexibility, but higher cost of lending. The person running the "credit check" never sees any of the raw data except court judgements I think. So there you go, that's how it used to work in UK few years ago. Then, you may ask, how does equifax get access to this data? Any bank account or credit product you get in UK contains a contractual agreement that the information about it will be passed to equifax(or credit rating agencies). This includes amounts you pay into your bank account every month, but is it from employment, or your rich grandma sending you gifts equifax can't tell. To me this sounds fairly reasonable. Especially that I can create my own login for equifax and see who has been running checks on my data and why(it requires one's permission). This sounds very different than "selling your data to the highest bidder". Right?
  • alistairSH 4y ago
    Not sure about Equifax specifically, but yes, several of the credit agencies also sell salary info. HR departments can use to see what you earn currently before making a job offer, etc. It's awful.
  • Tangurena2 4y ago
    The point behind the GDPR was that you own the data about yourself. And if the data is incorrect, you are able to get it corrected. In contrast, in the US, you own none of the data about yourself - many court decisions have basically ruled that whoever owns the computer (inside which the data is stored) owns that data. And if the data is wrong, only in certain limited areas (such as credit history) are you able to get it corrected. Thanks to Brexit, your country is migrating towards the US idea of data ownership.
• dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >The Work Number is so important that Equifax is engaged in the work that should be reserved to a government. While I'm sure many shallow ideologues are delighted to read it, this take misses the fundamental problem: concentration of power. Creating a government organization that does the things Equifax does will not change the balance of power even there's some nominal legislature or executive oversight. Worse still would be giving those tasks to an existing agency. The problem here isn't that Equifax isn't government. The problem here is that a singular organization is providing a set of services and the nature of those services and the information processing they do to provide them results in it having too much power and result in those who it affects having too little recourse. Unless you divy up the services Equifax performs across more organizations, public or private, you will not fix the problem (the clearest path to doing this is probably federal anti-trust law IMO).
• cameronh90 4y ago
  Just the other day, I tried to sign up for a monthly rolling account with Sky TV so that I could watch The Last Of Us. About 20 minutes after I signed up, they cancelled my account due to a failed non-credit "identity check" with Experian. They won't tell me any information about what the issue is due to "data protection" other than to say there's nothing that I or anyone else can do. My credit report looks fine but I'm guessing there's some incorrect data floating around somewhere, but I don't even know where to start in figuring out what's wrong since nobody will even discuss it with me.
  • 9WwFaLaTtBDaoS 4y ago
    The last time I went to rent a vehicle I got denied due to my credit (lack of, I pay cash for everything so have nothing on my credit reports). This despite the fact that I had been renting from this _same exact place_ for years prior. I was so enraged by this I said fuck it and went and purchased the vehicle (with cash) I was planning on renting and it will be a cold day in hell before I ever rent a vehicle again. How many industries are so anti-consumer and still in business? In many ways, covid has emboldened a lot of companies to behave in shitty ways.
  • jimz 4y ago
    There's a lot of incorrect data floating around, but then again, that's not really a problem limited to Experian (I've seen it with all credit reporting agencies), and it's not even limited to private entities. I would even say that it's less of a concern when it comes to the ramifications. About 15 years ago the police showed up at my parents' house looking for "me", and as it was a Friday evening, it took until Tuesday before it transpired, after my mother went to the courthouse in befuddlement, that due to a clerical error of some sort, somehow the LA Sheriff's Office looking to serve a failure to appear warrant on someone whose name is similar to mine but otherwise did not match my age, SSN, or anything else ended up getting served to me, and out of sheer dumb luck it happened during winter break, whereas 49 out of 52 weeks of the year I'd be 3000 miles away at school or 6000 miles away doing fieldwork. The confusion was already apparent by Monday because I spent the whole day in a holding cell with 30 other people at the courthouse and was promptly shuttled back to the Twin Towers jail with zero explanation, and it took literally Tuesday night around 11:30pm, after 3 hours of sitting on a bench, handcuffed, in silence for no discernable reason except that they can. In the interim, I did not have access to medication that I needed and quickly fell into medical distress that was entirely ignored. Luckily I didn't have a seizure, but that easily could have happened. A little bit of due diligence would have prevented this, and if I had a seizure the lawyers I consulted at the time said that I may be able to bring a claim against the sheriffs, but since I didn't, it didn't matter. Except that I did end up going to law school, and during my internships, which was extensive (your local public defender's office can absolutely use a law student who is tech/code literate, and attorneys and judges absolutely notice when you appear every afternoon if you treat the whole endeavor as less grad school but more trade school), it turned out that data error of some sort that resulted in some sort of loss of liberty, however temporary, is common enough that I'd say between 1-2% of bond hearings involved a case of mistaken identity. Bond hearing is the first opportunity for the defendant to face a judge and while the percentage is obviously low, misdemeanor bond hearing dockets are cattle-calls and a public defender and intern would be sorting and prepping between 30 to 100 individuals (higher after holiday weekends) usually in the span of 2 hours, every single day the court is in session. I didn't go to law school in CA and the demographics are pretty dissimilar, but the sort of error and the ramifications are striking in similarity. It adds up pretty quickly. Then leveraging my experience and language skills, I ended up moving into immigration removal defense at a private firm a few years later and as it turned out, ICE had data errors that, at least during the mid-Obama years, was even more prevalent, except immigration enforcement is administrative law, not criminal law, and federal administrative law, by virtue of its non-inclusion in the Constitution (who knew Jefferson and Madison could not literally see into the future, eh?), allowed for far more shenanigans with far fewer tangible consequences and most importantly, no entitlement to counsel except very narrow and exceptional circumstances, and in 1 circuit only (9th Cir, cases where the detained had severe mental disabilities). And then I began to see cases of US citizens, who are not subject to immigration enforcement, getting detained on administrative grounds and unable to get themselves out of the situation because administrative agencies almost never act in the capacity that places someone in non-judicial detention, except immigration enforcement (ICE/CBP, basically). Since it was not a judicial matter, there's no allegation of a crime, and without protections afforded by the Constitution or access to counsel, ICE was removing US citizens who had paperwork (that they would regard as false) and an abbreviated version of due process in immigration "court". I still don't know how they determine where to remove US citizens to, since some are native-born and some derived their citizenship from parentage, both requiring no paperwork since it doesn't involve naturalization. The US does not have a national ID system that is mandatory (non-citizens can get SSNs of course and many Americans do not have passports, and almost nobody routinely carries their birth certificate on them, which ICE routinely ignores anyway even if you manage to produce one). Immigration court proceedings do catch a number of erroneous detention cases, but we really can only rely on limited datasets to determine how many US citizens get removed to god-knows-where. Generally you'd have to make it back into the country to even make your case known to attorneys. Catholic Charities is probably the largest immigration legal service provider in terms of size and scale in this country by virtue of them being present just about everywhere and colleagues there sharing anectodal experience say that the number is "higher than anybody should be comfortable with", but there's so little transparency or accountability that the only thing that's certain is that it happens often enough that if you practice in this niche it's likely that you'll see cases, and there's very little that could be done to hold the agency accountable. Oh, and somehow my erroneous arrest ended up requiring me to explain to the state bar even though it is not linked to any actual case since it was an actual case of mistaken identity/lack of due diligence. It might still be in the system somewhere. Although it doesn't affect me today in any meaningful way, thanks to the kafkaesque system we have, having even an erroneous record of jumping an NYC turnstile, and afaik only an NYC turnstile (unless there's a subway system elsewhere in NY state), is sufficient for a legal non-citizen to face removal proceedings, thanks to careless wording and judicial deference and intentional congressional vagueness in statutory wording and New York State's shambolic legislative system unable or willing to alter the otherwise inconsequential nomenclature of the law. Small data errors can and have literally led to the upending of lives. I guess when there's a potential Sword of Damocles hanging over just about everyone, it's almost comforting to know that most of the time database errors only lead to small inconveniences in the grand scheme of things.