Comment by creepydata | Hacker News Reader

Comment by creepydata | Hacker News Reader

It's creepy how much companies know about you.

When I got married my husband pretty much immediately showed up as my spouse on my transunion credit report as my spouse. How did they know that? Our names are different. At the time we didn't have any loans together. We lived together but so do siblngs and roommates. We didn't register for any wedding registries or send out any announcements. Our wedding consisted of signing some paperwork at city Hall. They also marked me as "Active Duty Military or Dependant" (hubby is in the army so I became a "dependant" when we got married). So the only logical explanation is transunion can access DEERS, but I would hope the DoD doesn't allow random private companies access to DEERS... They DO have a website where you can lookup if someone is covered under the SCRA but dependants aren't covered under the SCRA and don't show up when queried (I tried).

Again this is my credit report. I didn't report a change in my martial status to any of my financial institutions. Not banks, not credit cards, and we already had a joint account for two years before we were married.

Marriage is a legal agreement, the fact that you "signed some paperwork at City Hall" is not at all a minor thing. The records are of course made available to credit reporting agencies.

I don't know why you think this would be a creepy thing, social security and credit scores are stongly connected to the legal and taxation system. Its only obvious that the information gets connected. If tomorrow you were to divorce and claim alimony/child support the wages and tax return of your spouse would be garnished, How would that be possible without linking SSN.

I don't know why you believe I am somehow confused about the legal agreement I entered into with my husband. I am not, I know what civil marriage is. I mentioned it to illustrate that we didn't have a venue or wedding planner so they couldn't have made a newspaper announcement for us.

Transunion is a private for-profit company; it has nothing to do with Social Security or the legal or taxation systems. Transunion gets its records from institutions that voluntarily report to it, as a business arrangement, (credit card companies, mostly) or they pull from publicly available sources. They don't have direct access to any private government (or non-government) databases unless the owner lets them have access. The reason they collect information about you is for their own business purposes. We aren't talking about the IRS here.

In other words my spousal information got in some company's database somewhere which was relayed to transunion, probably through a few other company's databases. It was surprising that information got to Transunion that fast because, as I said in a reply to a sibling comment, marriage records do not appear to be publicly available in my state. It's creepy to know how fast, far, and wide random information about you spreads. It's also scary to think about how false information about you can spread.

After reading this article it seems like that information almost could have indirectly come from Facebook (we did update our status!)

I think you misunderstand just how tightly integrated the credit reporting system is with government. The fact that "Transunion is a private for-profit company" is immaterial. or that it "only" gets information via "voluntarily reports to it, as a business arrangement, (credit card companies, mostly) pulled from publicly available sources" is plain wrong.

Just because some information is not "publicly available" does not means Government wont share it with third parties, especially credit bureau.

As far as information coming from Facebook posts thats just ridiculous.

I'm not going to argue anymore because it's pointless but I'd like to see any hard evidence my state reports directly to Transunion because they have no reason to.

>Our wedding consisted of signing some paperwork at city Hall.

They are constantly checking public records like this and that's how they would have found out. Still a little creepy though.

There are records, of course, but it doesn't seem like marriage records are public records in my state. The state says nothing on their website about obtaining these records other than going to city Hall in person with your ID and that's only to obtain your own marriage certificate. I think they also said something about responding to requests about genealogy requests but only for very old marriage records. There's not an online database of marriages like there is with everything else public in my state. Nothing publicly available for public consumption that I could see.

I can't see if my friends are legally married but I can easily see what they paid for their house.

Divorces are public though and very easy to find on the court's website.

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