I want Equifax as a company to be dissolved for incompetency with private data, and I want a way to legally opt out of other such companies collecting and aggregating private data about me.
I want the system to be changed such that the burden of proof is on the lender that they actually interacted with the person they claimed they did. That is, if someone who is not you uses your information to get a credit card, then the bank loses their money for not following due diligence.
That's pretty much how credit card issuing goes, but the risk is not in someone stealing from a bank under your name, but rather your file now looking so bad that you can't legitimately get credit if you want it. I think what we want here is "the bank has to pay you money if they reject your credit card application / home loan because someone else hacked Equifax."
I doubt that will ever happen.
Yes, but under the new system, the bank can't just tell a credit reporting agency that a person they never interacted with failed to make a timely payment. If the bank can't prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they actually entered a contract with you, then they can't affect the actual person's credit rating.
Compare a desire to legally opt out (after checking a box, agreeing to a privacy policy you never read, having your data from 10 years ago - with a chain of custody/dispersal that's probably untenable, if not impossible, to map by now - synthesized by a third party) to GDPR's concept of consent:
"The key point is that all consent must be opt-in consent, ie a positive action or indication – there is no such thing as ‘opt-out consent’. Failure to opt out is not consent as it does not involve a clear affirmative act. You may not rely on silence, inactivity, default settings, pre-ticked boxes or your general terms and conditions, or seek to take advantage of inertia, inattention or default bias in any other way. All of these methods also involve ambiguity – and for consent to be valid it must be both unambiguous and affirmative. It must be clear that the individual deliberately and actively chose to consent."
Source: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
[0]: Until opt in becomes mandatory for use of critical services like having a bank account or paying your power bill.
When you take out a loan or credit card you sign a legal document agreeing to all of the various terms. You don't sign anything when visiting a website.
"It's a stretch to call something opt-in when it's unavoidable in modern life."It's also pretty much impossible to get through modern society without a credit card if you want to do anything crazy like, rent a car or reserve a hotel room.
I discuss issues with renting cars and hotel rooms in sibling threads.
It's no longer 2001, we live in the era of big data now.
I don't really understand why you are being defensive of bad practices and policies with the "nobody makes you sign up" argument. I never understand why people defend these things and blame the victims of them.
I'm not being defensive. I just honestly do not understand what point you are trying to make. I think that the things that you think are self evident are not self evident to me. Perhaps that is my failing. shrug
Now, it's nearly impossible unless you want a slumlord.
Maximum security deposits are set by the state. In my state it's illegal to require more than two months rent as a security deposit. Security deposit is defined by statute, you can't just call it "rent prepayment."
Even my last apartment required a cosigner because of my lack of credit history. I don't have any family to turn to so I had to rely on the family of someone else. Many people don't even have that good fortune.
Less directly, I was illegally evicted from my first apartment (3 days to move out over burst pipes in a multi-unit dwelling which caused our unit to flood) and due to not having the credit to get a loan to hire a lawyer to defend me against a clear cut case, I was blacklisted by my vengeful landlord and banned from renting anywhere in that city. Only lease I managed to get in that city after that was because I was friends with the leasing agent. I also lost hundreds of dollars in furniture including some vintage pieces due to getting only 3 days notice to vacate.
This set me back tremendously; as you can see it's a bit of a feedback loop between bad credit and bad rental experiences.
Wait, I think it's _disproof_ that relies on one _counter_ example. I guess it's easy to get confused.
Plus, all that being said, you can still do all those things without a credit card. It'll just be somewhat more complicated.
You certainly can't show up at a hotel and check in without a credit card at any hotel I'd consider stay at
You also can't rent a car from a major carrier without someone's credit card securing it
You can also definitely rent a car some some of the major carriers without a credit card. See: https://www.bankrate.com/personal-finance/smart-money/can-yo...
Definitely not all locations all the time (see: "somewhat more complicated").
With a credit card it's not money you intended to use so you don't care - unlike cash in your debit account.
Heading off a routine objection to this observation: I've had a family with kids since I was 22, and spent most of the years prior to the Matasano acquisition living, if not paycheck-to-paycheck, at least pretty close to it.
I'll add: I don't know what my credit score is now --- it's probably better than it was, since I've had that dumb car-renting card for 6+ years --- but, knowing that my credit was bad enough that I couldn't get a non-secured card, including from my own bank after the wires for the Matasano acquisition cleared, and knowing that I had at the time a house and a car and all that stuff, and really no trouble ever getting a lease for any place I could afford the rent for, I find myself wondering a lot how much credit scores actually matter. If I'd thought that when I was 22, I'd say, "welp, I just don't have enough life experience to know". But I'm 42 now, and I have a bit of a hard time projecting to a point where I can see a clear reason to give a shit what number Equifax generates for me. Like, maybe I'll care a lot when I'm 62? I kind of doubt it, though.
There are also people who are below the income line of paycheck-to-paycheck, people with addictions, people who have jobs or lives with risk of injury and thus medical bills or unpaid leave for recovery, people who have a big family with needs they have to pay or travel for... and I feel people can use CCs because rich people culture pressures them to cling to things and the idea of being "successful" to attract peers and love interests... but that's just my subjective analysis.
Booking travel online? All credit cards.
Renting a hotel or car can be next to impossible without a credit card to put down. Once I had to pay a $500 deposit to stay in a hotel for 1 night because I didn't have a credit card they could put on file.
It is absolutely not impossible to book a hotel room or rent a car without a credit card. This is a weird thing that HN seems to believe about consumer finance that has not all that much basis in reality. I book rooms exclusively on debit cards, and doubt there is really a hotel that will refuse to do that. You might not be able to book a car with Hertz, but who cares? Other major rental car companies take debit cards.
I'm not sure about the sentiment on HN, but I'm speaking from personal experience. Any time I've tried to use a Debit/Visa when checking into a hotel they've required me to pay a deposit that was returned on checkout.
Cash back and other rewards. They can add up if planned for properly—they aren't a life-changing amount of money or anything, but they're nice. Effectively, if you aren't using a high-fee card like American Express, you're subsidizing those of us who do use them (much to the chagrin of merchants). It's better to be on the receiving end of that subsidy, not the giving end.
> I find myself wondering a lot how much credit scores actually matter
Here's a well-sourced WaPo article on how credit scores affect mortgage rates: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/get-there/wp/2016/11/17/...
That seems pretty reasonable.
What’s less reasonable is that you also have to participate in the system if you want a bank account or electricity or such. Or, heck, you don’t even need that; just have some fraudster open an account with your info and you’re in.
If a fraudster does something in your name, you can get things corrected. I agree that this can be more work than it should be, and would support regulations to make dealing with this easier.
You can get your info corrected if you’re the victim of fraud. Can you get it deleted entirely, such that the credit bureau has no record of you, as if you never existed? Or is participation in the system not actually voluntary at all?
If the data is required for providing the service, no consent is needed, but you must be able to clearly show that the data is indeed an absolute requirement to provide the service.
It's certainly a requirement if you don't want the interest rates on loans to be much higher.
Credit reporting is an immensely valuable institution, and a lot of that value gets passed down to borrowers.
The only thing that's in there outside of financial information is my name and a list of places I have lived.
I have to laugh a little at the naivete of thinking that a credit reporting company shows you everything they know about you on a credit report. They don't even show you everything they show loan companies who pull your report.
Subprime loan products already exist. They do typically run your credit, but they don't need to: the fact that you would pay for one says all that needs to be said. They're also typically offered under different branding from a respectable financial institution's loan products for people with good credit. An opt-in requirement for credit reporting only changes these basically cosmetic facts.
Better-than-worst-case credit history is immensely valuable. So valuable that a lender will cut you in on tens of thousands of dollars in savings for sharing it. Of all the things you could need opt-in consent for, it's an easy sell. Everyone would buy it. We'd be in the same position.
this is what I want too at the end of the day.
The problem is this also means you will be completely opting out of the credit system. No more morgtgages, no more credit cards, no more car loans.
I'm afraid it's kind of a necessary evil.
There is already a good number of lending options available to the many (millions?) of people disenfranchised from the traditional banking system. Usually that means offering strong collateral.
But the terms of those options aren’t too great because trustworthiness and risk have a strong negative correlation. And those who can prove their trustworthiness almost always prefer to do that rather than pay extra.
Isn't this the definition of a red flag? All you are is a profile to them so any unusual activity is going to draw scrutiny whether it's warranted or not. They have to do due diligence.
Finance isn’t the only area that uses reputation judge people. I imagine we’ve all been asked for references when applying for a job or an apartment. Jobs and apartments manage to get by without a centralized score.
Mortgages predate credit scores by centuries. It’s demonstrably not necessary.
As for getting a loan from a banker you’ve never met, my point exactly. They’re a convenient evil.