On numerous occasions these services have proven to be unreliable stewards of people’s most private data. How come we haven’t tried to disband them?
Ask HN: Why do we allow Equifax, Transunion, and Experian to exist?
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Re: Ask HN: Why do we allow Equifax, Transunion, and Experian to exist?
#2It's relatively inexpensive for these companies to stay out of regulatory purview, at the cost of a few hundred thousand dollars each election cycle.
https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/?data_type=processed&contr...
Re: Ask HN: Why do we allow Equifax, Transunion, and Experian to exist?
#3That and many important domains are prone to revolving door between them and the public sector.
Or just money
Re: Ask HN: Why do we allow Equifax, Transunion, and Experian to exist?
#4What do you replace them with? Lots of businesses depend on them.
How much does anyone care? Most people freely give much more intimate information to other companies.
How much will those billion dollar companies spend to survive?
Re: Ask HN: Why do we allow Equifax, Transunion, and Experian to exist?
#5Because in lending you need to rely on a data source to provide information about repayment behaviour, sanctions, fraud flags, outstanding loan volumes, historical loan volumes, etc in a neutral, reliable, verified, and consistent manner.
While in theory it's possible to calculate a credit score, the complexity of the reports these companies provide go much deeper.
Further, these companies operate across jurisdictions allowing for cross-border activities and economies of scale for MNC's.
Re: Ask HN: Why do we allow Equifax, Transunion, and Experian to exist?
#6The same credit reporting agencies exist for corporations, too: S&P Global ratings and Moody’s
Re: Ask HN: Why do we allow Equifax, Transunion, and Experian to exist?
#7The idea of government doing this is laughable.
Not on principle, but on reality. They’d be slow to get started, and change would take forever (short of legislation).
These companies exist to serve legitimate needs in the various industries they serve (as yuck as that statement may be) and have hundreds of years of experience judging people.
Yeah it sucks, but what’s the solution? Rely on people’s “feelings” about other people?
You’d bring back community bank managers in a heartbeat if you did that!
Re: Ask HN: Why do we allow Equifax, Transunion, and Experian to exist?
#8I prefer the alternative: let's put an end to misusing these "most private data". Stop using them as secret keys that you should never share with anyone (except that you are also routinely asked to share your SSN on paper, over fax, through random company portals, and if it ever gets leaked it's your problem.
Let's stop using identification keys as authorization keys.
Re: Ask HN: Why do we allow Equifax, Transunion, and Experian to exist?
#9It's not your data. It's the Banks data about you.
Do you have private notes about people you've met? Same thing happens with banks. Banks keep notes on how much you repay loans, how many loans you have, etc. Etc.
And the fact is, this data is very reliable. Prime Mortgages are paid back reliably. Subprime mortgages are not.
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If you are on the other side of the trade: deciding on which MBS to buy to secure your retirement income off of, you will be relying upon these statistics to keep your money safe.
Re: Ask HN: Why do we allow Equifax, Transunion, and Experian to exist?
#10I think something like the FICO system is probably necessary in an economy that runs on unsecured credit. If the government ran it they'd just outsource it to the same kind of contractors who built the original broken healhcare.gov and the result would be even worse than what we have now.
The rest of it like WorkNumber and TLO is really bad but it's exactly what you get in a neoliberal economy with very little privacy protection.