It's easy for anyone. Credit cards aren't an essential service necessary for modern life.
>> 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 absolutely do both of those things. I book and check in with debit cards routinely, and there are major carriers that rent cars on debit cards.
GDPR "opt-in" consent definition also says it must be possible to "opt-out" and still receive the service. 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.
I'm comfortable with the idea that "if you take out a loan, but don't pay us back, we're going to tell other people that you're a bigger credit risk" is 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.
It wasn't always a requirement! They had other heuristics before they had credit scoring databases, like, "do your parents have an account here", and, "do you have the correct skin color and religious affiliation".
Some tips: Note that many free credit monitoring services exist, and most credit cards nowadays have this feature available. These qualify you for the $125 payout. Up to 10 hours effort ($250) can be claimed without documentation, for time spent battling or preventing ID theft. Preventing is probably key here, and could cover a lot of activities.
The $125 and $250 come from a maximum fund of $31M each, so there is almost no chance anyone will get $125 or $250.
With friends/family, informal roommate arrangement, or renting substandard housing from slumlords. Either that or they have a cosigner.
Based on everything I have read, as well as my own personal experience, I think you are exaggerating the seriousness of the situation. Do you have any evidence of this being the case?
My sister is currently renting a moldy basement (not a legal apartment) because of her poor credit. She's got two babies, she'd prefer better accommodations but that's all she could find with her credit. No evictions but several judgements against her.
They aggregate every piece of information they can get out of every database they can access about you.
That's definitely not true. There is all kinds of information about me out in the world that does not appear in my equifax credit report. The only thing that's in there outside of financial information is my name and a list of places I have lived.
The fact you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
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.
With friends/family, informal roommate arrangement, or renting substandard housing from slumlords. Either that or they have a cosigner.
This is pretty clearly not the case. I rented in relatively hot markets --- there was actual bidding for the SOMA loft we got back around 2000! --- and I had bad credit (put differently: when I was renting, I would have had better credit had I no contact with the consumer credit system whatsoever), and my credit score never once kept me from getting a lease, or even changed the terms of a lease.
The person you are responding to claims that the situation has changed in the last 10 or 15 years, so I think your comment is not really responsive.
>> 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 absolutely do both of those things. I book and check in with debit cards routinely, and there are major carriers that rent cars on debit cards.
There's one gotcha though with using a Debit card for car hire where you cannot access the money for the holding deposit until the hold is released. Learnt that the hard way.
With a credit card it's not money you intended to use so you don't care - unlike cash in your debit account.
> I want a way to legally opt out of other such companies collecting and aggregating private data about me. 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…
Yes opt in is obviously better for the end user[0], but don't let perfect be the enemy of good here. We don't have opt out yet. [0]: Until opt in becomes mandatory for use of critical services like having a bank account or paying your power bill.
GDPR also has a concept of "objection". Even if you opt in, you can later "object" which will allow you to remove your consent. Although, in general, I really like GDPR, we've actually had a bit of a problem with this because it's quite unclear what you should do if someone opts in, then objects and then opts in again. For example, we have an opt in for us contacting the customer by email (which we do for marketing purposes). The customer can easily "object" and we'll remove them from the list. However, people frequently want to resubscribe. They thought they didn't want the marketing information and later changed their minds. It's not clear to us if it's legal for us to resubscribe them. I've actually thought that it's better for us to offer a separate service for marketing and get people to subscribe to that service under contract basis just to avoid this problem. That way they can terminate the contract and if they want to resubscribe, it's a new contract. I'm rambling here, but one of the things that really surprised me is that we have this horrible popup asking users to subscribe to our newsletter. I always opposed it because it's super annoying. However we were looking at analytics and it appears that a very large proportion of our customer base only go to the website to sign up to the newsletter (we're unusual in that most of our business comes through our call centre). So the newsletter really is a service that our customers want... It's a weird world ;-)