I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score

How many companies don't have a support@____ email address? Seriously, they'll figure it out, it's really not that large of a haul to get stuff corrected, and it's the difference between "we can't take credit card payments" and "a very low-percentage of real users have some extra friction / bounce somewhere else".

CRAs are a scam from top to bottom.

A bank makes a lot of money, but in theory, it's doing an important job which benefits society. That job is independently assessing creditworthiness. Of course, it's hard to assess creditworthiness if you don't know if someone is making a lot of loans at different places. So, there needs to be a system for credit monitoring. But credit monitoring is not credit rating. Credit rating is the one job a bank is supposed to do. Letting someone else do it undermines the whole purposes of the independent financial system. We might as well just dissolve the banks and move to a centralized planned economy if that's what we're doing, so that at least the centralized rating agencies will be democratically controlled.

So, to begin with, CRAs shouldn't exist and undermine the basic purpose of the financial system. On top of that, they are incredibly incompetent and corrupt as seen by the Equifax breach. It was clear in the early 2000s that the old system in which people would present a few pieces of relatively obscure personal identity to open a line of credit was no longer workable because the data was now subject to trivial duplication. Instead of fixing this, the industry created the concept of "identity theft" in order to falsely shift blame onto an unrelated third party.

I "had my identity stolen" a few years ago. The event had nothing to do with me, so all of the language around this is wrong. What actually happened was first a criminal learned some information about me, then Verizon chose to give the criminal a line of credit on a cellphone, then the CRAs reported that I was profligate to anyone who asked. Saying "my identity" was stolen makes it seem like I was somehow a party to any of this. "My identity" is not a property of mine; it is a property of the reliability of the CRAs' data. What actually happened was the CRAs had their data polluted by the combination of a criminal and lax identity checking at Verizon, and then the various guilty parties forced me to do their data cleanup for them.

What should have happened in the mid-00s was that the credit monitoring agencies, created systems where you can prove your identity to a notary public and get some sort of signed certificate gizmo that you can use to get a cellphone or make a car loan. But because the whole US financial system is corrupt, it instead outsourced all of the liability onto consumers.

First off no one is saying "you look like fraud", they're saying details of your purchase looked suspicious. This is the first place where people need to pump the brakes, there is not some dire sinister plot, you went to make a purchase, it looked weird, we want to make sure it all checks out. This happens _all the time_ with credit card purchases, historically from the card issuer, but card issuers are actually encouraging retailers to be more vigilant in the face of massive increases in card fraud, so now it's distributed. Honestly, whenever I've had the minor inconvenience / world-concept-shattering experience of having a card transaction declined & needing to go through around 15 mins of rectification, I've actually appreciated that they are running systems to prevent rampant fraud, because it's an even bigger pain in the ass to clean up after that than it is to endure some extra information checks on rare occasion.

My focus was on them transferring it to third parties, regardless of any accompanying money flows, so sell vs share doesn't matter to me.

Since I didn't provide the relevant context in my last post, here's the quote from the article:

>As of this summer, though, Sift does have a file on you, which it can produce upon request. I got mine, and I found it shocking: More than 400 pages long, it contained all the messages I’d ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time I’d opened the Coinbase app on my iPhone. Many entries included detailed information about the device I used to do these things, including my IP address at the time.

Right, it's not a score, it's just a thing you have to argue with them to change. Not a score though.