40
votes
Bernie Sanders wants to put credit reporting companies like Equifax out of business and replace them with a public credit registry
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- Published
- Sep 21 2019
- Word count
- 600 words
Sounds nice. I never (meaningfully) consented to having all my transactions monitored by for-profit institutions. Making it centralized and governmental at least makes it easier to legislate security requirements. The data's available to the government anyway, so no loss there.
This would be spectacular. Having private corporations using "proprietary algorithms" to give you a score that has huge impact on your life is obscene. Major institutional things like credit scores absolutely need to be public and transparent.
And least we forget the famous mega-breach, these private companies are just too irresponsible to wield this amount of power.
I can see this being attacked and compared to China with their social credit system. With how distrustful of the government Americans are, it be an easy target to smear a policy like this.
The same thing already happens with the private system. Anyone can pull anyone else's credit from Equifax by paying them. People's credit score is already being used as a crude social credit system for hiring and renting to people. At least if it was public, we would have some sort of accountability over it. Right now, Equifax doesn't have to do anything anyone says.
I've seen that exact argument being made multiple times on reddit already. It strikes me as lazy fear-mongering to avoid discussing the actual issues with for-profit credit reporting agencies. Even if we set aside the other genuine problems with for-profit credit companies that this article highlights the 2017 Equifax data breach should've been enough to convince even the most paranoid that maintaining this private model is not viable.
The cat is already our of the bag. A social credit system created and maintained by 3 monopsony firms isn’t any different.
Could someone please to me, a non-American, how a person's credit score is relevant to getting a job?
It started off with good intentions, as these things usually do - if you were applying to work at a bank in a position that handles large amounts of cash (back in the day when banks still handled large amounts of cash) then they might do a credit check to make sure you didn't owe $100k in credit card debt.
Then predictably, that gets expanded and abused, to the point that companies decide they only want to hire people with "good character" and that "do you pay your bills" is an effective proxy for good character.
(anytime you look at anything that's unique to the US and can't figure out why we do things that way, the answer is usually the Puritan work ethic)
Thanks for that.
That seems a bit too invasive for my liking. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable handing over my personal financial information to a prospective employer.
Many of us arent, we just like being able to live more :/