Just the other day, I tried to sign up for a monthly rolling account with Sky TV so that I could watch The Last Of Us. About 20 minutes after I signed up, they cancelled my account due to a failed non-credit "identity check" with Experian. They won't tell me any information about what the issue is due to "data protection" other than to say there's nothing that I or anyone else can do.
My credit report looks fine but I'm guessing there's some incorrect data floating around somewhere, but I don't even know where to start in figuring out what's wrong since nobody will even discuss it with me.
The last time I went to rent a vehicle I got denied due to my credit (lack of, I pay cash for everything so have nothing on my credit reports).
This despite the fact that I had been renting from this _same exact place_ for years prior. I was so enraged by this I said fuck it and went and purchased the vehicle (with cash) I was planning on renting and it will be a cold day in hell before I ever rent a vehicle again. How many industries are so anti-consumer and still in business?
In many ways, covid has emboldened a lot of companies to behave in shitty ways.
There's a lot of incorrect data floating around, but then again, that's not really a problem limited to Experian (I've seen it with all credit reporting agencies), and it's not even limited to private entities. I would even say that it's less of a concern when it comes to the ramifications. About 15 years ago the police showed up at my parents' house looking for "me", and as it was a Friday evening, it took until Tuesday before it transpired, after my mother went to the courthouse in befuddlement, that due to a clerical error of some sort, somehow the LA Sheriff's Office looking to serve a failure to appear warrant on someone whose name is similar to mine but otherwise did not match my age, SSN, or anything else ended up getting served to me, and out of sheer dumb luck it happened during winter break, whereas 49 out of 52 weeks of the year I'd be 3000 miles away at school or 6000 miles away doing fieldwork. The confusion was already apparent by Monday because I spent the whole day in a holding cell with 30 other people at the courthouse and was promptly shuttled back to the Twin Towers jail with zero explanation, and it took literally Tuesday night around 11:30pm, after 3 hours of sitting on a bench, handcuffed, in silence for no discernable reason except that they can. In the interim, I did not have access to medication that I needed and quickly fell into medical distress that was entirely ignored. Luckily I didn't have a seizure, but that easily could have happened. A little bit of due diligence would have prevented this, and if I had a seizure the lawyers I consulted at the time said that I may be able to bring a claim against the sheriffs, but since I didn't, it didn't matter.
Except that I did end up going to law school, and during my internships, which was extensive (your local public defender's office can absolutely use a law student who is tech/code literate, and attorneys and judges absolutely notice when you appear every afternoon if you treat the whole endeavor as less grad school but more trade school), it turned out that data error of some sort that resulted in some sort of loss of liberty, however temporary, is common enough that I'd say between 1-2% of bond hearings involved a case of mistaken identity. Bond hearing is the first opportunity for the defendant to face a judge and while the percentage is obviously low, misdemeanor bond hearing dockets are cattle-calls and a public defender and intern would be sorting and prepping between 30 to 100 individuals (higher after holiday weekends) usually in the span of 2 hours, every single day the court is in session. I didn't go to law school in CA and the demographics are pretty dissimilar, but the sort of error and the ramifications are striking in similarity. It adds up pretty quickly.
Then leveraging my experience and language skills, I ended up moving into immigration removal defense at a private firm a few years later and as it turned out, ICE had data errors that, at least during the mid-Obama years, was even more prevalent, except immigration enforcement is administrative law, not criminal law, and federal administrative law, by virtue of its non-inclusion in the Constitution (who knew Jefferson and Madison could not literally see into the future, eh?), allowed for far more shenanigans with far fewer tangible consequences and most importantly, no entitlement to counsel except very narrow and exceptional circumstances, and in 1 circuit only (9th Cir, cases where the detained had severe mental disabilities). And then I began to see cases of US citizens, who are not subject to immigration enforcement, getting detained on administrative grounds and unable to get themselves out of the situation because administrative agencies almost never act in the capacity that places someone in non-judicial detention, except immigration enforcement (ICE/CBP, basically). Since it was not a judicial matter, there's no allegation of a crime, and without protections afforded by the Constitution or access to counsel, ICE was removing US citizens who had paperwork (that they would regard as false) and an abbreviated version of due process in immigration "court". I still don't know how they determine where to remove US citizens to, since some are native-born and some derived their citizenship from parentage, both requiring no paperwork since it doesn't involve naturalization. The US does not have a national ID system that is mandatory (non-citizens can get SSNs of course and many Americans do not have passports, and almost nobody routinely carries their birth certificate on them, which ICE routinely ignores anyway even if you manage to produce one). Immigration court proceedings do catch a number of erroneous detention cases, but we really can only rely on limited datasets to determine how many US citizens get removed to god-knows-where. Generally you'd have to make it back into the country to even make your case known to attorneys. Catholic Charities is probably the largest immigration legal service provider in terms of size and scale in this country by virtue of them being present just about everywhere and colleagues there sharing anectodal experience say that the number is "higher than anybody should be comfortable with", but there's so little transparency or accountability that the only thing that's certain is that it happens often enough that if you practice in this niche it's likely that you'll see cases, and there's very little that could be done to hold the agency accountable.
Oh, and somehow my erroneous arrest ended up requiring me to explain to the state bar even though it is not linked to any actual case since it was an actual case of mistaken identity/lack of due diligence. It might still be in the system somewhere. Although it doesn't affect me today in any meaningful way, thanks to the kafkaesque system we have, having even an erroneous record of jumping an NYC turnstile, and afaik only an NYC turnstile (unless there's a subway system elsewhere in NY state), is sufficient for a legal non-citizen to face removal proceedings, thanks to careless wording and judicial deference and intentional congressional vagueness in statutory wording and New York State's shambolic legislative system unable or willing to alter the otherwise inconsequential nomenclature of the law. Small data errors can and have literally led to the upending of lives. I guess when there's a potential Sword of Damocles hanging over just about everyone, it's almost comforting to know that most of the time database errors only lead to small inconveniences in the grand scheme of things.
I've worked on the data feeds for TWN in a large company's payroll system. If I remember right they don't just get how much money you made but the line by line check level data. Your pay data probably goes out to 14 different vendors on any given pay period.
What amaze me about payroll was how accurate the data was on average, despite having wild amounts of new regulatory, healthcare, union, and pay program complexity. A surprising amount of money is directed by some lady in a payroll department making $40k with vlookup and 30 excel files on their desktop.
But there sure are some dark messy corners of data quality in people's pay and benefits.
The final act of the dystopic digital transition we are witnessing is when the (until recently ringfenced) information flows of the broader financial system start getting commingled with the other digital activity already being collected and monitored. With the headlong rush to eliminate physical cash soon there will be no opt-out whatsoever.
As the world of old oligopolies dies and a worse one emerges, the grotesque and frightening outline of a handful mega-digi-corps that are the defacto rulers of the brave new world is already visible.
There must be some escape hatch from this nightmare, some red lever behind a glass encasing with a label "break and pull when your society is in existential danger". But I don't see it.
I think people underestimate the importance of physical cash. It’s annoying, sure, but it affords a type of freedom that won’t be replaced once lost. I wish more people understood this. Sadly, most people seem willing to trade a tiny bit of convenience today for a worse future tomorrow—for example, the tipless, cash-only coffee shop on the HN front page. I guess, like smokers, people don’t believe there’ll be consequences until it’s too late.
Since I can't opt out of this and all the scoundrels can see it anyway, I think I should just post my salary on my Linkedin page. If everybody did that, it would undercut this business and bring to light the inequities to the common people.
They can and always do ask you anwyways. Equifax brings a 3rd party trusted account to the table - you volunteering some info isn't helpful, they don't trust your number.
You underestimate dishonesty in the population: having your pay exposed may force your company to reduce it to the lowest common denominator to avoid all the cries by people who simply shouldnt be paid like you (age, experience, output, knowledge criticality, all these things people dont wanna hear)
One detail the blog leaves out is that this employment and income collection extends to both Canada and Australia.
Much of the data is noisy and I won't even get into the gory details of data ingestion. I was wondering the other day why hedge funds and etc. aren't using them as an early indicator and I can speculate why. On the other side of the spectrum, your average Joe is at times inconvenienced by Equifax's inaccurate record keeping.
Seriously, is it true equifax in US "sells information about how much you earn" to anyone or is the article horribly misleading? I don't know about US, but some time ago I had dealt with Equifax in UK (when getting a car loan for example, then when renting a flat) and I was told by the paperwork I was given to sign authorising them to run "a credit check" they'll get the following info only:
- confirmation of your details including an address.
- then they plug in the amount you want to borrow and depending on the financial institution doing the lending your data such as
- any bad credit you might have including arrears, court judgements etc
- amounts of existing credit you have (including CC, overdraft in your bank account. Etc).
- regular in-payments in your bank accounts
Gets collated and they get an answer: either yes, or no, and if no, there can be a different lender proposed with more flexibility, but higher cost of lending. The person running the "credit check" never sees any of the raw data except court judgements I think.
So there you go, that's how it used to work in UK few years ago.
Then, you may ask, how does equifax get access to this data? Any bank account or credit product you get in UK contains a contractual agreement that the information about it will be passed to equifax(or credit rating agencies). This includes amounts you pay into your bank account every month, but is it from employment, or your rich grandma sending you gifts equifax can't tell.
To me this sounds fairly reasonable. Especially that I can create my own login for equifax and see who has been running checks on my data and why(it requires one's permission). This sounds very different than "selling your data to the highest bidder". Right?
Not sure about Equifax specifically, but yes, several of the credit agencies also sell salary info. HR departments can use to see what you earn currently before making a job offer, etc. It's awful.
The UK still retains EU data protection laws whereas the US essentially never had any.
Having lived in both countries, the American companies are totally flagrant in how they sell and abuse your personal data. Banks will sell your credit card transactions to advertisers, for example. The UK credit score was a reasonable and stable evaluation of my credit-worthiness based on data from my bank, but its American counterpart is a gamified setup that goes up and down randomly every month and is seemingly designed to make people take unnecessary debt. And so on.
The point behind the GDPR was that you own the data about yourself. And if the data is incorrect, you are able to get it corrected. In contrast, in the US, you own none of the data about yourself - many court decisions have basically ruled that whoever owns the computer (inside which the data is stored) owns that data. And if the data is wrong, only in certain limited areas (such as credit history) are you able to get it corrected. Thanks to Brexit, your country is migrating towards the US idea of data ownership.
There's a great opportunity here for the IRS to provide this service (with revenue from charging the requesting entities), with citizens being self-sovereign over what data is shared and who it is shared with. Especially because they could provide verified data in a very narrow scope (for instance only sharing Adjusted Gross Income and nothing else).
Equifax collects data that isn't true and libels its victims by disseminating it to other parties. Having that power enshrined within the government would not be a good thing.
I could see the IRS offering some service to enter the market and compete with Equifax to bring more competition to the sector. They might have to compel Equifax to give up some data or data sources to the government and their competitors. The government did this in WW2, forcing companies to give trade secrets to their competitors so there would be a more resilient supply chain.
Something similar could be done to break up big banking if the US Postal Service allowed people to open up super simple checking and savings accounts.
This is a good idea, but I’m skeptical if the IRS has enough funding and resources to manage another service. They barely have enough funding for the current backlog of filed tax returns.
Or rather than further entrenching the idea, we could work towards effective privacy legislation and relegate all of these commercial surveillance databases to the dustbin of history.
There is no free lunch. Limiting credit checks to AGI just means everyone will assumed to have an unknown credit history and will have much higher rates.
You ready to get a mortgage at prime plus 5% instead of prime plus 1%?
But let me guess, we could create a law about that?
Having the government do things doesn’t magically mean market forces don’t apply any more.
Not to mention the dire warning on the page about making it difficult to get a new job, mortgage, or obtain access to public healthcare benefits if you don't unfreeze before applying. Typical strongman shit.
>The Work Number is so important that Equifax is engaged in the work that should be reserved to a government.
While I'm sure many shallow ideologues are delighted to read it, this take misses the fundamental problem: concentration of power.
Creating a government organization that does the things Equifax does will not change the balance of power even there's some nominal legislature or executive oversight. Worse still would be giving those tasks to an existing agency. The problem here isn't that Equifax isn't government. The problem here is that a singular organization is providing a set of services and the nature of those services and the information processing they do to provide them results in it having too much power and result in those who it affects having too little recourse. Unless you divy up the services Equifax performs across more organizations, public or private, you will not fix the problem (the clearest path to doing this is probably federal anti-trust law IMO).
The US is taking corruption to institutionalized levels probably never seen before in any society. However, the media is so tightly controlled by corporate monopolies that the people of the US still believe they live in a democracy.
I recently interviewed and got job offer contingent on verifying work history, etc. After I cleared that, the link for docusign arrived. I called the recruiter and asked about payroll data sharing. She claimed to have never heard of it. A day later she said they don't do that. I explained my concerns, said I won't work for a company that does not respect employee privacy, and to go ask finance and HR. Just over a week later she confirmed they don't do that and she detailed exactly what is shared and when - State new hire DB, payroll taxes, medical plan, and by court order. I thanked her and signed the agreement to work for them.
We only have a choice if we are willing to use it.
A cogent argument could.be made that transunion, Equifax, and other big private credit clearinghouses act as direct agents of an unspoken american "social credit" system in which the credit score denies housing and employment to those who refuse to or cannot conform to a largely invisible tome of rules. These agents are then unpoliced as they serve capitalisms direct need for an underclass.
Full disclosure: I am a communist, and recognize most Marxist state social credit systems tend to have the same effect. Transparency in the plenary party sessions seems to do little to reform this cudgel but the parallels in capitalisms version are neat to me.
I see where you're coming from, but on the other hand, the biggest rules are well known and quite simple: If you take a loan and pay it back on time, you'll have high credit. If you fail to meet your obligations, you won't. The existence of an underclass which is constantly on the edge of not being able to pay their bills is true though.
The difference in the US financial system of credit and a "social credit" system is that these systems measure only attributes about financial credit, and in fact, the US has laws that specifically forbid many social factors from being used.
Additionally, many executives are virulently opposed to people working multiple jobs and are using things like The Work Number to identify and fire remote workers who have more than one job.
Even in our most dystopian RAND-suggested bedtime story vision of a "communist hellhole", those proles who happened to possess a ruble when they got to the front of the breadline could buy a loaf. In the supercapitalist future, all transactions will require the approval of more than the two involved parties. Good luck buying anything if you ever express skepticism toward the great and powerful credit bureaus.
While the Work Number is a horrible, anti-capitalist product, I can’t take seriously an article that keeps repeating the premise that having a monopoly is illegal. It just isn’t.
It’d be illegal to use monopoly power to prevent others from competing, but that’s a different thing.
That's why he talks about barriers to entry and market power because using those things to prevent competition is illegal. Sherman Act is actually a criminal statue that can put executives behind bars. There's also the Clayton Act and Robinson Patman act that ban forms of monopolization and price discrimination.
It's up to the courts to determine what's reasonable.
> Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for a company to "monopolize, or attempt to monopolize," trade or commerce. As that law has been interpreted, it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge "high prices," or to try to achieve a monopoly position by what might be viewed by some as particularly aggressive methods. The law is violated only if the company tries to maintain or acquire a monopoly through unreasonable methods. For the courts, a key factor in determining what is unreasonable is whether the practice has a legitimate business justification.
[+] [-] cameronh90|3 years ago|reply
My credit report looks fine but I'm guessing there's some incorrect data floating around somewhere, but I don't even know where to start in figuring out what's wrong since nobody will even discuss it with me.
[+] [-] 9WwFaLaTtBDaoS|3 years ago|reply
This despite the fact that I had been renting from this _same exact place_ for years prior. I was so enraged by this I said fuck it and went and purchased the vehicle (with cash) I was planning on renting and it will be a cold day in hell before I ever rent a vehicle again. How many industries are so anti-consumer and still in business?
In many ways, covid has emboldened a lot of companies to behave in shitty ways.
[+] [-] jimz|3 years ago|reply
Except that I did end up going to law school, and during my internships, which was extensive (your local public defender's office can absolutely use a law student who is tech/code literate, and attorneys and judges absolutely notice when you appear every afternoon if you treat the whole endeavor as less grad school but more trade school), it turned out that data error of some sort that resulted in some sort of loss of liberty, however temporary, is common enough that I'd say between 1-2% of bond hearings involved a case of mistaken identity. Bond hearing is the first opportunity for the defendant to face a judge and while the percentage is obviously low, misdemeanor bond hearing dockets are cattle-calls and a public defender and intern would be sorting and prepping between 30 to 100 individuals (higher after holiday weekends) usually in the span of 2 hours, every single day the court is in session. I didn't go to law school in CA and the demographics are pretty dissimilar, but the sort of error and the ramifications are striking in similarity. It adds up pretty quickly.
Then leveraging my experience and language skills, I ended up moving into immigration removal defense at a private firm a few years later and as it turned out, ICE had data errors that, at least during the mid-Obama years, was even more prevalent, except immigration enforcement is administrative law, not criminal law, and federal administrative law, by virtue of its non-inclusion in the Constitution (who knew Jefferson and Madison could not literally see into the future, eh?), allowed for far more shenanigans with far fewer tangible consequences and most importantly, no entitlement to counsel except very narrow and exceptional circumstances, and in 1 circuit only (9th Cir, cases where the detained had severe mental disabilities). And then I began to see cases of US citizens, who are not subject to immigration enforcement, getting detained on administrative grounds and unable to get themselves out of the situation because administrative agencies almost never act in the capacity that places someone in non-judicial detention, except immigration enforcement (ICE/CBP, basically). Since it was not a judicial matter, there's no allegation of a crime, and without protections afforded by the Constitution or access to counsel, ICE was removing US citizens who had paperwork (that they would regard as false) and an abbreviated version of due process in immigration "court". I still don't know how they determine where to remove US citizens to, since some are native-born and some derived their citizenship from parentage, both requiring no paperwork since it doesn't involve naturalization. The US does not have a national ID system that is mandatory (non-citizens can get SSNs of course and many Americans do not have passports, and almost nobody routinely carries their birth certificate on them, which ICE routinely ignores anyway even if you manage to produce one). Immigration court proceedings do catch a number of erroneous detention cases, but we really can only rely on limited datasets to determine how many US citizens get removed to god-knows-where. Generally you'd have to make it back into the country to even make your case known to attorneys. Catholic Charities is probably the largest immigration legal service provider in terms of size and scale in this country by virtue of them being present just about everywhere and colleagues there sharing anectodal experience say that the number is "higher than anybody should be comfortable with", but there's so little transparency or accountability that the only thing that's certain is that it happens often enough that if you practice in this niche it's likely that you'll see cases, and there's very little that could be done to hold the agency accountable.
Oh, and somehow my erroneous arrest ended up requiring me to explain to the state bar even though it is not linked to any actual case since it was an actual case of mistaken identity/lack of due diligence. It might still be in the system somewhere. Although it doesn't affect me today in any meaningful way, thanks to the kafkaesque system we have, having even an erroneous record of jumping an NYC turnstile, and afaik only an NYC turnstile (unless there's a subway system elsewhere in NY state), is sufficient for a legal non-citizen to face removal proceedings, thanks to careless wording and judicial deference and intentional congressional vagueness in statutory wording and New York State's shambolic legislative system unable or willing to alter the otherwise inconsequential nomenclature of the law. Small data errors can and have literally led to the upending of lives. I guess when there's a potential Sword of Damocles hanging over just about everyone, it's almost comforting to know that most of the time database errors only lead to small inconveniences in the grand scheme of things.
[+] [-] piyh|3 years ago|reply
What amaze me about payroll was how accurate the data was on average, despite having wild amounts of new regulatory, healthcare, union, and pay program complexity. A surprising amount of money is directed by some lady in a payroll department making $40k with vlookup and 30 excel files on their desktop.
But there sure are some dark messy corners of data quality in people's pay and benefits.
[+] [-] xattt|3 years ago|reply
I wonder if these people understand their value to an organization.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hnburnsy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] college_physics|3 years ago|reply
As the world of old oligopolies dies and a worse one emerges, the grotesque and frightening outline of a handful mega-digi-corps that are the defacto rulers of the brave new world is already visible.
There must be some escape hatch from this nightmare, some red lever behind a glass encasing with a label "break and pull when your society is in existential danger". But I don't see it.
[+] [-] minton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debacle|3 years ago|reply
There is likely no escape from an inhuman future.
[+] [-] kornhole|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WaxProlix|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnburnsy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwolfi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _gmax0|3 years ago|reply
Much of the data is noisy and I won't even get into the gory details of data ingestion. I was wondering the other day why hedge funds and etc. aren't using them as an early indicator and I can speculate why. On the other side of the spectrum, your average Joe is at times inconvenienced by Equifax's inaccurate record keeping.
[+] [-] smnrchrds|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Roark66|3 years ago|reply
Then, you may ask, how does equifax get access to this data? Any bank account or credit product you get in UK contains a contractual agreement that the information about it will be passed to equifax(or credit rating agencies). This includes amounts you pay into your bank account every month, but is it from employment, or your rich grandma sending you gifts equifax can't tell.
To me this sounds fairly reasonable. Especially that I can create my own login for equifax and see who has been running checks on my data and why(it requires one's permission). This sounds very different than "selling your data to the highest bidder". Right?
[+] [-] alistairSH|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavlov|3 years ago|reply
Having lived in both countries, the American companies are totally flagrant in how they sell and abuse your personal data. Banks will sell your credit card transactions to advertisers, for example. The UK credit score was a reasonable and stable evaluation of my credit-worthiness based on data from my bank, but its American counterpart is a gamified setup that goes up and down randomly every month and is seemingly designed to make people take unnecessary debt. And so on.
[+] [-] Tangurena2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coderintherye|3 years ago|reply
There's a great opportunity here for the IRS to provide this service (with revenue from charging the requesting entities), with citizens being self-sovereign over what data is shared and who it is shared with. Especially because they could provide verified data in a very narrow scope (for instance only sharing Adjusted Gross Income and nothing else).
[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] connor11528|3 years ago|reply
Something similar could be done to break up big banking if the US Postal Service allowed people to open up super simple checking and savings accounts.
[+] [-] SamuelAdams|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindslight|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|3 years ago|reply
You ready to get a mortgage at prime plus 5% instead of prime plus 1%?
But let me guess, we could create a law about that?
Having the government do things doesn’t magically mean market forces don’t apply any more.
[+] [-] No1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datavirtue|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|3 years ago|reply
While I'm sure many shallow ideologues are delighted to read it, this take misses the fundamental problem: concentration of power.
Creating a government organization that does the things Equifax does will not change the balance of power even there's some nominal legislature or executive oversight. Worse still would be giving those tasks to an existing agency. The problem here isn't that Equifax isn't government. The problem here is that a singular organization is providing a set of services and the nature of those services and the information processing they do to provide them results in it having too much power and result in those who it affects having too little recourse. Unless you divy up the services Equifax performs across more organizations, public or private, you will not fix the problem (the clearest path to doing this is probably federal anti-trust law IMO).
[+] [-] nextstep|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HeckFeck|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnburnsy|3 years ago|reply
https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze
[+] [-] landemva|3 years ago|reply
I recently interviewed and got job offer contingent on verifying work history, etc. After I cleared that, the link for docusign arrived. I called the recruiter and asked about payroll data sharing. She claimed to have never heard of it. A day later she said they don't do that. I explained my concerns, said I won't work for a company that does not respect employee privacy, and to go ask finance and HR. Just over a week later she confirmed they don't do that and she detailed exactly what is shared and when - State new hire DB, payroll taxes, medical plan, and by court order. I thanked her and signed the agreement to work for them.
We only have a choice if we are willing to use it.
[+] [-] nimbius|3 years ago|reply
Full disclosure: I am a communist, and recognize most Marxist state social credit systems tend to have the same effect. Transparency in the plenary party sessions seems to do little to reform this cudgel but the parallels in capitalisms version are neat to me.
[+] [-] xxpor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kube-system|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tangurena2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbg721|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|3 years ago|reply
Let’s be honest, credit score pretty accurately reflect what they are supposed to measure - credit worthiness.
[+] [-] quantified|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orev|3 years ago|reply
It’d be illegal to use monopoly power to prevent others from competing, but that’s a different thing.
[+] [-] connor11528|3 years ago|reply
It's up to the courts to determine what's reasonable.
> Section 2 of the Sherman Act makes it unlawful for a company to "monopolize, or attempt to monopolize," trade or commerce. As that law has been interpreted, it is not illegal for a company to have a monopoly, to charge "high prices," or to try to achieve a monopoly position by what might be viewed by some as particularly aggressive methods. The law is violated only if the company tries to maintain or acquire a monopoly through unreasonable methods. For the courts, a key factor in determining what is unreasonable is whether the practice has a legitimate business justification.
https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...