Equifax refused to restore his credit score or explain why it dropped to zero, until Go Public started asking questions.
Only then did the company point to its little-known policy: If a credit file sits inactive, the consumer may be labelled “unscoreable” and their score reset to zero. Tregear says the last time he checked, before it disappeared, his score was around a more respectable 700.
Go Public has since found a major flaw in consumer protection rules — that there are no laws or oversight on how credit scores are calculated, leaving credit bureaus to do what they want.
Consumer advocate Geoff White says that gives credit bureaus too much power, with no transparency.
Don’t forget the even more nebulous and secretive insurance scores that are even tied in to data brokers!
On the other hand, the Chinese “social credit” is mostly western fabulation. And what little implementation of that actually does exists is actually mostly used to track and punish corporations and governmental bodies… So there’s that.
Ah, so eastern social credit is the public(ish) policing private business. And that is very bad – by which of course I mean it’s targeting the people who most manipulate western public opinion.
But our western financial credit is private business policing the general public. “This is normal.”