[guelo]

Consumers don't use the credit reporting database, we have very little access to it besides restricted annual or paid for reports. The real users are the B2C companies like retail banks, cell phone companies, apartments, background checkers, etc. These B2Cs use the db in both read and write modes with little verification. The main incentive of the reporting agencies is to make it very easy for B2Cs to read and write to their db. Any strong encryption scheme would have to take into account the needs of the B2C's. Nothing is going to happen unless congress demands it because their is no market incentive to secure it. The data is already known to be frequently inaccurate but businesses don't care, they'd rather have a bunch of false positives than one deadbeat customer.