Credit history companies like Equifax are very much an American thing; lending still works everywhere else.
They are such a non-topic in France that I only learned about them last year, and the French Wikipedia page on the subject is very short, and only documents the US, Canada, and China: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89valuation_des_risques-cl...
And IANAL, but it seems to me that credit history databases are made illegal by Article 5 of the 1978 "Computing and freedoms act" https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFT...
As I understand it, the American weirdness is that this is a private sector function rather than a service of the state. Not that it exists.
Source: https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F17608
That's nowhere near the amount of data Equifax collects.
As I understand it, the American weirdness is that this is a private sector function rather than a service of the state. Not that it exists.