This looks like a perfect class action case. There's really no physical harm or financial harm to the users, but a class action might be the only way for it to hurt. But IANAL, and probably have it all wrong in my head???
Why is it that in the US individuals have to band together and privately launch a class action to stop these types of parasitic behaviours. The government is supposed to represent the interests of citizens.
That's exactly why - we have a largely dysfunctional federal government (and most state governments aren't much better).
The biggest downside is the lawyers take a massive chunk of any award and the actual victims are often left with very little. Or, even worse, the victims get worthless coupons (like with many credit/PII breaches - the award will be 1-year of credit monitoring from the company that allowed the breach in the first place).
This credit score system in the US always made me curious. Say some point I had a proposition to move to the US and I asked the company offering the job how they will ensure that I immediately get the best possible score. They said it was not possible because it was a personal score.
I told them that I will certainly not start to build a credit score at 40 yo so they will have to find someone else.
Yes, and this is when I discovered this system which looks quite crazy to me.
I am coming from abroad with experience nedded in a US company (and therefore in the US at large) and I start my finance as if I was 18.
Then if there is a problem with my PII I have to worry about why it was lost. The company that lot it is going to give me a year of some kind of monitoring.
Well, no. I am not really interested to depend on some proprietary system that can make my life difficult just because someone fucked up. Or go through hoops to build it without consideration of my past outside the US or my job.
Honest question, what do other nations do to determine credit-worthiness? There has to be some sort of risk assessment on the part of banks and other financial institutions. And that risk assessment would have to be made for immigrants there as well, presumably with less/zero data?
FWIW, as much as Americans complain about the credit score system, it's mostly not a problem (for most people, most of the time). It's not hard for a middle-income person to earn and maintain a top-tier score (800+) and the lowest possible APRs when borrowing.
And assuming a prospective employer would assist you with finding housing, it's not hard for an immigrant to begin building their credit score. Just make sure your landlord reports rent to the credit agencies and take out a credit card. 3-6 months later, you have a decent score.
Identity theft is a real problem, but that extends well beyond the credit agencies.
1) Common law versus civil law. We rely a lot more on private lawsuits than on regulator action. This is probably a mistake, given that it sure looks like it adds costs to common law countries with little to no benefit (and, arguably, harm) but it’s what we have.
2) The consumer protection laws we do have, and the bodies to enforce them, are relatively weak and enforcement is spotty at best. The most recent serious attempt to kinda fix this is the formation of the CFPB, and one of our two relevant political parties deliberately prevents it from working when they hold the White House (sample size of one, admittedly) and has been trying to totally kill it, in the legislature or (better, because it’s popular and this is deniable) in the courts.
> consumer protection laws we do have, and the bodies to enforce them, are relatively weak
IANL - however, in the US and in US States, many serious cases have been decided in favor of the consumer, over decades. It is the most recent waves of privacy versus ad revenue that are indeed, very weak. It is awkward to defend these regulators since their failures are sometimes glaring, however it is my impression that serious settlements against industry can have silence or "gag orders" attached, and they often do. The industry lawyers can argue that the news of the settlement alone constitutes additional commercial damage to the company, and of course they are right in a narrow sense.
> The government is supposed to represent the interests of citizens.
I'm not sure that's ever happened in this country. They pay all sorts of lip service, but when challenged or under pressure, the US makes a lot of excuses for leaving its own people behind.
Thankfully we can repay that favor and see how they like it when there's nobody left to defend them.
It's not true that individuals need to band together. A single individual can kick off a class action lawsuit, private litigators can even kick start a lawsuit themselves (though ultimately the lawsuit will bring in impacted individuals).
The idea of private litigators is to complement the innate limitations of federal/state lawyers, by offering profit as an incentive.
Ideally yeah Americans would have stronger laws around TOS, customer privacy, data handling and security, and robustly funded state lawyers... but we don't.
Practically speaking, such gaps are not unique to technology. Every industry has this same problem, and your awareness of those problems is reflective of the general public's political engagement with this thread's topic. So having gaps that private litigators address is really quite normal and part of the incremental progress of legislation and state enforcement.