So here is the thing. Given the Eqifax breach I kinda feel like giving yet another agency to much information for them to monitor your credit is just another source of a possible future data breach.
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Garbage. It doesn’t punish them, hold them accountable, or force them to improve their security practices.
Every breach like this should automatically require a $100 cheque to every affected account holder. Two nillion accounts compromised? $200M is a real consequence.
It’s basically a zero-cost thing they can offer and makes a lot of people feel better about how screwed they just got.
It’s very much the ideal ‘the least we could do!’ offering.
This is because collecting so much information isn’t about protecting your security or even monitoring your credit in Equifax’s case. It’s about collecting even more digital you and selling it to whoever will pay. They don’t care about data breaches, they care about profit and on any ‘free’ service that means selling you and/or forcefeeding you custom ads.
It is just a free trial with the long term goal of getting people to subscribe when it expires.
“Please don’t force us to advertise our services to our victims!”
Freeze your credit report sharing with all major consumer reporting agencies when not applying for new credit. Without reports, lenders won’t grant new lines of credit in your name. It’s free and timely, as required by US law.
Credit monitoring companies just run credit checks, which they can’t do with your credit frozen. Check your credit every 3-4 months yourself at annualcreditreport.com (proof of legitimacy).
Don’t stay informed of breaches, prevent them.
Exactly:
- keep credit reports frozen
- use a password manager and random, long passwords (and ideally usernames too)
- use MFA/2FA where available
If you do that, you’ll prevent the vast majority of problems.
Credit monitoring services just alert you when something bad happens, which means you’ve already gotten screwed. And honestly, you probably don’t need to check your credit report that often, once a year is probably fine, provided you’ve frozen everything already.
The good news is that a lot of banks now offer free credit monitoring, alerts and controls because they know your data has already been breached. This allows you to, via your bank’s interface, take control of your credit monitoring instead of handing it off to an agency that profits from gobbling up whatever it can know about you.
Check with your bank to see what tools they have available for you.
