ChoicePoint is watching you

Big Brother Isn’t Gone, He’s Been Outsourced:  It looks like a mini-TIA program already exists and it’s named ChoicePoint.  The difference is that the government has to pay to use it.  This gets them around the Privacy Act of 1974, which was designed to discourage such wholesale data gathering.

 

This information purchasing has already had a big impact on us:
[ChoicePoint] provided county electoral boards with a list of convicted felons to be used in purging voting lists during the last presidential election. Unfortunately, the state was Florida, the list was wildly inaccurate, and an estimated 8,000 citizens, many of them African-Americans, were deprived of their right to vote in the election — 15 times George Bush’s margin of victory over Al Gore. (source: http://www.choicepoint.net/news/gatrend.html)
It’s a problem from a privacy standpoint, but it also affects your personal finances.  Not only are the big 3 credit bureaus (Equifax, Trans Union and Experian) tracking us, but they’re selling the information to ChoicePoint and Fair Issac (FICO score).  And if you want to make sure the information is right, all of them want to charge you money to see the information that they have on you (and I know from personal experience it’s often wrong).

 

A catch-22:  In order to get loans or credit, the consumer is motivated and encouraged to verify and correct information in the databases (and pay for the privilege of doing this). In effect they must give up their privacy to the government (and whoever else is willing to pay for a report checks up on you) and help fund Big Brother at the same time.