The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced on Monday that it would begin supervising the leading credit bureaus, the companies that collect financial details of everyone’s life, according to the New York Times.
The bureau will oversee and make rules covering about 30 credit reporting companies, representing 94 percent of the $4 billion credit reporting market. The rules will apply to the three big credit reporting firms — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — and others with more than $7 million in annual revenue.
The credit reporting companies already must abide by the Fair Credit Reporting Act and they have also been subject to Congressional oversight, but they lacked a single federal overseer, said the bureau’s director, Richard Cordray.
“The fact that this industry has never before been subject to any federal supervision means there’s a lot we don’t know about it,” Mr. Cordray said in an interview Monday morning.
Credit reports have increasing importance in consumers’ lives because they are used in many kinds of lending, by landlords in renting a property and even as a way to screen job applicants. And various reports have found that up to 25 percent ofcredit reports contain errors that could hurt consumers’ ability to borrow.
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pdpEcho 
Is it really necessary? Credit Bureaus intend to follow you on Facebook
thelocal.de reports that Germany’s biggest credit bureau Schufa plans to tap social networks such as Facebook and Google Street View in a huge data trawl for personal information to use in deciding whether a person is credit-worthy.
I recently started to look Euro-wide on credit bureaus practices regarding privacy and data protection, and what I have found is that credit bureaus – which are most often private entities, place themselves in this we-don’t-care-about-your-privacy-rights bubble and nobody complains about it! I discovered that there is no common EU policy for credit bureaus, hence they function under self-determined rules which lead to such different practices. For instance, some credit bureaus retain your personal data for 6 months and other retain it for 10 years. Plus, you never know which kind of data they gather!
Hence, this piece of news is quite interesting.
“A joint investigation by radio station NDR Info and Die Welt newspaper unearthed internal papers about the establishment of a “Schufa Lab” research group to work out how to link information found on the Internet with other details about personal credit rating.
Schufa is a privately-held credit bureau – by far the biggest in the country. It confirmed cooperation with the Hasso-Plattner Institute for software systems technology (HPI) in Potsdam on the project.
Ideas which will be discussed and examined include using profiles on services such as Facebook, Xing and Twitter in order to get addresses, Die Welt reported on Thursday. Property rental and sale sites such as immoscout24 or mobile.de could also be used, the paper said.
The statistical linking of particular personal characteristics to ability or willingness to pay off loans could also be part of the research, while detailed information will be gathered in the huge data trawl.
Both the HPI and Schufa stressed that the research would be conducted according to the highest ethical standards, and that everything would be published after a three-year work period.
The more concrete plans of Schufa were contained in a second paper, Die Welt said. This included the idea that, “Information generated from the web would be linked by Schufa with other information and analysed from a business perspective.””
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Tagged credit bureaus, credit data, credit information, credit worthiness, data protection, data retention in credit bureaus, EU policy for credit bureaus, Facebook, privacy