Personal Finance 💸

It is what it is. It’s a painful reality. Though “impossible” would be mostly exaggerated. Certainly it’s inconvenient in a country where most people are addicted to convenience.

Indeed you should, but it’s still insufficient. Musk did not get the data from the credit bureau. Freezing credit data does not prevent Musk’s exfiltration. Freezing your data also does not change the data. E.g. If a debt collector knows where you bank (from a leak), they can still tap that account directly even if your credit file is frozen. If a prospective employer knows your health history, you may be passed over for a job. Knowing your home address is useful for stalkers. All that info that was leaked is valuable to social engineers in countless creative exploits.

(edit) One of the intended exploits by Musk is to manipulate elections. How do you think freezing your credit bureau file mitigates election manipulation when the data was taken from the social security administration? Even if Musk were to have harvested the credit bureaus, the credit freezes would not have impeded him.

In any case, the best move w.r.t banking is to find a bank that is not a member of any of the credit bureaus. In principle, an account that extends no credit does not require credit worthiness. But banks are sloppy because consumers are pushovers. Banks systemically exchange info with credit bureaus anyway b/c consumers are not smart enough to demand otherwise.

Moving to a country with some version of GDPR protection would be the most effective way to avoid a repeat.

The US has what the Scottish call a “running goat fuck”. Americans’ data is compromised and abused repeatedly on large scales, to the point that when the data is exploited it can no longer even be attributed to a specific breach.. too many breaches, too many fingers pointing. The only proper recourse is to bounce from the country.