A single issue post to just alert folk to the murky world of credit reference agencies and their dual-role as data brokers – which I was (I’m ashamed to say) totally unaware of.
This came to my attention when I received an email from Experian – who I had an account with due to a data breach with my Pension provider which resulted in them giving members free 12-month access to their services – which advised that I had 19 “experienced” Soft Searches on my account with them. Now I’d not been seeking any credit recently, so this immediately sparked my interest and so I clicked on the link in the email (see above) and logged in to see what was happening. At which point I was greeted by this screen and the rather alarming sidebar, you can see here …
… just ponder this for a moment. I had always assumed that Experian was a credit reference agency which provided a service to organisations wishing to extend credit to consumers and businesses to give an assessment of credit worthiness. Indeed when I had an account with them, I could see my score, and you were able to challenge that if you didn’t think it looked right. But that’s all immaterial to what I was seeing on the screen. I was being asked to accept that it was perfectly OK for Experian to share personal information with their partners which included Facebook and Google. What!!!!!!!!!
This got me going, so I clicked on Settings …
Performance and analytics – OK, but the other two … no way! How could this be? I had to do some searching to find out that Experian (and a couple of other “credit reference agencies”) were also DATA BROKERS, and that they’d been hauled up about NOT declaring this part of their role in 2018. This appears to have been resolved now – because we are past the nine months they were given to clean-up their practices, but their other business purpose – sharing information with others would continue if you clicked on the Accept all button.
A real lesson learnt, with a secondary one being to engage brain before clicking on Accept all – the minimum requirement GDPR had imposed upon them and many others.
And what was the outcome of this. How had it come about, what is a “soft search”? The latter is explained on this page. How it had come about is more difficult to work out so this is just conjecture – our house insurance was about to come up for renewal and all 19 of the organisations who’d made an enquiry of our credit worthiness – or had been sent details of the upcoming renewal by Experian – were like these 9 …
… I leave you to draw your own conclusions.