| Entities | |
| Topics and Issues | Credit Header (15) Data brokers (46) |
In December 2021, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote a letter to the CFPB asking it
to prevent credit agencies from selling Americans’ personal data for purposes entirely unrelated to consumers’ credit or financial decisions, including to law enforcement, via data brokers. The government should be seeking a subpoena or court order for this information, but these data brokers are serving as shady middlemen to sell this personal information without any legal protections.
Equifax, Experian, Transunion and other credit reporting agencies collect, process, and sell data on hundreds of millions of Americans. But while the sale of credit data, revealing payment history and credit lines, by the credit agencies is strictly regulated under federal law, these companies also sell a subset of the same data- including names, addresses, dates of birth, and social security numbers – in bulk, to data brokers who then sell it to private investigators and the government. The sale of this so-called “credit-header” data is regulated by CFPB, pursuant to the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA).
The letter was covered by the Washington Post, Utility giants agree to no longer allow sensitive records to be shared with ICE.