As Republicans tightened work requirements and eligibility rules for Medicaid and SNAP last year, Equifax’s CEO openly celebrated the profit
Verifying a workers’ income for government health insurance, and Equifax’s capture of that function, is just one illustrative component of the Rube Goldberg machine that comprises America’s rigorously means-tested safety net and its vulnerability to corporate capture. Complex eligibility rules and administrative hurdles to determine who deserves coverage and who does not are fractured across government agencies and jurisdictions. Many research studies, magazine spreads, and books have documented how this complexity keeps millions of eligible people from accessing billions of dollars in benefits they are entitled to – the unemployed are locked out of their unemployment insurance, the uninsured are never enrolled in their health coverage, and the hungry are denied food assistance.
Vice President Harris’ announcement of “a student loan debt forgiveness program for Pell Grant recipients who start a business that operates for three years in disadvantaged communities” is perhaps the best recent caricature of how increasingly complex eligibility rules have failed to deliver for millions of Americans. And this labyrinth of eligibility rules doesn’t just fail the intended beneficiaries – the administrative complexity they create presents an enormous opportunity for profit by government contractors.
After the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency was ended by Congress in 2023, I led a government team at the United States Digital Service to help fix state Medicaid systems that had fallen into crisis. As we rushed to put out fires in Red and Blue states alike we encountered the same problem – entrenched government contractors like Deloitte had charged millions to build error–prone systems that state governments had no capacity to fix. Billing by the hour, growing the complexity and incomprehensibility of these systems proved profitable. Changes that my team could make in minutes were quoted as requiring hundreds of billable hours. When we discovered that nearly 500,000 children had lost their health coverage improperly because of software errors, many system contractors were painfully slow to reinstate coverage for those children and fix the errors.
[...]
Again, new work requirements for Medicaid highlight the profits to be made from adding complexity to the safety net. Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people. As the other 55 states and territories are now forced to join Georgia and implement new work requirements, millions will lose their healthcare and Deloitte will cash in.
At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans' privacy
This Saturday (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:
Privacy raises some thorny, subtle and complex issues. It also raises some stupid-simple ones. The American surveillance industry's shell-game is founded on the deliberate confusion of the two, so that the most modest and sensible actions are posed as reductive, simplistic and unworkable.
Two pillars of the American surveillance industry are credit reporting bureaux and data brokers. Both are unbelievably sleazy, reckless and dangerous, and neither faces any real accountability, let alone regulation.
Remember Equifax, the company that doxed every adult in America and was given a mere wrist-slap, and now continues to assemble nonconsensual dossiers on every one of us, without any material oversight improvements?
It's hard to overstate how fucking scummy the credit reporting world is. Equifax invented the business in 1899, when, as the Retail Credit Company, it used private spies to track queers, political dissidents and "race mixers" so that banks and merchants could discriminate against them:
As awful as credit reporting is, the data broker industry makes it look like a paragon of virtue. If you want to target an ad to "Rural and Barely Making It" consumers, the brokers have you covered:
There are zillions of these data brokers, operating in an unregulated wild west industry. Many of them have been rolled up into tech giants (Oracle owns more than 80 brokers), while others merely do business with ad-tech giants like Google and Meta, who are some of their best customers.
As bad as these two sectors are, they're even worse in combination – the harms data brokers (sloppy, invasive) inflict on us when they supply credit bureaux (consequential, secretive, intransigent) are far worse than the sum of the harms of each.
And now for some good news. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, under the leadership of Rohit Chopra, has declared war on this alliance:
They've proposed new rules limiting the trade between brokers and bureaux, under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, putting strict restrictions on the transfer of information between the two:
As Karl Bode writes for Techdirt, this is long overdue and meaningful. Remember all the handwringing and chest-thumping about Tiktok stealing Americans' data to the Chinese military? China doesn't need Tiktok to get that data – it can buy it from data-brokers. For peanuts.
The CFPB action is part of a muscular style of governance that is characteristic of the best Biden appointees, who are some of the most principled and competent in living memory. These regulators have scoured the legislation that gives them the power to act on behalf of the American people and discovered an arsenal of action they can take:
Alas, not all the Biden appointees have the will or the skill to pull this trick off. The corporate Dems' darlings are mired in #LearnedHelplessness, convinced that they can't – or shouldn't – use their prodigious powers to step in to curb corporate power:
And it's true that privacy regulation faces stiff headwinds. Surveillance is a public-private partnership from hell. Cops and spies love to raid the surveillance industries' dossiers, treating them as an off-the-books, warrantless source of unconstitutional personal data on their targets:
These powerful state actors reliably intervene to hamstring attempts at privacy law, defending the massive profits raked in by data brokers and credit bureaux. These profits, meanwhile, can be mobilized as lobbying dollars that work lawmakers and regulators from the private sector side. Caught in the squeeze between powerful government actors (the true "Deep State") and a cartel of filthy rich private spies, lawmakers and regulators are frozen in place.
Or, at least, they were. The CFPB's discovery that it had the power all along to curb commercial surveillance follows on from the FTC's similar realization last summer:
I don't want to pretend that all privacy questions can be resolved with simple, bright-line rules. It's not clear who "owns" many classes of private data – does your mother own the fact that she gave birth to you, or do you? What if you disagree about such a disclosure – say, if you want to identify your mother as an abusive parent and she objects?
But there are so many stupid-simple privacy questions. Credit bureaux and data-brokers don't inhabit any kind of grey area. They simply should not exist. Getting rid of them is a project of years, but it starts with hacking away at their sources of profits, stripping them of defenses so we can finally annihilate them.
I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:
http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
More than half of Americans admit to lying on a resume at least once. It's such a common practice that no wonder services are popping up to help employers find out about workers' previous job history.
A viral video from TikToker Morgan (@wfhmuva), who comments on work-from-home topics, informs viewers about one such service.
…
One viewer shared, "I used to work for Equifax and got hired somewhere else they found out so fast."
"Yes girl, they can see down to your gross and net income from each job from equifax," a second wrote.
Another expressed concern they may be in trouble. "wait so they'll know if im a job hopper?" the viewer asked. Morgan responded, "It's possible."
"Every company does not report to the work number!!!" one viewer noted. "Walmart does though. Also it costs to use this service. Most companies not paying for it."
Late last year, a Human Resources worker referenced the service as a reason employers are sometimes aware that a worker is about to leave. She noted that job seekers can check a box asking interviewers not to contact their current place of employment.
What's the difference between hard credit checks and soft credit checks? And how are they both different from credit monitoring?
Ask the Bitches: What’s the Difference Between Credit Checks and Credit Monitoring?
The world of personal finance is full of terms designed to confuse and waylay the innocent. Yet you are a beautiful and mysterious adventurer on the exciting journey of life! You do not have time to parse the different meanings of seemingly synonymous financial terms like “credit checks” and “credit monitoring.”
Fortunately, we’re a coupla’ nerds with nothing better to do.
Nothing will radicalize you faster than spending All Day™️ being passed around the 3 credit reporting agencies’ information dispute lines like a dirty bong until you’re hanging onto sanity by willpower & fanfiction alone 🙂
from /r/vexillology
Top comment: Flag from this post [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillology/comments/ky5a11/thats_an_interesting_way_to_present_language/), made in Flagmaker Jr.
Yeah you do. Especially if you’re taking it from a big, irresponsible ultrarich company that leaked your personal data.
Go to equifax and see if you were affected by their leak: https://eligibility.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/en/eligibility
They aren’t going to tell you if you were affected, you have to type your name and the last 6 digits of your social security number there to see if you were. If you were affected, you can get $125. It takes like 30 seconds. I got this link from AOC herself:
File an online claim today if you were affected by the 2017 data breach
The US credit reporting agency Equifax settled earlier this week with the Federal Trade Commission over the massive 2017 data breach that exposed hundreds of millions of Americans’ Social Security numbers and other sensitive data. Now, you can finally file a claim to collect on the $700 million settlement, which contains a $380,500,000 consumer restitution fund, as part of the class action lawsuit.
The FTC this morning posted the claim website, where you can both check if you were affected by the company’s breach and fill out the relatively simple form that lets you specify to which claims you feel entitled. Thankfully, it is not operated by Equifax, but by the settlement administrator JND, which handles these types of sprawling class action and corporate bankruptcy cases that may eventually involve millions of people filing claims.
i recalled i received a letter a long time ago from equifax saying my data was compromised as part of a larger hack. today, i decided to see if i was eligible for the $125 settlement. turns out i am, so i filed a claim. now, i’m just waiting for the check. :)
it’s not much comfort, and if you think you’re owed more money, there are other claims you can make. the claim website walks you through all of it.
