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Week 1 Day 4: Our credit reporting system is an identity theft waiting to happen

In the wake of the 2017 Equifax Breach, all the investigations focused on how Equifax messed up. And Equifax did mess up. Spectacularly.

But the investigators missed the deeper problem. The overall credit reporting system is another disaster waiting to happen, because it depends on Social Security Numbers for authentication. This is one of the dumbest ideas ever foisted on society. And it’s even dumber now, in the internet era, than before.

Here is a link to a recorded presentation I put together about what went wrong with Equifax with a little bit about the credit reporting system structural problem:

Here is a recorded presentation about the perils of passwords.

Here’s a link to my “Greg Scott Public Videos” YouTube channel:

We can fix the credit reporting system when we decide we’re tired of being victims and the credit reporting agencies decide they’re tired of crooks stealing their data. I’ll propose how in Week 2, day 1. For the impatient, here’s a link to the recorded presentation I made shortly after the Equifax disaster for how to fix the system.