Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Life, Liberty and Lifelock?

Have you seen the commercial where the man is saying,” that’s my real social security number!" as a bus drives by plastered with his nine-digit personally identifying information. Pretty brave, I would say.

Evidently, this man is the owner of lifelock and believes that his service can protect your private financial information and your identity from being stolen. The services come with a $1,000,000 Service Guarantee.

For years, the credit agencies have had a stranglehold on the credit reporting market. In fact, the only way to get a free copy of your credit report was if you had been turned down for credit

Reportedly, the protective services of lifelock are cutting into the profits of at least one of the credit reporting agency. Experian is suing Lifelock because they are afraid that this new lifelock service will eliminate the red tape that allows credit agencies to charge fees for correct errors in credit reporting information. Lifelock also asks that credit agenices put fraud alerts on their customers' accounts, which also costs them money.

In addition, lifelock would also like to put a stop to other practices used by the credit reporting agencies; namely, the selling of data to credit card companies so that these credit cards companies may solicit new customers.

Regulatory authorities should make the credit reporting agencies stop selling your private data to credit cards companies and begin to protect your identity and credit.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A common complaint I hear about Lifelock is that you can do most of what they offer for free. Concise instructions on how to do it yourself, for free, are available here.

CyberCelt said...

@mike-thanks for the tip.