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This page will be talking about different things in link with freedom and the USA. Most people think and/or view the USA as a place of freedom. This is a common missinterpretation. Actually the UK is certainly free-er... at least in regard to freedom of speech.
In any country, if you get some very sensitive information, just don't publish it publicly. Information about terrorists or industrial spying can cost you a lot.
Now there is a new kind of information which was setup a while back to protect creditors. Note that I'm saying creditors and not people. In case you didn't know, creditors are not people anyway.
So? What did they create? Wanna guess? I'll tell you: Your Credit Score! If you are good and lucky not to be affected by identity theft, then you will automatically have a high credit score. Whatever happens and you get a 0. Then bye bye credit. Not like you should really need credit, most people die in debts today and that's the kids who have to pay for it. But the problem is not whether you have credit or not. The problem is if you exist in the USA you have to be registered with these people and there is no choice. Ho! Sorry...
We are always given a choice. You can leave the country. That will cost you one plane ticket. Period. If you are in the right state, you can also choose to pay all of the major credit record companies so they don't release your information. Sorry! Actually, if you have been stolen it's free. What?!
Wait a minute... I went on this website:
http://www.consumersunion.org/campaigns//learn_more/003484indiv.html [broken link now]
This site is very informative. It lists the states which offer a freeze on your credit information. I repeat: YOUR CREDIT INFORMATION. Ha! There we are! Look at it, it is not free. You have to pay so they don't release YOUR CREDIT INFORMATION. So in other words, you do not own your credit information. And not only that, they make big bucks with it! The largest such compagnies have a turn over of 1 to 3 billion a year.
Note that the states not listed in the table below are just not offering any specific protection of the sort (they may have other protections though). This means you certainly can request to have some protection, but the agencies may charge you whatever and not really honor your request and they would have no legal problem (and you know... companies making billions a year...)
But before to read what follows, a few other numbers. The US is losing, because of these agencies (yes! because of them and not because of you or your neighbor nor even the thieves!):
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US $ 48 billion |
(business) |
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US $ 5 billion |
(personal) |
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US $ 53 billion |
(total) |
What I'm wondering now is: how much are the banks saving by using these services?! $1 or $2 billions? Probably $10 billion maximum. Okay, so we, consumers, have to pay $53 billion to crooks so banks can save $10 billion. Who does not understand that?!
Yet another number: every year we now have close to 10 million people who fall in the Victims category. Imagine that only adults are affected. According to the Wold Fact Book we have 298,444,215 people in the US. 67.2% are between 15 and 64 (12.5% are over 64). This means roughly 200,555,000 adults. In other words:
Close to 5% of the population has been affected by identity theft.
What is the gouvernment doing about it? Nothing. Why? Because you have 3 giant companies making roughly 5 billion dollars a year together in selling YOUR CREDIT INFORMATION. You cannot just ask them to shutdown. The only real way to avoid these thieves. Ho! Well... another way would be to have a diffenrent "social security" number for each different matter that you need to address. Thus, you could have a credit card identity number, a morgage identity number, a medical identity number, a social security number, a tax identification number... well... maybe we ought to find a different way to manage money that does not let crooks access the info. Not possible today it looks like. Companies have been exposing thousands of records, when not hundred of thousands!
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