Yeah, instead of getting my lender to give me a better interest rate or a discount on fees, I'm going to instead use my negotiating leverage to make sure Equifax makes $20 less revenue.

Might as well not even vote. Your one votes can't turn the tide.

If you're in the position to be buying a house, voting is basically free. Ignoring a credit score when applying for a mortgage can be considerably more expensive.

That's not what they said though, they said they are gonna vote for whoever makes their life directly better in the relative short term.

Depending on where you live that can be very true.

That's why we get people like Trump.

He sure made some people's lives better.

Yes, but only a small demographic that actually votes.

If only 1% of the population actually votes, elected representatives will tend to represent that 1%. If you cede the centre ground you get extremists.

Say what you like about Trump, he managed to get his target demographic fired up and out to vote. $boring_reasonable_politician doesn't have the same ability by their nature to get people fired up, but we still need to vote for them.

Their loyalty lies mostly with campaign financers. If campaign financers want a different outcome than voters, they get it.

But then you're back to not voting and getting a Trump again.

Not voting is not a solution.

We're agreed on that.

When you say "$boring_reasonable_politician" I think Joe Biden. <yawn>

If what Trump did last election was getting them fired up, then this election they are going nuclear. Check out the massive waves of people at his rallies versus the trickles at the Dem's gatherings.

The next election is going to be decided by about 5% of the country that’s contested. Everyone else might as well not even bother filling in the box for president

Asimov's story takes this to its (extreme) logical conclusion:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)

There are more votes than just the presidential election.

Yeah that’s why I just said presidential a lot of other important elections that count on the downballot

Wasn't a problem? What do you think is more likely:

1) They didn't follow company procedure of which big banks insist employees follow otherwise the employees risk 'liability for not picking the 3 credit agencies'. Or

2) They lied and followed company procedure, and not tell you the outcome from them.

3) Your lender probably passed the request and got 1) or 2) later in the chain.

You're missing the most important outcome:

4) They insist they have to use Equifax, lose the deal, and note why in their records.

You mean, they insist you have to use Equifax, lose the deal, then then wonder what’s for lunch in the cafeteria today. Or most likely of all, every lender insists you have to use Equifax, and the people you interact with have no authority to even run your request up a management chain, let alone actually honor it.

reasons for losing sales get put in a database, and people pay attention when the same reason shows up repeatedly.

In my experience, nobody cares. I remember how long it took before Netflix finally supported a player on Linux desktop. And in the end, their decision had zero to do with customer demand or complaints for that feature.

You can log reasons for bad business outcomes all day long, millions and millions, and it won’t change corporate behavior.

Just pointing out that this analogy doesn't hold. Netflix's customer base running desktop Linux are a rounding error for the foreseeable future. 99% of any lender's customers would be at least somewhat pleased to drop Equifax and none of them receive any benefit from using Equifax's service over their competitors.

The amount of people who will actually demand a lender to omit Equifax is also complete roundoff error and insignificant compared with political dealing etc.

That is a self-fulfilling prophecy with no utility to the people making it.

Whatever it is, it’s just a fact of human behavior, and to understand the world around us, we ought to be honest about such facts and investigate how best to live in a world where such facts are true.

For instance, it might suggest that championing a grassroots boycott effort is a waste of time, and that perhaps putting that effort to lobby for laws by which these types of privacy breaches result in automatic prison time or high personal fines is a better option? Also not likely to succeed, but perhaps much more likely than asking rando consumers to not defect in their personal prisoner’s dilemma game with an unmoving corporate behemoth.

It's quite impressive how thoroughly the american consumer has been demoralized by these supposedly unmoving corporations.

> and it wasn't a problem.

That outcome is academic, as the parent specifically said it wasn't an issue.

What was your procedure for confirming they did anything but roll their eyes and go about their normal routine?

I kept Equifax frozen through the refinance

Sounds pretty suspicious. Like you have a really bad credit score on Equifax compared to the other two

In which case the Equifax score would have been dropped anyway. So the lender isn't in any worse position.

I guess Equifax has a low enough rep that it is less suspicious than for any other

lol “suspicious”, as if it matters

you realize you can say the wildest most unsophisticated things and they’ll just punch the numbers into a machine and get a “lend to this guy or not” result either way right?