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.