Yeah, the whole industry is insane and scummy. It's designed to give creditors as much gossip as possible, and congress has only taken rather tepid steps to reign it in. At the time I thought I was on the side of goodness, as my job was to find legal reasons to dispute these negative items on credit reports, submit the report back to the bureaus for a rescore, and ultimately get people their mortgage. But with the benefit of hindsight I can plainly see how I was a cog in creating the 2008 crash, and how the whole system was ultimately constructed to look the other way vs fraud if it meant the mortgage went through.

We badly need much stricter privacy rights surrounding personal information, but I don't see a viable political path to making it happen sadly :(.