There are _a lot_ of credit reporting agencies to place freezes with. I put freezes at several credit reporting agencies. It took quite a bit of time to work through a small subset of this list:

https://www.consumerlawfirm.com/credit-reporting-agencies.ht...

'Nationwide', 'Check and Bank' and 'Supplimentary/Alternative' are probably the minimum.

I wish we had privacy and security by default instead of "opt in"

> Plant your flag with any large government entities that are used for collecting benefits

What does this mean?

I think GP means create your account on these sites before a fraudster does it for you. I.e., if you already have an account, they need your login credentials to access your account. But, if you have not established an account, they can often establish a new account using nothing but publicly available data like your birthday and street address for identity verification, then access your data (IRS experienced a lot of fraudulent accounts being created to steal peoples' tax refunds; their new verification system is less susceptible, but IMO too invasive [biometric data]).

Sillystuff answered correctly.