Also, I'm kind of confused, why do you think you'd have more privacy in other countries or with other systems? Even without credit scores, you still have credit cards, debit cards etc and all this can be tracked? There were massive data breach at places like Target, wouldn't you be impacted without credit scores and those 3 companies?

Outside of living off the grid, paying everything in cash, how do you want to have privacy about how you spend your money in this day and age?

Well, I'd say having a soon-to-be expired credit card transaction revealed here and there is a lot less worrisome than a single entity hoarding everything over my lifetime, combined with an utter disregard for security. They also sell it without knowledge and usually consent. At least CC processors have PCI standards right?

Bulk surveillance is a problem as well, but a big topic for another day.

Having done PCI compliance audits and talked to QSAs who told me about pretty serious breach from a well known payment processor owned by Visa, I wouldn't put too much faith in the PCI compliance process when it comes to protecting my data.

I guess where we differ is that between banks having lousy security, social medias and search giants selling all our data, the cat is already out of the bag when it comes to privacy and won't be put back until law is updated to have teeth, so I see that as a separate problem (which does bother me) that's orthogonal to the 3 companies credit scoring system.

That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be solved, I believe Equifax, Experian and Transunion should be heavily fined for any breach of data especially considering how important the data they have.