,
23 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
1. Some history of Equifax. It used to be called the Retail Credit Corporation. It was a leader in the world of 'business intelligence'.
2. The use of the term 'intelligence' is no accident. The Retail Credit Corporation was a big ally of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.
3. The Fair Credit Reporting Act was passed in 1970, when the intelligence agencies began being subject to public scrutiny.
4. In 1968, a Congressman named Cornelius Gallagher chaired a special subcommittee on invasions of privacy and did a hearing on the company.
5. The purpose of Retail Credit's business, said the CEO of the company, was to impose a 'discipline' on the American citizen. 
6. Some of the business of credit reporting agencies back then were explicitly racist and sexist. And employers often did credit checks.
7. Gallagher made the point that in America, you have the right to confront your accuser. Retail Credit had seized/privatized this right.
8. The Fair Credit Report Act was passed to give Americans some sort of due process right over their own data. It is the first big data law.
9. Rep. Wright Patman and Rep. Leonor Sullivan in 1970 got a strong version through the House. Senator Proxmire screwed up.
10. When the act passed, the reporting agencies weren't liable for errors. That's why today Equifax doesn't have to take care of your data.
11. The history of privacy rules in the 1960s and 1970s is weird and very relevant to today. People understood the importance of data.
12. We never really figured out how to handle privacy and data, and kind of gave up trying when Reagan came into office.
13. But the point is that computerization and personal data has always been linked to the power to control citizens, not privacy, per se.
14. Rep. Gallagher was eventually destroyed by what he says was an FBI conspiracy linked to the Retail Credit Corporation. But who knows?
15. Anyway, a lot of this had to do with the explicit creation in the 1970s of a national credit market linked by electronic data.
16. I studied this stuff for a few months and could never come to any conclusions except that Equifax has origins in manipulating citizens.
17. Here's a creepy quote from an investigator doing this work for an insurance underwriter.
18. Homosexuality "is one of the most difficult things to determine. If you have that sixth sense that something is wrong, you dig."
19. "We won't say he's a homosexual .. . .We'll report, for example, that certain people feel he has homosexual tendencies."
20. Lots of discussion of a cashless society, and also as personal data as a Constitutionally protected property right. In 1968.
21. Anyway, none of this stuff is totally new. There's a history to everything, even big data, algorithms, and data breaches.
22. Also, Federal Trade Commission, you should know this stuff. You should fix it. This is your job and you have a $300M annual budget.
23. Finally, we shouldn't pick b/n economics and race. Sexual/racial discrimination is/was operationalized via credit bureaus.
