Selling disinformation?

Wired magazine recently reported on a speech by the CEO of Equifax in which he objected to recent legislation (the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act) requiring credit agencies to make available personal data to the person in question at no charge every 12 months.

"Our company felt, and still does ... that it's unconstitutional to cause a public company who has a fiduciary responsibility to return profit to shareholders to give away the product" he said.

Apart from the moral implications of collecting information on individuals and then making them pay to see that data, there ought to be a practical incentive for the credit agencies to let me see the data they have collected about me. What easier and cheaper way is there for them to validate the data they have?

I wrote in an earlier posting about the issues that arise when the credit agencies provide their customers with inaccurate or incomplete data. Does the CEO of Equifax care if the data he is selling to his customers is correct? Or is he happy to sell them complete and utter crap? What does he tell his kids when they ask him "what did you do today Daddy?" Well he ought to answer "I sold a bank some inaccurate information. I screwed the bank and I screwed the individual that the data was about."

Perhaps he would prefer that people start suing his company for the damages they incur when he sells inaccurate data about them. How can such a short-sighted idiot be worth what his company is paying him?

If you are selling disinformation then you are not adding economic value, you are destroying it. You are nothing more than an economic parasite, sucking up the value being created by others and giving nothing back.