How credit agencies like Experian use fear to pitch online identity protection services of questionable value and with onerous ToS including arbitration clauses
David Lazarus / Los Angeles Times : Tweets: @briankrebs , @troyhunt , and @mississippiago Tweets: @briankrebs : http://www.latimes.com/... Experian et al want to sell you FUD. It's all out there for sale, either by the bureaus or on Dark Web. Freeze now. Troy Hunt / @troyhunt : Very disappointing to see Experian approach “Dark Web Scans” like this, they should be able to do this well http://www.latimes.com/... http://twitter.com/... MS Attorney General / @mississippiago : The dark web & credit rating agencies: be careful what you sign up for http://www.latimes.com/... #Equifax #databreach #Experian
Context & Ripple Effects
David Lazarus's Los Angeles Times column lands in the middle of the post-Equifax-breach moment, when the credit bureaus are pitching 'dark web scans' to anxious consumers. Security researcher Troy Hunt publicly calls the pitch disappointing, arguing the data being 'scanned for' is largely already for sale, and the Mississippi Attorney General warns consumers to read what they sign up for before enrolling.
The critique has a longer tail at Experian itself: former employees told Krebs on Security that the company's security efforts slipped after CIO John Finch departed, which makes fear-based upselling from the same firm look worse. The bureaus' broader posture is consistent — the same companies that hold the data also sell the remediation, and have since pushed into alternative credit data like rental payments to widen what they score.
First-order effects
- Consumers who sign up for these identity protection services accept terms of service with arbitration clauses, giving up class-action recourse precisely when the provider's value is most questionable.
- Security experts like Troy Hunt steer consumers toward the cheaper, more effective alternative the column highlights — a credit freeze — undercutting the paid product's reason to exist.
Second-order effects
- Public criticism of 'dark web scans' pressures Experian and its peers to justify monitoring products whose underlying data is already purchasable, threatening a revenue line built on breach anxiety.
- Attorneys general weighing in signals state-level scrutiny of bureau consumer products, raising the cost of onerous ToS terms as a standard practice.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the structural conflict — bureaus profiting from both the data that creates risk and the services sold against it — invites regulation of how credit agencies market protection and write consumer contracts.
- Arbitration clauses across consumer financial products progressively close the litigation channel, leaving regulators and state AGs as the main check on bureau behavior.
The trend: Credit bureaus are monetizing breach anxiety on top of the very data holdings that create the risk, while regulators and security researchers push back on both the products and the contract terms that shield them.