Credit Bureaus and Outsourcing
The “I’ve Been Mugged” blog has a great three part series on outsourcing by credit bureaus:
“Is It Wise For Credit Bureaus To Outsource To Foreign Call Center Firms? (Part 1),” “part 2” and “part 3.”
He digs deep into how extensively TransUnion outsources, and where. I went looking, and was surprised to see that their privacy policy is at least honest. They make no claim that they care about your privacy, nor any that they apply the highest standards of security to your information.
It’s not like credit bureau and other informations brokers apply much controls to their data anyway. A few years back (2004) I got a 200 pages word file and an SSL certificate from Choice Point and that was all that was required to query any information they have on anyone with no further restrictions. Given 9 digits I could get all the info on a random american and it took less then a week to get the certificate and RPC specs and a few hours to write a perl script to query.