Equifax Will Offer Free Lifetime Credit Locks in January
A few weeks after the massive data breach, Equifax has made an official apology with the offer of peace: by January 31st, they will offer a new service that will allow you to easily block and unblock access to your Equifax file. But what does that mean?
The company’s interim CEO Paulino do Rego Barros Jr. apologized via the Wall Street Journal :
We have heard your concern that the window for signing up for a free credit freeze at Equifax is too short, so we are extending the deadline to the end of January. Likewise, we are extending the subscription period for TrustedID Premier, a free package that we offer to all US consumers, through the end of January. We hope that these immediate actions will go a long way toward resolving the concerns we hear from consumers. We know they won’t solve a bigger problem.
Also by the end of January, they will offer a new service that will give “consumers the ability to control access to their personal credit data.” The service will be free (for life) and will allow you to block and unblock your credit files at any time. Other than that, there are not many details other than that the service will be “reliable, secure and simple”.
However, as Ron Lieber of the New York Times notes, this raises even more questions. First, why is a lock better or more convenient than freezing?
File unlocks are instant … Experian and TransUnion said this week that it should take no more than 15 minutes to unlock over the phone or over the Internet if you have a PIN. My files were frozen for ten years and I always found thawing to be instant.
If your report is blocked, thieves will not be able to open new lines of credit in your name. The credit card company, bank or lender they’ve contacted won’t be able to get your report because, well, it’s frozen. The only way to allow access is to unblock the report yourself using your PIN. In addition, Lieber adds that the freezing is regulated by state law. “But blocking, which has the same effect as freezing, does not obey such rules and does not have a hard-to-remember PIN,” Lieber writes.
Fortune says blocking will be more convenient than freezing, but also doubts that “Equifax has the technical ability to do this and do it in a safe way.”
Without further information from Equifax, it’s hard to assess if this service will be worth it – we’ll have to wait until January to see. Apologies, meanwhile, lament critics saying it’s too little, too late, but the biggest critics are their customers, and customers are right not to be impressed. Many don’t even want to visit the Equifax website.
In addition, even if the blocking is worth it, it only affects the least dangerous scenario. When a thief has your personal information and social security number, opening a credit card and shopping on your behalf is one of the least dangerous things he can do.