Lifelock Under Fire Once Again
Posted on Jun 04, 2008 under Credit |Apparently the credit bureau Experian has filed a lawsuit against the identity protection company lifelock. Experian is arguing that third parties shouldn’t be allowed to place fraud alerts on behalf of consumers which is exactly what lifelock does. And it’s easy to understand why Experian wouldn’t like this since it has to cost them money to place the alert and to monitor it.
Experian also makes their money by selling people’s information for pre-approved offers and such. When lifelock opts it’s customers out of this type of junk mail, it limits the credit bureau’s ability to sell the information.
It’s up to every consumer to decide if lifelock’s services are worth the $10 per month charge, since you can set your own fraud alerts and everything yourself for free, but if someone wants to use these services for peace of mind, I see no problem with it. I also don’t like the fact that the credit bureaus sell my information to make a profit so it should be up to us as consumers whether we want to authorize a third party to do these things for us.
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by The Bald Monkey, on June 5 2008 @ 7:47 pm
What’s really great about LifeLock is how well they work. It works so well that the owner, the guy you see on TV and hear on the radio ads giving out his SSN because he is so sure of the effectiveness of his company, got his own identity stolen and LifeLock didn’t catch it. He says it’s because his SSN was used at a check cashing place that didn’t check the SSN. Well, that’s exactly the problem. Why would I want to pay these people $120 a year just to have some guy go get money in my name and have some collection agency start calling me up?