Opening a bank account in the US entails supplying the bank with copious sensitive info. I think the most disturbing is having to supply your physical address for where you sleep at night. Mailing address is insufficient. Even if your physical address cannot receive mail, they still want it.

I could perhaps tolerate trusting the bank alone with it, reluctantly. But the bank shares that info with credit bureaus. That crosses a line for me. I absolutely do not trust credit bureaus with my physical address. They have proven to be sloppy & careless with people’s data (#equifaxBreach).

If it’s truly a bank account and not a credit account, in principle the bank need not be a member of any credit reporting agency (CRA) & it likely has no obligation to share your address with the CRA. The problem is, the fine print on account applications always has some vague wording saying you agree to your data being shared with the credit bureau (whether they act on that or not).

So what are the remedies here? Finding a bank that is not a member of any of the credit bureaus seems highly unlikely & I assume they all have that sloppy vague wording to get your agreement to share you address with the CRA.

So what do people do to avoid the bank → CRA address sharing?

    • soloActivistOP
      1·
      11 months ago

      I’ve been lucky. I periodically request my report and it never shows my current address only past addresses.

      In the past my mailing address could be passed off as a physical address (in fact, banks did not used to even make a physical/mailing distinction on the forms like they do now). But that has gotten harder. The banks are all sharing a DB that tells them whether an address is a commercial or residential. I think the DB is by a company called Chex Systems.

  • c0mmandoMA
    21·
    11 months ago

    Hell no the bank doesn’t have my address. I have a private mailbox for EVERYTHING.

    • soloActivistOP
      1·
      11 months ago

      Same for me but that’s getting harder in the US. Banks are getting persnickety and probing whether an address is residential. So old accounts can coast but opening a new account is seemingly impossible now.

      So this is a good reason to hold on to old accounts, but that also works against privacy because then you have a lot of history stored in one place… all eggs in one basket makes you more vulnerable to data mining & exploits. So better to be disloyal and bounce between banks. But then opening new accounts under a mailing address is becoming impossible. So you also have to wonder why homeless people are not being protected from this discrimination.