Naive question: Why would credit reporting companies resist allowing consumers to freeze their credit? I would think, if anything, it provides them another data point and does not otherwise affect their business at all. Is there something I am overlooking?
Credit reporting agencies make the VAST amount of their money by giving your reports to companies that ask for it, even if unsolicited by you. Putting a credit freeze kills this ability to make money off you without your knowledge.
In fact, I think one way to do more consumer-safe credit reporting is to make it so that agencies are ONLY allowed to give a person's report to that particular person. When a person applies somewhere for credit, they would need to ask a credit agency for their report, and then give it to a prospective lender (the report would be cryptographically signed). That way you at least control who has access to your information.
It absolutely affects their business; they are paid by companies that want to check your credit, and freezing means they can't get paid by all those credit card companies that send you random offers after seeing that your credit is good.
