The Briefing Room
General Category => Economy/Business => Topic started by: 240B on May 26, 2018, 05:38:31 pm
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FORBES
By Lauren Gensler and Samantha Sharf
MAY 23, 2018
After the consumer credit bureau Equifax revealed last September that personal data from 145 million Americans had been exposed in a breach of its computers, a well-worn corporate scandal playbook kicked in. Nervous investors beat its stock down by a third. The CEO and other top execs felt a sudden urge to "retire." Congress held hearings. Lawsuits were filed. One response, however, was more surprising: Sign-ups at Credit Karma -- which requires consumers to trust yet another financial company with their credit records --spiked 50%. Apparently some hack-weary folks concluded that the only way to protect themselves from a bad guy with their financial data was to arm a good guy with it too. And Credit Karma has built a reputation, particularly among Millennials, as a good guy.
More than 80 million Americans (one in three adults) are now Credit Karma "members" and eligible to use its growing menu of free services, including anytime access to their credit files and scores; advice on raising those scores; alerts of credit applications and new accounts opened in their names; help fixing errors in reports; and even tax preparation. When they log in, they also get personalized recommendations for new credit cards and loans they're likely to both find attractive and be approved for -- a targeting process that employs Credit Karma's extensive data on users so effectively that last year it booked $680 million in referral fees from lenders, up from $500 million in 2016. In March, the still-private company was valued at $4 billion.
But Kenneth Lin, Credit Karma's 42-year-old CEO and largest shareholder (with a stake worth more than $500 million), doesn't want anyone to think his San Francisco-based company has led a charmed life. "The first five years were stay in business, stay in business, stay in business," he says. "The hockey stick happened in the last five."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurengensler/2018/05/23/big-brother-with-benefits-why-80-million-americans-is-letting-credit-karma-cash-in-on-data/#7b2a44e30845
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Do you think Credit Karma is 'free'?
Do you think all those DNA registries are 'cheap'?
Do you think anything you do on Amazon/Netflix/Facebook/Twitter/Cellphone/Alexa isn't recorded, packaged, and sold?
"Big Brother With Benefits" is a perfect description of all these services.
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I use credit karma... works well for me.
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Do you think Credit Karma is 'free'?
Do you think all those DNA registries are 'cheap'?
Do you think anything you do on Amazon/Netflix/Facebook/Twitter/Cellphone/Alexa isn't recorded, packaged, and sold?
"Big Brother With Benefits" is a perfect description of all these services.
Always be aware of what you're putting out there. Heck, Google basically steals anything you put on a crawlable Web page. It doesn't matter where it is on the Web, Silicon Valley will eventually get to it.
I remember a couple years ago while I was online dating that a couple of the sites were free. Both were fronts for subscription megalith Match.com. One of them was a blatant data-mining scheme and the other was designed to cast as wide of a net and get profiles of as many single people as they could, and probably was also data-mining. Not that I minded; I was deliberately vague about certain personal details I don't really want known, and I would rather part with non-identifiable data for a free service than pay money to let them do the same thing. (For the record, the sites didn't get me anywhere. Next time I feel like I'm ready to get back into dating, I am paying...just not for any site in the Match.com portfolio.)
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Do you think Credit Karma is 'free'?
Do you think all those DNA registries are 'cheap'?
Do you think anything you do on Amazon/Netflix/Facebook/Twitter/Cellphone/Alexa isn't recorded, packaged, and sold?
"Big Brother With Benefits" is a perfect description of all these services.
The Beast rises.