Equifax was founded as Retail Credit Company in 1899. The company grew quickly and by 1920 had offices throughout the US and Canada. By the 1960s, Retail Credit Company was one of the nation’s largest credit bureaus, holding files on millions of American citizens. Unlike the two other bureaus, the company was formed to be exactly what it is today, a database on the personal credit histories of US consumers.

Retail Credit Company’s extensive information holdings, and its willingness to sell them to anyone, attracted criticism of the company in the 1960s and 1970s. These included that it collected “…facts, statistics, inaccuracies and rumors… about virtually every phase of a person’s life; his marital troubles, jobs, school history, childhood, sex life, and political activities.” The company was also alleged to reward its employees for collecting negative information on consumers. Because of the lack of legal oversight at the time, consumers had no right to see the information collected on them. Many didn’t even know the files existed.

As a result, when the company moved to computerize its records, which would lead to much wider availability of the personal information it held, the US Congress held hearings in 1971. From Wired Magazine:

One of the most vocal critics of Equifax was Columbia University Professor Alan Westin, who attacked the company for its cavalier attitude toward the accuracy of its information on consumers, and for giving out that information to practically anyone who asked for it. An article he wrote criticizing Retail Credit appeared in March 1970:

“Retail Credit files may include ‘facts, statistics, inaccuracies and rumors’ … about virtually every phase of a person’s life; his marital troubles, jobs, school history, childhood, sex life, and political activities.”….“Almost inevitably, transferring information from a manual file to a computer triggers a threat to civil liberties, to privacy, to a man’s very humanity because access is so simple,” argued Westin in the Times. The effect, he continued, is that it becomes harder and harder for people to escape from the mistakes of their past, or to move in search of a second chance.

Those hearings resulted in the passage of the Fair Credit Reporting Act in October 1971, which gave consumers rights regarding information stored about them in corporate databanks. Whether or not Equifax, as the company was known after the hearings were over and the passage of the FCRA, actually contained information about a person’s private life such as a person’s sex life seems to be born out by the documentary “the Secret History of the Credit Card“:

Chris Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research center says, CRAs back then reported only negative financial information as well as “lifestyle” information culled from newspapers and other sources — information such as sexual orientation, drinking habits, and cleanliness.

From Equifax’s website, some of the consumer information solutions it offers:

• The Lifestyle Selector®
• TotalSource XL ™
• Equifax Credit Data
• Equifax Prescreen Solutions
• Connexus®
• They also provide employment screening services through their purchase of the Work Number in 2008,

This is part 3 of 3 in our History of the Credit Bureaus Series. Read Part 1, the History of Experian and Part 2 of 3 the History of TransUnion here.

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