Oregon woman awarded $18.6 million after Equifax failed to fix errors on her credit report

[SheilaT]

54. It can also make life difficult for those children themselves.

If you want to name your child Frederick Asswipe Fotheringay VI that's of course up to you. However, the roman numeral after the name never impresses me, just reminds me that it's an indication of a severe lack of original ideas for five or so generations. I happen to think each kid ought to be given a different first name from the parent's first name. That's just me.

And yeah, everyone needs to be very careful about exactly what information is used and so on, but trust me, to simply blame incompetent credit agencies absolutely misses the larger point. Again, I am NOT defending what Equifax did, and I sincerely hope the award stands, because they deserve it. But every single person with a non-unique name, of whom there are plenty even if no one ever again named a kid exactly after Dad or Mom, can be faced with that problem.

This wasn't such a big problem when the population was significantly smaller, even fifty years ago. Even then credit bureaus could screw up and combine files because of the same or similar names. Computerization has just made this process possible to occur faster and on a larger scale. Thinking that if we get rid of credit bureaus the problem will be magically solved is, well it's just magical thinking.