Day: October 19, 2017

This past spring, David Mifflin looked at his credit report online and saw that something wasn’t right.

There were inquiries from Chase Bank about an application for a credit card that someone was trying to open in his name. Mifflin, who lives in San Antonio, Texas, says he called the bank and was told the identity thieves “had my Social Security number.”

He set up fraud alerts with the three major credit reporting companies. But he says the fraudulent attempts to open credit cards continued “multiple times a week, multiple times a day.”

The Equifax security breach — the largest known theft of Social Security numbers in history — has lawmakers, prosecutors and identity theft victims like Mifflin angry with the company. The revelations have put a spotlight on the industry, raising some important and deeper questions and sparking calls for tough new rules to reshape the credit reporting landscape.

Mifflin soon found himself talking to collectors about debts he didn’t recognize. He kept seeing inquiries to open credit cards on his credit report and would call the bank to say “don’t issue those cards, it’s fraud.” He says he would wake up in the middle of the night worried and angry.

Even to discover any of this, Mifflin says he’d had to sign up for a service with the credit reporting firm Experian, paying $26 a month. He says that was frustrating too, to have to pay some $300 a year “just to get my information that they’re collecting.”

“That’s my information; I should have access to that at any time for free,” he says.

Mifflin put a freeze on his credit report with the credit bureaus. That apparently stopped anybody from opening new accounts. But he had to pay more money for that.

Then the Equifax hack came to light, involving stolen Social Security numbers and other records of more than 145 million Americans. “When I heard that, my anger level really, really kicked up after that,” Mifflin says. He doesn’t know if he was a victim of that hack. The Equifax website told him his information may have been stolen.

All this got Mifflin asking questions that many lawmakers are now asking too:

• How can these credit reporting firms collect our information, and sell it for a profit, without asking our permission?
• Why do they have the right to charge us to see our own credit report regularly, or to freeze it, especially when they aren’t doing a good enough job protecting our information from hackers?

“It’s incredible power they have and they hold us just sort of hostage,” Mifflin says. “I’d like to see some major reform.”

So would a growing number of lawmakers and regulators. Maura Healey of Massachusetts is one more than 30 state attorneys general investigating Equifax. She was the first to file a lawsuit against the company in the wake of the massive hack.

“I find this incredibly irresponsible and outrageous,” she says. “The company and its executives need to pay and reforms need to be brought to this industry.”

Healey is working with Massachusetts lawmakers on new legislation to require better security. It would also block any company from buying consumers’ credit reports or scores without their permission.

“For far too long these companies have been out there collecting our personal data,” Healey says. “We never gave them permission to collect it, let alone to sell it to other entities.”

In Congress, Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., introduced a bill that would force the credit reporting firms to get federal cybersecurity reviews and to stop using Social Security numbers to identify people.

“You could develop technology very easily that would allow people to go to an app on their phone to put a credit freeze on free of charge,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told an industry spokesman at a Senate Banking Committee hearing Tuesday. “That ought to be a minimum.”

A bill introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., would require free credit freezes. And several proposals in Congress would also give Americans more access to their credit reports for free.

Chris Hoofnagle, a cybersecurity expert at Berkeley Law school, says all of these measures would fundamentally change the credit system. Currently, he says, “every second of your existence someone can come along and pretend to be you, get your consumer report, and get a new credit card or an auto loan in your name.”

Hoofnagle says your credit report should be frozen by default and then you could unfreeze it to, say, buy a car.

Andrew Smith, representing the Consumer Data Industry Association at the hearing, said the industry already faces enough regulation, and that the credit bureaus play an important role in the economy by helping consumers get access to credit.

It’s not your imagination: Tiny tots are spending dramatically more time with tiny screens.

Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization, just released new numbers on media use by children 8 and under. The nationally representative parent survey found that 98 percent of homes with children now have a mobile device — such as a tablet or smartphone.

That’s a huge leap from 52 percent just six years ago. Mobile devices are now just as common as televisions in family homes.

And, the average amount of time our smallest children spend with those handheld devices each day is skyrocketing too: from 5 minutes a day in 2011, to 15 minutes a day in 2013, to 48 minutes a day in 2017.

James Steyer, CEO and founder of Common Sense Media, calls this “a seismic shift” that is “fundamentally redefining childhood experiences” with “enormous implications we have just begun to understand.”

Other eye-grabbing highlights from the survey:

• 42 percent of young children now have their very own tablet device — up from 7 percent four years ago and less than 1 percent in 2011.
• Screen media use among infants under 2 appears to be trending downward, from 58 minutes a day in 2013 to 42 minutes in 2017. This decline correlates with a drop in sales of DVDs, and particularly those marketed at babies, such as Baby Einstein. Updated pediatricians’ recommendations released last year call for limited, but not banned, screen use among the youngest set.
• Nearly half, 49 percent, of children 8 or under “often or sometimes” use screens in the hour before bedtime, which experts say is bad for sleep habits.
• 42 percent of parents say the TV is on “always” or “most of the time” in their home, whether anyone is watching or not. Research has shown this so-called “background TV” reduces parent-child interaction, which in turn can hurt language development.

The growth of mobile is a dramatic change. But other aspects of kids’ media use have been more stable over time, this periodic census reveals.

When you take every source of screen media together, children 8 and under spend an average of about two-and-a-quarter hours (2:19) a day, a figure that’s flat from 2011 (2:16). That implies mobile is apparently cannibalizing, not adding on to, the boob tube and other types of media.

And, whether young kids are looking at small screens or big ones, most often they are passively watching videos, not using interactive apps. Video watching has dominated children’s media use for decades.

Finally, young children are still being read to by their parents about 30 minutes a day.

More questions than answers

What does all this mean?

Researchers don’t really know, and that concerns observers like Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra, the founder of Children and Screens: The Institute of Digital Media and Child Development.

“How different is the brain of a child who’s never known anything but sustained digital media exposure to the brain of her parents, or even older siblings? she asks. “And what are the implications for parents, educators or policymakers?”

Hurst-Della Pietra says these are questions “we’re only beginning to ask, let alone answer.” Children and Screens is getting ready to release its own series of reports that sets an agenda for future research.

Steyer, of Common Sense Media, agrees. “I would argue there are big implications for brain and social-emotional development, many of which we don’t know the answer to,” he says.

The public conversation about kids and screens is somewhat schizophrenic. American schools, even preschools, are buying millions of electronic devices, and there are tens of thousands of apps meant to enhance learning for even the smallest babies.

On the other hand, doctors warn, and parents worry, about negative effects from too much screen time, ranging from obesity to anxiety.

One part of the Common Sense report that really plays up this contradiction is the section on the so-called digital divide. The phrase reflects the idea that learning how to use computers and the Internet at home helps kids get ahead in school and in life.

Unlike in previous years, this census shows both rich and poor families now appear to have nearly equal access to smartphones. At the same time, kids from lower-income families are spending twice as much time with screens daily as those from the most advantaged families. Is this a boon or a danger?

Lynn Schofield Clark at the University of Denver studies media use with a focus on disadvantaged youth and youth of color. She says the missing ingredient in understanding the real impact of the digital divide is time.

That is, parenting time: showing a kid how to use a laptop, how to do Internet research, picking out highly rated educational apps or steering a child toward programs with positive messages.

“People who have more advantages have more time and education to help their kids use the technology,” she explains. “We have set up a society where it’s structurally very difficult for families to spend time together.”