Let credit bureaus fix this mess

What sheer, unmitigated cheek. Creditors and their cronies hold all the cards in the game, and now that someone has forced a play of 145-million-card pickup, they want us on our knees putting the dirty deck back together.

It’s no wonder that so few people have bothered to click through a few pages on a website to freeze their credit files even after the unprecedented hack of credit bureau Equifax. The percentage is in the low single digits.

Why bother? If one of the biggest names in the game can’t protect our data, who can?

This is just the most recent digital disaster, but it hits almost all of us — as a cyber sucker punch.

It’s particularly galling. It’s one thing to expect us to carefully build and protect our credit, as much as anyone can until misfortune strikes.

And no one should resent having to take extra steps to protect personal credit data that we can directly control, such as account numbers, passwords, addresses and so on.

But who made me a “client” of Equifax, and the other credit bureaus Experian and TransUnion, in the first place? Not me.

Actually, I’m not a client. Neither are you, probably, unless you’re a creditor. Or an employer, and if you’re a client of the credit bureaus so you can scan job applicants’ credit reports, shame on you.

The rest of us? We are neither clients nor customers of the credit bureaus. They just take our information, make up some stuff and add to it (“proprietary” data modeling) to create the credit scores that control our lives as consumers.

We are mere files of data, caught up in a system not of our making, and a financial nightmare that is not our responsibility. Let them fix it themselves.

Or not, until no one can

get a loan or credit for anything and the whole thing grinds to a halt.

“It’s a new world, one oversaturated with information about all of us,” Cathy O’Neil, author of a book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” wrote the other day in an opinion piece for Bloomberg.

She gives more credit, so to speak, to everyday people’s energy and heart for tackling something so huge, so hopeless, and so demeaning.

“Instead of pretending it’s under control, we need to get busy protecting ourselves and others,” she wrote. “This won’t happen individually, by people wrapping their phones in tin foil. It needs to be legislated.”

An act of Congress? This Congress? Right. Just bring back paper.