{"id":225230,"date":"2026-03-19T04:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T08:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/19\/whats-private-about-your-privacy\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T04:01:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T08:01:00","slug":"whats-private-about-your-privacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/19\/whats-private-about-your-privacy\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Private About Your Privacy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s Private About Your Privacy?<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.independent.com\/2026\/03\/19\/whats-private-about-your-privacy\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-03-19 04:01:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.independent.com<\/a><\/p>\n

The Homebuyers Privacy Protection Act (HR 2808) changed life for all Americans without most of them even knowing it last year. Have you ever applied for a mortgage, and then all of sudden, your phone won\u2019t stop ringing with lenders promising you the deal of the century? You wonder how they know so much about your personal situation. You wonder if you are supposed to reply to any of these folks. Maybe you wonder if there is a problem with your loan in process. No matter what, you probably felt annoyed, possibly scared, or confused. Lame, right?<\/p>\n

What actually happened was that your credit inquiry information was sold by the credit bureaus as a \u201ctrigger lead.\u201d No, your lender didn\u2019t do anything wrong. No, your information wasn\u2019t leaked. Yes, it shouldn\u2019t happen if you had opted out under the Fair Credit Reporting Act\u2019s (FCRA) online offering (optoutprescreen.com).<\/p>\n

Yes, it seems like this is something that shouldn\u2019t happen in today\u2019s multi-factored, privacy-focused financial policy world. Well finally, the Homeowner Privacy Protection Act has changed this.<\/p>\n

Previously, credit bureaus were allowed to sell certain points of data to various lenders \u2014 your name, phone number, and amount of credit requested, to name a few. Because of this, I know many loan officers that would input a fake phone number before running credit. Some would input $1 for the loan amount requested, or input the client\u2019s address as 1234 Main Street, to defer accurate data from preying salesmen.<\/p>\n

Now, the FCRA permits lenders to acquire these types of leads only if the lender intends to extend a \u201cfirm offer of credit\u201d to the consumer. What is that? Well, it means that the folks buying this data must feel they have enough information to genuinely offer credit based on the information at hand. And anyone who has applied for a mortgage loan in the last 10 years knows that there\u2019s way more than the credit report analyzed to render a credit decision.<\/p>\n

This act…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s Private About Your Privacy? https:\/\/www.independent.com\/2026\/03\/19\/whats-private-about-your-privacy\/ Publish Date: 2026-03-19 04:01:00 Source Domain: www.independent.com The Homebuyers…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225230"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}