Year: 2019

Understanding what makes something offensive or hurtful is difficult enough that many people can’t figure it out, let alone AI systems. And people of color are frequently left out of AI training sets. So it’s little surprise that Alphabet/Google -spawned Jigsaw manages to trip over both of these issues at once, flagging slang used by black Americans as toxic.

To be clear, the study was not specifically about evaluating the company’s hate speech detection algorithm, which has faced issues before. Instead it is cited as a contemporary attempt to computationally dissect speech and assign a “toxicity score” — and that it appears to fail in a way indicative of bias against black American speech patterns.

The researchers, at the University of Washington, were interested in the idea that databases of hate speech currently available might have racial biases baked in — like many other datasets that suffered from a lack of inclusive practices during formation.

They looked at a handful of such databases, essentially thousands of tweets annotated by people as being “hateful,” “offensive,” “abusive,” and so on. These databases were also analyzed to find language strongly associated with African American English or white-aligned English.

Combining these two sets basically let them see whether white or black vernacular had a higher or lower chance of being labeled offensive. Lo and behold, black-aligned English was much more likely to be labeled offensive.

For both datasets, we uncover strong associations between inferred AAE dialect and various hate speech categories, specifically the “offensive” label from DWMW 17 (r = 0.42) and the “abusive” label from FDCL 18 (r = 0.35), providing evidence that dialect-based bias is present in these corpora.

The experiment continued with the researchers sourcing their own annotations for tweets, and found that similar biases appeared. But by “priming” annotators with the knowledge that the person tweeting was likely black or using black-aligned English, the likelihood that they would label a tweet offensive dropped considerably.

This isn’t to say necessarily that annotators are all racist or anything like that. But the job of determining what is and isn’t offensive is a complex one socially and linguistically, and obviously awareness of the speaker’s identity is important in some cases, especially in cases where terms once used derisively to refer to that identity have been reclaimed.

What’s all this got to do with Alphabet, or Jigsaw, or Google? Well, Jigsaw is a company built out of Alphabet — which we all really just think of as Google by another name — with the intention of helping moderate online discussion by automatically detecting (among other things) offensive speech. Its PerspectiveAPI lets people input a snippet of text and receive a “toxicity score.”

As part of the experiment, the researchers fed a bunch of the tweets in question to Perspective. What they got saw was “correlations between dialects/groups in our datasets and the Perspective toxicity scores. All correlations are significant, which indicates potential racial bias for all datasets.”

So basically, they found that Perspective was way more likely to label black speech as toxic, and white speech otherwise. Remember, this isn’t a model thrown together on the back of a few thousand tweets — it’s an attempt at a commercial moderation product.

As this comparison wasn’t the primary goal of the research, but rather a byproduct, it should not be taken as some kind of massive takedown of Jigsaw’s work. On the other hand, the differences shown are very significant and quite in keeping with the rest of the team’s findings. At the very least it is, as with the other datasets evaluated, a signal that the processes involved in their creation need to be reevaluated.

I’ve asked the researchers for a bit more information on the paper and will update this post if I hear back. In the meantime you can read the full paper, which was presented at the Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Florence, below:

The Risk of Racial Bias in Hate Speech Detection by TechCrunch on Scribd

VMware today confirmed that it is in talks to acquire software development platform Pivotal Software, the service best known for commercializing the open-source Cloud Foundry platform. The proposed transaction would see VMware acquire all outstanding Pivotal Class A stock for $15 per share, a significant markup over Pivotal’s current share price (which unsurprisingly shot up right after the announcement).

Pivotal’s shares have struggled since the company’s IPO in April 2018. The company was originally spun out of EMC Corporation (now DellEMC) and VMware in 2012 to focus on Cloud Foundry, an open-source software development platform that is currently in use by the majority of Fortune 500 companies. A lot of these enterprises are working with Pivotal to support their Cloud Foundry efforts. Dell itself continues to own the majority of VMware and Pivotal, and VMware also owns an interest in Pivotal already and sells Pivotal’s services to its customers as well. It’s a bit of an ouroboros of a transaction.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry was always the company’s main product, but it also offered additional consulting services on top of that. Despite improving its execution since going public, Pivotal still lost $31.7 million in its last financial quarter as its stock price traded at just over half of the IPO price. Indeed, the $15 per share VMware is offering is identical to Pivotal’s IPO price.

An acquisition by VMware would bring Pivotal’s journey full circle, though this is surely not the journey the Pivotal team expected. VMware is a Cloud Foundry Foundation platinum member, together with Pivotal, DellEMC, IBM, SAP and Suse, so I wouldn’t expect any major changes in VMware’s support of the overall open-source ecosystem behind Pivotal’s core platform.

It remains to be seen whether the acquisition will indeed happen, though. In a press release, VMware acknowledged the discussion between the two companies but noted that “there can be no assurance that any such agreement regarding the potential transaction will occur, and VMware does not intend to communicate further on this matter unless and until a definitive agreement is reached.” That’s the kind of sentence lawyers like to write. I would be quite surprised if this deal didn’t happen, though.

Buying Pivotal would also make sense in the grand scheme of VMware’s recent acquisitions. Earlier this year, the company acquired Bitnami and last year, it acquired Heptio, the startup founded by two of the three co-founders of the Kubernetes project, which now forms the basis of many new enterprise cloud deployments and, most recently, Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

International money transfer startup TransferWise’s debit card is now available in Australia and New Zealand, with a Singapore launch expected by the end of this year as the company expands its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. TransferWise’s debit card, which features low, transparent fees and exchange rates, first launched in the United Kingdom and Europe last year before arriving in the United States in June. Since its launch, the company claims the debit card has been used for 15 million transactions.

Australian and New Zealand customers will have access to the TransferWise Platinum debit Mastercard (a business debit card is also available). Cards are linked to TransferWise accounts, which give holders bank account numbers and details in multiple countries, making it easier and cheaper to send and receive multiple currencies. The company says that over the past year, customers have deposited more than $10 billion in their accounts.

TransferWise’s debit cards allow users to spend in more than 40 currencies at real exchange rates. In an email, co-founder and CEO Kristo Käärmann told TechCrunch that TransferWise decided to launch its debit card in Australia and New Zealand because its business there has already been growing quickly. “In addition to responding to customer demand, launching the card in Australia and New Zealand was also driven by the fact that Aussies and Kiwis are being overcharged by banks for using their own money abroad. It is expensive to use debit, travel and credit cards for spending or withdrawals,” he said.

Käärmann added that “independent research conducted by Capital Economics showed that Australians lost $2.14 billion last year alone just for using their bank issued card abroad. This is because banks and other providers charge transaction fees every time someone uses their card abroad, plus an inflated exchange rate. Similarly, in New Zealand, Kiwis lost $1 billion simply for using their card abroad.”

One of TransferWise’s competitive advantages is that unlike most legacy banking and money transfer services, its accounts and cards were designed from the start to be used internationally. “While there are existing multi-currency cards that exist in Australia and New Zealand, they are prohibitively expensive to use. For example in Australia, the TransferWise Platinum debit Mastercard is on average 11 times cheaper than most travel, debit, prepaid and credit cards,” Käärmann said.

TransferWise cards don’t have transaction fees or exchange rate markups and cardholders are allowed to withdraw up to AUD $350 every 30 days for free at any ATM in the world.

The company is currently talking to regulators in several Asian countries, a process that can take up to two years, Käärmann said. It was recently granted a remittance license in Malaysia and plan to make its remittance service available there by end of this year.

Flatfair, a London-based fintech that lets landlords offer “deposit-free” renting to tenants, has raised $11 million in funding.

The Series A round is led by Index Ventures, with participation from Revolt Ventures, Adevinta, Greg Marsh (founder of Onefinestay), Jeremy Helbsy (former Savills CEO), and Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise co-founder).

With the new capital, Flatfair says it plans to hire a “significant” number of product engineers, data scientists and business development specialists.

The startup will also invest in building out new features as it looks to expand its platform with “a focus on making renting fairer and more transparent for landlords and tenants”.

“With the average deposit of £1,110 across England and Wales being just shy of the national living wage, tenants struggle to pay expensive deposits when moving into their new home, often paying double deposits in between tenancies,” Flatfair co-founder and CEO Franz Doerr tells me when asked to frame the problem the startup has set out to solve.

“This creates cash flow issues for tenants, in particular for those with families. Some tenants end up financing the deposit through friends and family or even accrue expensive credit card debt. The latter can have a negative impact on the tenants credit rating, further restricting important access to credit for things that really matter in a tenants life”.

To remedy this, Fatfair’s “insurance-backed” payment technology provides tenants with the option to pay a per-tenancy membership fee instead of a full deposit. They do this by authorising their bank account via debit card with Flatfair, and when it is time to move out, any end-of-tenancy charges are handled via the Flatfair portal, including dispute resolution.

So, for example, rather than having to find a rental deposit equivalent to a month’s rent, which in theory you would get back once you move out sans any end-of-tenancy charges, with Fatfair you pay about a quarter of that as a non-refundable fee.

Of course, there are pros and cons to both, but for tenants that are cashflow restricted, the startup’s model at least offers an alternative financing option.

In addition, tenants registered with Flatfair are given a “trust score” that can go up over time, helping them move tenancy more easily in the future. The company is also trialing the use of Open Banking to help with credit checks by analysing transaction history to verify that you have paid rent regularly and on time in the past.

Landlords are said to like the model. Current Flatfair clients include major property owners and agents, such as Greystar, Places for People, and CBRE. “Before Flatfair, deposits were the only form of tenancy security that landlords trusted,” claims Doerr.

In the event of a dispute over end-of-tenancy charges, both landlords and tenants are asked to upload evidence to the Flatfair platform and to try to settle the disagreement amicably. If they can’t, the case is referred by Flatfair to an independent adjudicator via mydeposits, a U.K. government-backed deposit scheme the company is partnering with.

“In such a case, all the evidence is submitted to mydeposits and they come back with a decision within 24 hours,” explains Doerr. “[If] the adjudicator says that the tenant owes money, we invoice the tenant who has then has 5 days to pay. If the tenant doesn’t pay, we charge her bank account… What’s key here is having the evidence. People are generally happy to pay if the costs are fair and where clear evidence exists, there’s less to argue about”.

More broadly, Doerr says there’s significant scope for digitisation across the buy-to-let sector and that the big vision for Flatfair is to create an “operating system” for rentals.

“The fundamental idea is to streamline processes around the tenancy to create revenue and savings opportunities for landlords and agents, whilst promoting a better customer experience, affordability, and fairness for tenants,” he says.

“We’re working on a host of exciting new features that we’ll be able to talk about in the coming months, but we see opportunities to automate more functions within the lifecycle of a tenancy and think there are a number of big efficiency savings to be made by unifying old systems, dumping old paper systems and streamlining cumbersome admin. Offering a scoring system for tenants is a great way of encouraging better behaviour and given housing represents most people’s biggest expense, it’s only right renters should be able to build up their credit score and benefit from paying on time”.

U.S. stock markets plummeted today as recession fears continue to grow.

Yesterday’s good news about a reprieve on tariffs for U.S. consumer imports was undone by increasing concerns over economic indicators pointing to a potential global recession coming within the next year.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 800 points on Wednesday — its largest decline of the year — while the S&P 500 fell by 85 points and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 240 points.

The downturn in the markets came a day after the Dow closed up 373 points after the U.S. Trade Representative announced a delay in many of the import taxes imposed by the Trump administration planned to impose on Chinese goods.

In the U.S. it was concerns over the news that the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes had dipped below the yield of two-year notes. It’s an indicator that investors think the short term prospects for a country’s economic outlook are better than the long-term outlook for economic health.

China’s industrial and retail sectors both slowed significantly in July. Industrial production including manufacturing, mining and utilities grew by 4.8 percent in July (a steep decline from 6.3% growth in June).  Meanwhile retail sales in the country slowed to 7.6 percent, down from 9.8 percent in June.

Germany also posted declines over the summer months indicating that its economy had contracted by 0.1% in the three months to June.

Globally, the protracted trade war between the U.S. and China are weighing on economies — as are concerns about what a hard Brexit would mean for the economies in the European Union .

The stocks of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, and Salesforce, were all off by somewhere between 2.5% and 4.5% in today’s trading.

Sleeper is looking to take on fantasy league apps from major players like ESPN and has amassed venture funding from Silicon Valley investors to take down them down.

The Bay Area startup is aiming to treat a fantasy football league more like a social platform than a loose jumble of league mechanics, distinguishing itself as a simple and free, ad-free option.

Sleeper has done limited press as it has been ramping up its apps over the past two seasons, but the team has been courting the interest of investors to scale the product, raising over $7 million from VCs to date. The company closed a $5.3 million Series A late last year led by General Catalyst. In early 2017, the startup also closed a $2 million seed led by Birchmere Ventures with participation from Uber co-founder Garrett Camp’s startup studio Expa.

There isn’t much in terms of monetization options at the moment, CEO Nan Wang tells TechCrunch that the focus right now is “amassing a large base of users and making it the stickiest and highest engagement product in the category.”

Wang says the app’s users spend 50 minutes per day on average during the season, numbers he calls “Instagram-like.” The main contributor to that number seems to be that chat is always a swipe away and that all of the actions that are happening during the season show up inside chats to encourage engagement.

This unifies the experience for users, many of whom have had to piecemeal their experience by using a WhatsApp or GroupMe group in addition to the other fantasy league apps that they’ve been using. Sleeper’s more differentiated UI seems to be largely popular among early vocal users as well as the up-to-the-minute notifications that deliver league updates.

Poaching users from other platforms is definitely a priority, but Wang says the team has really been looking at how to nab users who have stayed away from the convoluted confusion of fantasy leagues as well. Taking on the leading apps from ESPN, Yahoo and NFL can be daunting, another stress for the younger startup is just how tight the user acquisition window is, though things compound quickly if you can create one loyal user that brings their entire league to the platform.

“The user acquisition window for fantasy football leagues is strongest from the second week of August until the first week of September. Historically, we’ve seen that about 70% of users create their leagues in that three-week window,” Wang tells me.

The funding has been used to build out its team, which is still just 10 full-time employees, as well as expand their ambitions beyond fantasy football alone into other sports including basketball and soccer.

The 2019 Audi e-tron has become the first battery-electric vehicle to earn a top safety rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an achievement that Tesla and other electric models like the Chevy Bolt have not been able to capture.

Scoring an IIHS top safety award isn’t easy. A vehicle has to earn good ratings in six crashworthiness evaluations, as well as an advanced or superior rating for front crash prevention and a good headlight rating.

IIHS said Wednesday that the e-tron fulfills the criteria to earn a top safety rating with standard equipment. The vehicle performed well in crashworthiness testing, earning good ratings in the driver-side small overlap front, passenger-side small overlap front, moderate overlap front, side, roof strength and head restraint tests, according to IIHS.

The SUV’s standard front crash prevention system rated superior in IIHS track tests. It avoided a collision in the 25-mph test and reduced its impact speed by an average of 11 mph in the 12-mph test. Its forward collision warning component meets National Highway Traffic Safety Administration criteria.

The award provides a much needed boost to the e-tron. There’s a lot riding on the e-tron, the German automaker’s first mass-produced electric vehicle. And while TechCrunch’s Matt Burns found it quick, comfortable and familiar, the vehicle has had a rocky start that included a voluntary recall in the U.S. due to the risk of battery fire.

Tesla has gotten close to the top safety pick designation. A Tesla Model S was tested in 2017 and performed well, but fell short of earning the top score due to poor headlights and an “acceptable” score in the small overlap crash test. The IIHS has never tested the Tesla Model X.

The electric automaker does have another chance. This time, it’s with the Tesla Model 3, which IIHS is currently testing, according to a recent tweet from the organization.

The Model 3 has already achieved an all-around five-star safety rating from the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration. Despite the high marks, NHTSA and Tesla have tussled over how the automaker has characterized the rating in an October 7 blog post when it said the Model 3 had achieved the lowest probability of injury of any vehicle the agency ever tested.

Earlier this month, Hyundai hydrogen fuel cell SUV, the Nexo, became the first fuel cell vehicle to be tested and to earn IIHS’s top safety award. 

Shout out to all the savvy enterprise software startuppers. Here’s a quick, two-part money-saving reminder. Part one: TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 is right around the corner on September 5, and you have only two days left to buy an early-bird ticket and save yourself $100. Part two: for every Session ticket you buy, you get one free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019.

Save money and increase your ROI by completing one simple task: buy your early-bird ticket today.

About 1,000 members of enterprise software’s power-house community will join us for a full day dedicated to exploring the current and future state of enterprise software. It’s certainly tech’s 800-pound gorilla — a $500 billion industry. Some of the biggest names and brightest minds will be on hand to discuss critical issues all players face — from early-stage startups to multinational conglomerates.

The day’s agenda features panel discussions, main-stage talks, break-out sessions and speaker Q&As on hot topics including intelligent marketing automation, the cloud, data security, AI and quantum, just to name a few. You’ll hear from people like SAP CEO Bill McDermott, Aaron Levie, Box co-founder, Jim Clarke, Director of Quantum Hardware at Intel and many many more.

Customer experience is always a hot topic, so be sure to catch this main-stage panel discussion with Amit Ahuja (Adobe), Julie Larson-Green (Qualtrics) and Peter Reinhardt (Segment).

The Trials and Tribulations of Experience Management: As companies gather more data about their customers and employees, it should theoretically improve their experience, but myriad challenges face companies as they try to pull together information from a variety of vendors across disparate systems, both in the cloud and on prem. How do you pull together a coherent picture of your customers, while respecting their privacy and overcoming the technical challenges?

TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 takes place in San Francisco on September 5. Take advantage of this two-part money-saving opportunity. Buy your early-bird ticket by August 16 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) to save $100. And score a free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019 for every ticket you buy. We can’t wait to see you in September!

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Kurbo Health, a mobile weight loss solution designed to tackle childhood obesity which was acquired for $3 million by WW (the rebranded Weight Watchers), has now relaunched as Kurbo by WW — and not without some controversy. Pre-acquisition, the startup was focused on democratizing access to research, behavior modification techniques, and other tools that were previously only available through expensive programs run by hospitals or other centers.

As a WW product, however, there are concerns that parents putting kids on “diets” will lead to increased anxiety, stress, and disordered eating — in other words, Kurbo will make the problem worse, rather than solving it.

The Kurbo app first launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2014. Founder Joanna Strober, a venture investor and board member at BlueNile and eToys, explained she was driven to develop Kurbo after struggling to help her own child. Mainly, she came across programs that cost money, were held at inconvenient times for working parents, or were dubbed “obesity centers” — which no child wanted to be associated with.

Her child found eventual success with the Stanford Pediatric Weight Loss Program, but this involved in-person visits and pen-and-paper documentation.

Together with Kurbo Health’s co-founder Thea Runyan, who has a Masters in Public Health and had worked at the Stanford center for 12 years, the team realized the opportunity to bring the research to more people by creating a mobile, data-driven program for kids and families.

They licensed Stanford’s program, which then became Kurbo Health.

The company raised funds from investors including Signia Ventures, Data Collective, Bessemer Venture Partners, Promus Ventures, as well as angels like Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube; Greg Badros, former VP Engineering and Product at Facebook; and Esther Dyson (EdVenture), among others.

At launch, the app was designed to encourage healthier eating patterns without parents actually being able to see the child’s food diary. Instead, parents set a reward that was doled out simply for the child’s participation. That is, the parents couldn’t see what the child ate, specifically, which allowed them to stop playing “food police.”

Unlike adult-oriented apps like MyFitnessPal or Noom, kids wouldn’t see metrics like calories, sugars, carbs and fat, but instead had their food choices categorized as “red,” “yellow,” and “green.” However, no foods were designated as “off limits,” as it instead encouraged fewer reds and more greens.

The program also included an option for virtual coaching.

As a WW product, the program has remained somewhat the same. There are still the color-coded food categorizations and optional live coaching, via a subscription. The app also now includes tools that teach meditation, recipe videos, and games that focus on healthy lifestyles. Subscribers gain access to one-on-one 15-minute virtual sessions with coaches whose professional backgrounds include counseling, fitness and other nutrition-related fields.

However, there are also things like a place to track measurements, goals like “lose weight,” and Snapchat-style “tracking streaks.”

 

While the original program was designed to be a solution for parents with children who would have otherwise had to seek expensive medical help for obesity issues, the association with parent company and acquirer WW has led to some backlash.

Today, body positivity and fat acceptance movements have gone mainstream, encouraging people to be confident in their own bodies and not hate themselves for being overweight. The general thinking is that when people respect themselves, they become more likely to care for themselves — and this will extend to making healthier food and lifestyle choices.

Meanwhile, food tracking and dieting programs often lead to failure and shame — especially when people start to think of some food as “bad” or a “cheat,” instead of just something to be eaten in moderation. And excessive tracking can even lead to disordered eating patterns for some people, studies have found.

In addition, WW has already been under fire for extending its weight loss program to teens 13-17 for free, and the launch of what’s seen as a “dieting app for kids” certainly isn’t helping the backlash.

That said, when positive reinforcement is used correctly, it can work for weight loss. As TIME reported, the red-yellow-green traffic light approach was effective in adults in one independent study by Massachusetts General Hospital and another by presented at the Biennial Childhood Obesity Conference worked in children, with 84% reducing their BMI after 21 weeks.

“According to recent reports from the World Health Organization, childhood obesity is one of the most serious public health challenges of the 21st century. This is a global public health crisis that needs to be addressed at scale,” said Joanna Strober, co-founder of Kurbo, in a statement about the launch. “As a mom whose son struggled with his weight at a young age, I can personally attest to the importance and significance of having a solution like Kurbo by WW, which is inherently designed to be simple, fun and effective,” she said.

That said, it’s one thing for a parent to work in conjunction with a doctor to help a child with a health issue, but parents who foist a food tracking app on their kids may not get the same results. In fact, they may even cause the child to develop eating disorders that weren’t present before. (And no, just because a child is overweight, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re suffering from an “eating disorder.”)

 

There can be many other factors that could be causing a child’s unexpected weight gain, beyond just their interest in eating high-calorie foods. This includes health ailments, hormone or chemical imbalances, medication side effects, puberty and other growth spurts, genetics, and more.

Parents may also be part of the problem, by simply bringing unhealthy food into the house because it’s more affordable or because they aren’t aware of things like hidden sugars or how to avoid them. Or perhaps they’re putting money into a child’s school lunch account, without realizing the child is able to spend it on vending machine snacks, sodas, or off-menu items like pizza and chips.

The child may also suffer from health problems like asthma or allergies that have become an underlying issue, making it more difficult for them to be active.

In other words, a program like this is something that parents should approach with caution. And it’s certainly one where the child’s doctor should be involved at every stage — including whether or not it’s actually needed at all.

Users of credit monitoring site Credit Karmas have complained that they were served other people’s account information when they logged in.

Many took to a Reddit thread and complained on Twitter about the apparent security lapse.

“First time logging in it gave me my information, but as soon as I refreshed the screen, it gave me someone else’s info,” said one Reddit user. “Refreshed again and bam! someone else’s info — it’s like roulette.” Another user said they logged in and out several times and each time they had “full access to a different random person’s credit file,” they said.

One user told TechCrunch that after they were served another person’s full credit report, they messaged the user on LinkedIn “to let him know his data was compromised.”

Another user told us this:

The reports are split into two sections: Credit Factors — things like number of accounts, inquiries, utilization; and Credit Reports — personal information like name, address, etc.. The Credit Reports section was my own information, but the Credit Factors section definitely wasn’t. It listed four credit card accounts (I have more like 20 on my report), a missed payment (I’m 100% on time with payments), a Honda auto loan (never had one with Honda), student loan financing (mine are paid off and too old to appear on my report), and cards with an issuer that I have no relationship with (Discover).

Several screenshots seen by TechCrunch show other people’s accounts, including details about their credit card accounts and their current balance.

Another user said that the login page was pulled offline for a brief period. “We’ll be right back,” the login page read instead.

Credit Karma spokesperson Emily Donohue denied there was a data breach, but when asked would not say how many customers were affected.

“What our members experienced this morning was a technical malfunction that has now been fixed. There is no evidence of a data breach,” the statement said.

The company didn’t say for how long customers were experiencing issues.

Credit Karma offers customers free credit score monitoring and reports. The company allows users to check their scores against several major credit agencies, including Equifax, which last month was fined at least $575 million for a 2017 data breach.