Experian's tech chief defends credit scores: 'We're not Palantir'

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neilai Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Alex Lintner, who is the CEO of technology and software solutions at Xperian, the credit reporting company. Xperian is one of those multinationals that's so big and complicated that it has multiple CEOs all over the world.

So Alex and I spent quite a lot of time at the beginning simply talking through the decoder questions. so I could understand how Experian is structured, how it works, and how the kinds of decisions that Alex makes actually work in practice. There's a lot there, especially since Alex is in charge of the company's entire tech arm. That means he oversees big operations like security and privacy, and now, of course, AI. All of which is always important, but even more critical when you factor in what kinds of information Xperion collects and stores about, well, literally everyone.

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