@Anonymous great explanation! Could not remember the details and you hit it right to the point! This new lock/unlock is more credit bureau "NONSENSE" ... 
@Anonymous wrote:
@DaveInAZ wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:What Experian won’t tell you is that credit locks aren’t regulated like freezes are. They aren’t subject to service up time, backup methods of removal, or legal consequences like credit freezes are. It’s worth the less than 2 minutes to fill out a form to have the legal protection afforded by a credit freeze, not to mention the ability to remove by phone or mail if the online system is down.
With all due respect, I'm just a tad skeptical of "legal consequences" and "legal protection" supposedly provided by a security freeze. If Experian does and oopsie and lets someone access my credit report while I have a freeze in place I'm going to get a free Harvard legal team to sue their pants off???? Equifax let someone access the personal data files for over half the country, hid that little detail for months, and almost two years later there has not been a single legal conviction or any penalties as a result. The only legal consequences were a couple of the exec management members were convicted of insider trading for thinking it might be a neat trick to sell their stock before the rest of the country found out about Equifax's gross negligence and incompetence.
To each their own. I'm completely confident with the security my credit locks provide me, and for me they are more convenient. Security freezes were designed to completely shut down all access to the credit reports after somone who has been the victim of identity theft for the months to years it takes to straigthen all that out. Credit locks were designed to provide protection to prevent identity theft in the first place.
Credit locks and credit freezes are meant to do the exact same thing since the law was past mandating free credit freezes as a result of the Equifax breach.
I don’t care as much about the legal protections as I do the failsafe ones. TransUnion had an outage on their website for almost a month where I couldn’t log in to manage my freeze but I made a quick phone call and punched my social and PIN in and lifted it over the phone. Like all things that are regulated, the credit bureaus are being held to a higher standard on freezes and can do whatever they please with locks.
Its up to the individual consumer to decide what they value more in the end but it’s ridiculous that the CRAs aren’t honest about there being a difference up front.
Legally, you hit the nail on the head!!! 