Wait... are you saying that talking about an ex-colleague with anyone (without filing a bunch of paperwork or something) is a "giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act"?

Yes. But to be clear, since "anyone" is vague: I specifically mean talking to hiring teams, about ex-colleagues who haven't given them permission to ask around in the first place.

Because the Fair Credit Reporting Act governs background checks. It isn't limited to money, or to scoring -- it covers any third party that reports data about you, for the sake of determining if you're eligible for anything from a loan to an apartment to a job. The language of it is broad enough that it doesn't just cover your spending and payment habits, but extends to your general habits, criminal history, personal character, and "mode of living."

I'm saying the behavior normalized by recruiters is a giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Because when they proactively reach out to random individuals you worked with, to ask you for your views on them as a reference, without your consent, that is an exploit. It is a workaround. It is skirting the actual intentions of the thing, because its scope is limited to "agencies" -- which, no matter how broad that term might be, still ultimately means third party data collectors.

If something your boss said about you came up on a background check, you would have a right to know about it. But if someone on a hiring team goes behind your back to that same boss, for those same comments, that is widely accepted as fine and normal.

That's the part that's a real problem.

If you're making hiring decisions based on someone else's statements about the applicant, that someone's statements, if false, are pretty much the definition of defamation in the US.

It's perfectly just that the applicant get to know if the reason they didn't get a job is because their bitter former boss defamed them.