Fair Credit Reporting Act and Consumer Reporting Agencies' right to your credit information.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act is the federal law that regulates the collection and use of your credit information. The law controls how your information is used by the Credit Reporting Agencies, but it doesn't grant them any rights of priviledges to that information because your credit info is mostly public data. Everything in your credit report is information either publicly available or freely provided or submitted to the reporting agencies by your creditors.

When you get a home laon, auto loan, or credit card your sign a contract granting the creditors the right to provide info they collect about you to the reporting agencies. Essentially, you surrender to the reporting agencies the right to handle and collate your credit info every time you apply for credit. Anyone can act as a credit reporting agency, gathering whatever credit info on you they can find and providing it to would be creditors for a fee, so long as they abide by the restrictions set out in the FCRA (and break no other laws in the process of collecting the data).

Your credit information does not belong to you, it is merely a description of your credit activities. A private investigator can legally follow you around town, record and track all of your movements, and sell that info to interested parties. Information about where you've been and what you've done does not belong to you, so no one needs your permission to use it. Credit information is just where you've been and what you've done as far as credit is concerned, and it's not yours to control either. People's personal privacy is a concern to the state, so PIs have to be licensed just to make sure qualified people are doing the legal stalking. People's financial privacy is also of concern to the state, and the FCRA ensures those who traffic in your credit info do so according to guidelines. Because it is important to know your credit the law also provides that the collected info has to be available to you free of charge once a year.

So, no law gives the agencies the right to collect your info, because anyone is free to do so. The closest thing to such a law is the Fair Credit Reporting Act which regulates how agencies use your info. By getting credit you voluntarily buy into the credit reporting system and give up the privacy of some of your information in exchange for the lifestyle advantages credit. The only way to keep your info out of the hands of the reporting agencies is to not get credit at all.