Experian plc is a multinational data broker and consumer credit reporting company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland.

[7] In addition to its credit services, Experian also sells decision analytic and marketing assistance to businesses, including individual fingerprinting and targeting.

[8] Its consumer services include online access to credit history and products meant to protect from fraud and identity theft.

[13] Just one month later, the two firms sold Experian to The Great Universal Stores Limited in Manchester, England, a retail conglomerate with millions of customers paying for goods on credit (later renamed GUS).

In the British version there are 15 main groups, broken down into 89 hyperspecific categories, from "corporate chieftains" to "golden empty-nesters" which can be taken down to the level of individual postcodes.

[26] In 2013 a Vietnamese national, Hieu Minh Ngo,[27] was charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with attempting to sell personally identifiable information on hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents.

However, Ngo testified under oath that the information he had sold to identity thieves had actually been acquired from another hacker based in Russia, and not Experian or Court Ventures.

This is probably the most severe data breach in history, as it includes names, social security numbers, income tax declaration forms, addresses and other private information on nearly all Brazilian citizens.

[39] In late 2022 a flaw was revealed in Experian's website which allowed access to individual credit reports without full authentication, simply by changing the last part of the URL being requested from "/acr/oow/" to "/acr/report.