Is there a material difference between *the credit report I see on credit karma for myself and the credit report produced by a business or person that runs a credit report on myself?
I can't speak for Credit Karma in particular, but in general, YES.
Agencies and services often provide at least two types of reports. One is a Summary Report and it is given to consumers. The other is a detailed report and it is given to employers, lenders, law enforcement, etc. When you request a report the service will send you a Summary Report if you don't ask for a Detailed Report.
Sometimes the agency or one of its trade groups will setup a front company that only provides summary reports, and they herd consumers to it. I believe that is what Credit Karma does. You can't get the detailed report from Credit Karma because they don't offer it. Meanwhile, Credit Karma will collect your private information like email, phone number and current address, and pump it back into the system. It is a honey pot of sorts.
One service I know that provides Summary and Detailed Reports is Early Warning. Early Warning is a fintech company owned by seven of the country's largest banks. The company can authorize transactions in real time from their customer databases. They also supply traditional consumer reports.
One of my gripes with Anthem and Equifax data breach settlements is, consumers get the junk Summary Report when they need the Detailed Report to detect fraud on their accounts, name and social security number. Obviously, companies like Anthem and Equifax don't want consumers to see it because it proves fraud is occurring on the consumer.*
I've written Object Letters opposing the settlements that include this exact point. That bitch Judge Koh completely disregarded the objection in the Anthem Data Breach settlement. She approved the settlement without the requirement of Detailed Reports. I hope that bitch gets hit by a bus and dies. She is no friend of the people in this country.
* One of the hurdles in moving an action forward in a class action is Article III standing. That basically says you have to be experiencing harm or harm is eminent. Obviously a documentation trail that details harm correlated to a breach is good for consumers and their action, and bad for businesses.
There's also a 2018 ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that basically acknowledged someone is at future risk after a data breach. The Justices reasoned, "why steal the data if the thieves were not going to use it". Hat tip to the 9th Circuit for the ruling. The US Supreme Court upheld the Circuit Court's ruling.
I've been trying for 10 or 15 years to get the courts to apply that reasoning. In the early 2000's I watched as no judge exercised any common sense. Then, around 2005, I started writing them before the rulings and criticizing them after their [poor] rulings.
From Court Reopens 2012 Zappos Data Breach Litigation:
A class-action lawsuit against Zappos.com was reopened Thursday when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted to overturn a previous lower-court dismissal.
The case, “Theresa Stevens, et al., v. Zappos.com Inc.,” stems from a 2012 data breach in which hackers accessed the Zappos servers and allegedly stole the names, addresses, passwords and credit and debit card information of more than 24 million of the site’s customers.
Zappos responded quickly to the incident at the time, notifying customers via email of the breach and recommending that they change their passwords on the e-commerce site.
However, numerous customer filed punitive actions against the company following the news, claiming that Zappos did not do enough to protect its customers’ privacy and that they were at risk of identity fraud.
The U.S. District Court in Reno, Nev., chose to dismiss the claims on the grounds that not all of the plaintiffs had Article III standing, which requires (a) proof of actual injury, (b) that the injury be traceable and (c) that the injury can be redressed by a favorable decision.
On March 8, the federal appeals court chose to overturn that decision, allowing all the plaintiffs to pursue their litigation against Zappos.
Judge Elaine E. Bucklo wrote in a summary opinion, “The panel held that plaintiffs sufficiently alleged an injury in fact … based on a substantial risk that the Zappos hackers will commit identity fraud or identity theft. The panel assessed plaintiffs’ standing as of the time the complaints were filed, not as of the present. The panel further held that plaintiffs sufficiently alleged that the risk of future harm they faced was ‘fairly traceable’ to the conduct being challenged; and the risk from the injury of identity theft was also redressable by relief that could be obtained through this litigation.”