We may be in an age of Big Data, but collecting information on consumers is nothing new. Credit reporting goes back to the late 1800s, when it was just a couple of guys going from door to door, asking merchants to describe the customers who had credit at their stores. The technical, sometimes-long files we now know as credit reports started out as a few notes in a ledger that said something like, “Reliable,” “Slow to repay” or “Won’t pay, but father will cover debt.”

A credit report is a pretty simple concept: It’s a report on your past use of credit and loans. That part is generally pretty easy for people to grasp. It’s some of the other stuff on the report — and the stuff that’s not on the report — that confuses some and leads to misunderstanding the credit report’s purpose.