Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/08/identity-theft-politics.html
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Sign Up Folks!
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Today’s Harsh Truth About Life in the 21st Century: No matter how careful you are about protecting your own confidential personal information, it doesn’t matter because that information will be collected and eventually either leaked or sold by some indifferent third party.
It’s not that it’s not worth being smart and savvy; it’s just that all that does is delay the inevitable.
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thank you Cory, for one of the most clear, concise, well-referenced explanations of this bullshittery
cannot believe the common citizens are NOT rioting in the streets with pitchforks and torches demanding blood from these money-grubbing ass-hats.
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Important note: it seems that signing up for Equifax’s credit monitoring service (or, it has been claimed, even using their website to check whether your details were leaked) may result in you losing the right to sue them, forcing you to go through binding arbitration (trans: they win, you lose) instead.
But why, given that they’ve amply demonstrated their manifest incompetence, would you possibly want to use their service?
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These fucking assholes.
Earlier this year, our main credit card was compromised by someone pretending to be me. They called the bank and changed the primary card holder to someone else as well as the address. Thankfully, they didn’t know that the card was in both my and my wife’s name, so she was able to call and start getting it fixed. This was the 3rd time in about 5 years we’ve had a card compromised in some fashion.
Of course, they said to report this to Equifax and sign up for their free monitoring, etc…
One thing I recommend - change your verification with your bank when you call to two factor. Tell them you want that - for me, that means that if I call, I have to provide them with a code that’s a combo of a word and numbers.
I called Fidelity as well and they told me they would enroll me in their voice recognition program.
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Credit bureaus: noun, an oligopoly of three private companies exercising more power than most major federal agencies and doing so with virtually no public transparency or serious oversight and a few band-aid regulations put in place for show after the financial crises of the past decade. see: leaches
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Nice to see this, but what type of payout could be expected after it’s divided among 145,000,000 people and a bunch of attorneys?
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Devalued Stock and Possible Bankruptcy.
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Since it’s been repeatedly demonstrated recently that it’s legal for members of Congress to trade shares based on non-public information concerning businesses they’re in charge of overseeing, I would be interested to see if any of them managed to bail out at exactly the right time as well.
Here’s a 5 year old article explaining that Congress is not bound by insider trading laws:
Love to know if they knew before we knew.
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Equifax should offer credit monitoring through another party. Who in their right mind would want to give them information that they may or may not have already lost.
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I am a total tech idiot but that website looks like crap to me. This is not really techy, but it is strange how it keeps referencing equifaxsecurity2017.com like it’s a completely different site.
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The US Government surely knew.
“Starting in 2012, however, publicly traded companies must acknowledge the cyber attacks to regulators and explain the measures they plan to take to close their cyber-security gaps. Before the Guidance, only certain sectors of the economy were required to report cyber attacks. Banks are required to report any cyber intrusions to the Department of the Treasury. In the healthcare sector, companies are required to report data breaches to the Department of Health and Human Services.” IRMI
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thanks a lot, Akimbo
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Wealth creators.
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If you are possibly effected, Experian has a really easy online fraud alert process. That will put a Fraud alert on your credit for 90 days. As a side bonus, they unsub you from auto-approved credit deals for 2 years.
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There must be some way to prevent third parties from collecting information about you and then harming you by mishandling it. This ought to be simply illegal. At least it should carry onerous liability by law, something requiring dispensation of damages before actual harm occurs. We need a serious threshold here so that if information is handled carelessly the company responsible (and their shareholders) hurt, or removal of traditional corporate limits to liability.
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I’m still waiting for my goddamned tuna.
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I think that even though it’s all “legal”, that members of congress do still have to disclose securities trade, is that right? I just look forward to seeing if any of those weasels made, or at least didn’t lose, money on Equifax stock from their foreknowledge.
That just really bugs me. At least we can put these execs on trial. Won’t, but we can.
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