The US desperately needs its own version of GDPR. If this had happened in the EU, or if they processed EU data, the company would be looking at handing over 4% of its turnover and a possible ban on processing personal data - aka the end of its business.
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I used to work for First American.
It was 2008, it was the recession, and work was hard to come by, so I accepted an entry-level temp job in IT, which mostly consisted of imaging laptops, shipping them out, and general warehouse work. (Got valley fever and asthma around then, which I’m pretty damn sure I got from working in the warehouse, so that’s fun.)
I did a good job and my supervisors realized before too long that a warehouse job wasn’t the most effective use of my talents. They pushed for me to be promoted to a position on the desktop architecture team; the manager who ran it requested that a new position be created for me.
The bosses in Santa Ana weren’t having it. A $14.50/hour temp I remained. For two years (my responsibilities increased in this time, but my pay didn’t). Until Christmas 2010, when they laid off all the temps. (From what I heard, our regional director, my boss’s boss’s boss, protested this idea in no uncertain terms, and got pretty heated with his boss’s boss’s boss, with the result that he got moved out of our org chart and they put somebody else in charge.)
Anyway, I’m not saying I definitely would have caught this if they’d given me that promotion; I did eventually end up in a web development career, but who knows where I would have ended up if I’d been on the FATco architecture team.
But I do strongly suspect that I’m not the only competent web developer who worked for First American Title and was terminated at the whim of some corner-office Santa Ana bean-counter against the recommendation of his supervisors. I bet there were other people, somewhere in the company, who would have spotted this if they were ever given the opportunity, but who didn’t get any more respect from Santa Ana than I did.
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So you may know then the reason why documents pulled through this breach go back to 2003? I do. That’s when we started using this current platform.
Back in ‘08 when the the economy took a dump, I was working for subsidiary of FATCO; it was shut down and a few of us were rolled into the mothership. The problem w the Santa Ana types is (and I speculate) stock options. The employees are allowed to buy stock and I believe the those in the Santa Ana campus are scooping up huge piles of stock as part of their benny package - again, I’m only guessing but why else would they be doing all this? Someone once said, follow the money. I get that. But these managers are squeezing us to death. The software platform is just part of the problem (and now a real big one). Off shoring is getting out of control. Those people are nice, but they don’t know what they are doing - it’s a tough way to learn English as a 2nd language, while using legal documents to learn. Native English speakers have hard enough time with this stuff! I was told Off Shore has a 2% error rate. I actually laughed in a meeting - out loud (oops); I’m an actual title examiner, and I can actually read the work, which more than a lot of the managers can do these days. Someone is BSing someone and I think that someone is somewhere on the Santa Ana campus. There needs to be a Come To Jesus moment in this company real soon, or in a couple of years (if not now) there are going to be real problems.
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Because there is a large cost to collecting it, sometimes literally sending a human being down to a courthouse basement to dig through and scan dusty old paper files. They know the property will sell at some point and it costs them much less to keep the electronic version and update a few things than to re-collect it all from scratch again.
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Any chance they got Trump’s tax info?
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Some mandantory jail time for top execs for data breaches like this seems to be the only way breaches will stop happening.
Let them prove in the courtroom that they were using best practices.
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That’s part of what makes commonwealths such interesting places. On one hand, those details make you appreciate the history associated with a property. On the other, details that go back a century (or more) can cause a lot of problems.
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I gained a new appreciation for this when a distant relative filed a quit claim deed and sold property that he didn’t own. The owners had to sue, but the buyers didn’t handle compensation - the title company did. They didn’t conduct enough research about the deed before the sale went through.
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Wells Fargo, Equifax, Bank of America, etc, etc, etc. We are just data now.
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Exactly, which is why you need title insurance no matter how solid the government tracking of ownership. A government database does not stop sales by identity thieves.
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By all means, maintain the information on the property in your private database for that reason. My banking, tax and identification data has nothing to with the chain of title. Flush it.
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I don’t see how a forged title would be less effective when used in a system with no official register of record.
1 second per compromised record seems fair place to start as a mandatory minimum
uh shit wait what?
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