Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/25/t-mobile-confirms-1-million-hi.html
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It’s starting to feel like the defining characteristic of a data breach is that nobody paid for the data. T-Mobile and all the other telcos use the data for advertising all the time. IMHO, any use of my data for reasons not associated with the product or service that collected the information is a violation of my privacy.
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Oh sure, there’s nothing financial you could do with somebody’s name, address, and phone number. 
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No problem. All you have to do is change your name, phone number, email and address! Easy.
/S
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I’m torn. Because I grew up with telephone books, and the white pages. You could pay extra to have an unlisted phone number, but if you didn’t, there it was with your name and address for anyone with the book to take and use how they wanted.
Now however, with the internet tying everything together along with a “forever” memory, and giving access to more and more people with criminal intent, is that making it worse than it was?
Because these are never small leaks, it seems. You never hear about the information of under 100 people being leaked through a data breach. It’s in the millions, or now billions like the other bb post mentions.
So unless someone is specifically looking for your data, the odds of someone landing on you randomly should be very small.
That doesn’t help the people they do end up landing on, of course. And again, while the pool of info is huge, it seems the pool of criminals/scammers is also huge.
So yeah, torn. I’d rather they didn’t happen, but they are happing with regularity and the government could do something about it through substantial fines, but won’t. So the companies do a risk assessment and realize it would cost them more to fix the problem – upgrade servers and security, or information handling processes – than to deal with the aftermath.
What are their customers going to do? Leave? Hah.
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the people doing this have so much on everyone at this point it is like some kind of anti-social media.
Actually, the defining characteristic of a data breach is that it’s inevitable, and this for MANY reasons, not the least of which is that we somehow got it in our brains that networked computers could be “safe and secure”.
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