Seriously, Equifax? This Is a Breach No One Should Get Away With
Raj Joshi, an analyst at Moody’s, said in a note to investors
that Equifax was likely to be fine, as “the impact of the security breach will only modestly erode its solid credit metrics and liquidity.”
The two regulators that do have jurisdiction over Equifax, the Federal Trade Commission
and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, declined to comment on any potential punishments over the credit agency’s breach.
Here’s one troubling reason: Because even after one of the gravest breaches in history,
no one is really in a position to stop Equifax from continuing to do business as usual.
“It is troubling that Equifax is forcing people to waive legal rights in order to receive fraud monitoring after the
company’s breach put their personal information at risk,” Samuel Gilford, a bureau spokesman, said in a statement.
“There’s nothing in any statute or anything else that allows you to ask Equifax to remove your data or have all your data disappear
if you say you no longer trust it,” said John Ulzheimer, a consumer credit expert who worked at Equifax in the 1990s.
On its website, Equifax boasts that it “organizes, assimilates
and analyzes data on more than 820 million consumers and more than 91 million businesses worldwide, and its database includes employee data contributed from more than 7,100 employers.”
But if we are now conceding that hacks just happen
and no one can stop them — well, here’s a crazy thought: Maybe let’s not allow any company to house all this data.
