Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does Equifax, a private company, have the rights to access my personal data in the first place? Who exactly is giving it to them without my explicit consent, and why?
Every financial institution you deal with gives them your info, and they do it so collectively they all have lower risk on loans. I suspect if this wasn't in place, we'd be paying significantly higher interest rates on loans.
Equifax security freeze PINs are the timestamp of when you request the freeze
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Re: Equifax security freeze PINs are the timestamp of when you request the freeze
#82Anyone else confirmed this? Don't know who Tony is, usually like more sources that a tweet.
Edit: Can confirm: The pin is the exact date/time stamp that my freeze was applied. I'm able to tell based on another note saved to 1password. It is within 1 minute :(
Re: Equifax security freeze PINs are the timestamp of when you request the freeze
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a 1 in 60*24 chance of guessing correctly then after 1000 guesses (potentially against different people) you have a 50 chance of being correct on one.
Could you explain your math here? Is there something you learn about the other digits when you make a wrong guess?
Your chance of being wrong in all 1000 guesses, assuming you guess randomly (not ensuring you never make the same guess twice) is (1-1/(60* 24))^1000
That's about .5
This is based on the assumption that you are guessing for a different person each time, so you can't increase your odds by eliminating any guesses you've already made. If you're guessing for the same person every time, you just need to guess half the possibilities. You can confirm this by realizing:
Your chance of being wrong in a guess is 1-1/(60* 24-x) where x is the number of guesses you have already made.
The product of 1-1/(60* 24-x) from x=0 to x=60* 24/2-1 is .5
Edit: hackernews formatting is weird
Re: Equifax security freeze PINs are the timestamp of when you request the freeze
#84This is embarrassing at this point; a credit authority printing dividends is too busy placating shareholders to even pretend to give a shit about the data of the people who _involuntarily_ have their PII stored on their platform. Whoever files a class action should make a motion such that anyone can purge their PII from a credit authority that's experienced a public hack such that their PII was exposed, or some other…
Re: Equifax security freeze PINs are the timestamp of when you request the freeze
#85It's time to have a mandatory certification for people who develop critical systems. After such certification, you can consider such an implementation a malpractice, and sue them for it (of course the penalty is paid by the insurance company which sold the malpractice insurance). Doctors, lawyers, and many other professions have such system, why can't we have it as well?
"Critical systems" pretty vague, and could be used to describe any system that processes payments or other basic things we use. It's fundamentally different from malpractice in my opinion. In health care malpractice has obvious pieces of data - we know who the doctor is, we know their credentials, we know what information they had and when they had it, we know what they decided, what they prescribed, what they said.…
Re: Equifax security freeze PINs are the timestamp of when you request the freeze
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just try it out for yourself, like others did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15204573
I'm not using anything that Equifax set up in case it waives any of my rights. This is how bad it's gotten, people are afraid/untrusting of their security/protection measures. Thank you for linking to more accounts of this.
Re: Equifax security freeze PINs are the timestamp of when you request the freeze
#87And the hits just keep on coming... www.equifaxsecurity2017.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown. The server might not be sending the appropriate intermediate certificates. An additional root certificate may need to be imported. Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER
How do you explain to your father/grandfather/whoever that equifaxsecurity2017.com is ok, but equifax-security-breach.com, checkyourequifaxaccount.com, equifaxsecurity-2017.com and equifaxsecurity2018.com are not legit?
Stick to your top level domain. Something like security2017.equifax.com or equifax.com/security2017 would be okay.
Re: Equifax security freeze PINs are the timestamp of when you request the freeze
#88True thing: until recently you could remove hard inquiries from your credit report merely by pulling your own credit so often in one month using an array of daily monitoring services that you would overflow the field and bump off legit inquiries. I did this in 2009-10, it had been going on for a while, and lasted for a while but sadly I hear they've solved it seemingly by nightly batch job to remove your own credit p…
Re: Equifax security freeze PINs are the timestamp of when you request the freeze
#89Something worth taking into consideration is these companies are not Engineering/Tech companies at the core. They were probably born as paper-companies and digitized their operations later on. I am hoping for the day something and more appropriate for this age will make them irrelevant.
How does Equifax, a private company, have the rights to access my personal data in the first place? Who exactly is giving it to them without my explicit consent, and why?
Re: Equifax security freeze PINs are the timestamp of when you request the freeze
#90True thing: until recently you could remove hard inquiries from your credit report merely by pulling your own credit so often in one month using an array of daily monitoring services that you would overflow the field and bump off legit inquiries. I did this in 2009-10, it had been going on for a while, and lasted for a while but sadly I hear they've solved it seemingly by nightly batch job to remove your own credit p…
The kids on flyertalk were all over this.