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120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

forbes.com

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Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#151

Class action lawsuit? How is it okay that this information is even available from Experian in the first place? I don't think anyone opted in to this. And I don't think there is any obvious way to opt out. And Experian is not just some data tracking company watching your behavior on a website; they're supposed to be protecting our credit system. Do they obtain some of this information through special privileges becaus…

And they even have us all classified into consumer categories (and sub-categories!) with snappy little names: https://www.experian.com/assets/marketing-services/brochures...

"Blue Sky Boomers," "Significant Singles," "Pastoral Pride" (subgroups: "True Grit Americans," "Countrified Pragmatics," "Rural Southern Bliss," "Touch of Tradition").

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big problem with this is that a lot of data about you isn't owned by you. The fact that you took out credit card X on Y date and have paid the balance on time since then is owned by the credit card company you do business with (well, it belongs to you too, but businesses are more willing to trust Chase than you). This information has real business value from being a leading indicator and costly signal of your futur…

At the risk of speaking for OP: The point is that the data should be owned by me. Yeah, I get that it has value to other people, but I'm the one that has to deal with the fallout, not them. Just because something is useful to a business doesn't mean that they have the right to it. If they want information about me, they should be asking me, not some third party.

This is nonsensical--your interactions with other entities belong to them just as much as you. Chase gets to talk about their experience with you just as you may talk about your experience with Chase.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of speaking for OP: The point is that the data should be owned by me. Yeah, I get that it has value to other people, but I'm the one that has to deal with the fallout, not them. Just because something is useful to a business doesn't mean that they have the right to it. If they want information about me, they should be asking me, not some third party.

This is nonsensical--your interactions with other entities belong to them just as much as you. Chase gets to talk about their experience with you just as you may talk about your experience with Chase.

I never said they couldn't. But they don't need my personal, non-public info to do that.

And if the interaction does also belong to them, why don't I get access to their data?

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of a data tax, I like the idea of mandatory data insurance, with payouts to users whose data is leaked/stolen. If your company has shitty security, or a history of leaks, your data insurance provider will charge out the ass. The financial math has to clearly be on the side of it being more profitable to practice proactive security.

Without data provenance (ie a data chain of custody) corporations will just "subcontract" it out to the lowest bidder. There needs to be consequences all the way up the chain to everybody that provided the data. This way, the people will bad security won't even get the data in the first place because no one will risk their data with them.

Regulations like EU GDPR require such provenance - you can subcontract if you wish, but you're still liable if your subcontractor fails in some way.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's my data" - this is absurd. Observations I make are mine, if I observe you it's my observation. I can tell stories about my observations, but if I make public statements about you that are false, that's a tort.

This is what needs to happen. "identity theft" is what people fear. It would not happen if the banks got sued for big money and lost every time they lied to credit agencies about debts you did not default on. All this data breach stuff is mostly a bait and switch tactic from the real problem stemming from bank slander. Your security clearance report stolen by the Chineese from the US government OPM database[1]. This…

"if the banks got sued for big money and lost every time they lied to credit agencies about debts you did not default on" is pretty much the situation in most (all?) of EU; if you dispute the claim, then the debt can't be reported to anyone else unless they can prove that it was you, and no, "they knew your magic number and your mother's maiden name" doesn't count as evidence.

Coincidentally, we don't have the same types of mass identity theft issues that USA has.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#156

Personal data right now is considered an asset. It needs to be seen as a liability. Maybe the solution is a data tax. You pay a set amount every year for every piece of personal data you have. If you buy personal data from another company, you still have to pay the tax for the data you acquired. If you have a breach of data, your tax goes up for a period of 10 years. In addition, every piece of personal data needs to…

You're going to make the cost of doing business prohibitively high.

Most businesses don't need to store sensitive private data, it's a convenience and marketing benefit for them. The few domains that really do have a need for this data can afford to handle the data properly; and all other business should consider the cost of handling that data prohibitively high, and simply do their business without that data.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have said on other comments on this article, everyone has to stop using that data ( all of it) for purposes of verifying that you are who you claim to be. My initial thought was "good luck with that", but maybe, in an ironic sort of way, these breaches are going to force that to happen. "You say someone opened a credit card in my name, and you want me to pay for what they charged? What data did they use to…

>"Yeah, good luck collecting, suckers." They don't have to collect, they just ruin your credit and make your life difficult. That's what they do now.

You can make it illegal for them to do so; many countries require lenders to ensure that they clear any marks on your credit if the claim is disputed and they can't prove it's you; saying "Bob took money from me and didn't give it back" is clearly libel if they can't prove it's true. You don't even have to go to court for that; you simply dispute it and either it goes away or they charge you with fraud if the prosecutor believes that they have solid evidence that it's really you and you're intentionally scamming them.

There are options that have been tried, they're just difficult for USA to adopt because of reasons mostly tied to the weirdness of identity and IDs in USA.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#158

I imagine this scenario now in EU, where the Smart Meter Gateway will enter millions of households, tracking the electricity consumption. Where goes this data? Who will use this information?

Somewhere there is a law enforcement organization that's drooling over the thought of automatically generating a list of suspected grow-ops by cross referencing power usage with marketing demographic information and automatically applying for a search warrant. They'll probably stop doing it after they kick down the door of a day-care in a rich neighborhood and only find hot glue guns and those beads you fuse with an…

That's why savvy grow-ops bypass the meter.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#159
post #63

My reading of this is that anyone who "just want's to see the world burn" needs to pay $40k to Experian and then post this data on the web.

I think the data probably comes with a license that you can't redistribute it.
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