411–420 of 670 posts
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I believe it depends on your state. I'm in California and I had to pay $10 for freezing on Experian and TransUnion, although it was free for Equifax.
i filled out the experian form online for free: https://www.experian.com/fraud/center.html#content-01
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Won't work. Once companies start gathering private data stored in this DB, it can be compromised and government isn't that great at securing data either. MFA would required everyone having a smart phone or RSA key fobs. SMS/Phone based authentication isn't secure. Only real way to get true identity system is biometrics(Fingerprints,DNA, or Iris) taken at birth. But that will never happen for privacy reasons.
Biometric national identification is used in many countries, with India's Aadhaar system being the best example. Those systems are mostly used in developing countries that are leapfrogging their financial technology past the legacy systems that the 1st-world powers developed in the 20th century. 'Privacy reasons' is an American cultural anomaly, especially considering the lack of privacy we suffer from the system use…
You can't say that immediately after citing Aadhaar as the "best example" of biometric national identification. There has been massive pushback against Aadhaar for privacy reasons specifically, which just resulted in the Supreme Court declaring privacy to be a fundamental right - something which, incidentally, goes far beyond the approach to privacy taken in the US and Europe.
This is just pure crazy. There should not be any non-govt agencies that store such sensitive information. This is not like credit card where you end up getting a new card. You can't change your name and ssn. I wonder how we will tackle this problem.
Short answer: We won't.
Nothing is likely to drastically change. It'll just be another blip on this week's news, and on to the next big thing that comes up.
Some individuals, over time, will likely have their lives screwed with, but because not everyone at one time will have this happen to them, nobody will care.
Think about how long the EU and others had chip-and-pin for their cards. Also, everyone knew it was more secure. But it's only been in the past 6 months or so that the United States is finally getting it - and it isn't everywhere yet.
I'm not trying to say chip-and-pin would have helped this situation (it wouldn't have). I'm just trying to convey just what kind of social and political inertia is at hand here in the United States, not to mention the size of our collective apathy, and extremely short attention spans.
Had something like this had happened in the 1970s or 80s - heads would've rolled. 60 Minutes would have been all over it. Dan Rather would have frothed at the mouth. It would have been crazy to the extreme in the media and elsewhere. Change might have even occurred.
Today? We'll be lucky if we're still talking about this in any amount next Friday.
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There are legal limits to how long the data can be stored for. (I want to say it's a federal 7 year limit, but I might be wrong and it might be state laws). Eventually it all times out and your credit resets.
That's not the issue. They are required to immediately remove incorrect information from your credit report. A freeze prevents them from reporting your credit to third parties (i.e. it prevents them from doing business). So, they hate people who freeze their credit. Their strategy seems to be to make having a credit freeze so onerous that you won't do it so they can continue to sell your information to their customer…
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Corporate charters can be dissolved by the government at any time. Given Equifax ONLY deals in building detailed profiles of every US adult and managed to lose that information to criminals is grounds for terminating their corporation. At this point, their lack of basic security practices has endangered national security by weakening the banking and credit systems. On top of that, this company is massively unpopular.…
The government can't just dissolve a corporation on a whim. We have due process and the rule of law.
Not on a whim, but for (e.g., in Delaware) “abuse, misuse or nonuse of its corporate powers, privileges or franchises.” (Delaware Code Title 8, § 284.)
> We have due process and the rule of law.
While rarely used in practice currently (it was more used in the past, and there is a movement to revive the practice), the law provides for charter revocation for corporate misconduct.
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The damage is not the cost of getting a new SSN, but the cost of verifying that your info is safe (still safe?). This is why companies routinely list the _cost_ of dealing with hacking incidents (scrub all the servers, pay people overtime, etc). I think it's fair to assign costs similarly for equifax.
Info monitoring is what, like $29.99 a month? Perhaps reasonably ask for 3 years of monitoring, so $980 But those aren't actual costs incurred yet.
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Same experience here (also CA), and I was able to freeze all of them online. It's mildly interesting how different the experience was across the three. Experian gave me the choice between choosing a PIN and getting a generated one, Equifax just gave me a PIN, and for TransUnion I had to choose the PIN (shorter than for the other reports) myself.
How do you freeze them online?
https://www.freeze.equifax.com/ https://freeze.transunion.com/ https://www.experian.com/freeze/center.html
Ok, so credit reporting agency collects sensitive personal and financial data on basically every adult American, loses it to a bunch of criminals and now I have to deal with the consequences? I looked into credit freezes yesterday. This is really a total scam. You have to _call_ each of the three agencies and pay a fee ($5 to $10) each time. If you need to unfreeze your report to make a legitimate credit application…
hmm i called the 3 mentioned here today and all were free. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0497-credit-freeze-faq... Equifax — 1-800-349-9960 Experian — 1‑888‑397‑3742 TransUnion — 1-888-909-8872
"You'll need to supply your name, address, date of birth, Social Security number and other personal information. Fees vary based on where you live, but commonly range from $5 to $10."
So depending on where you live, you probably have to pay.
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To be fair, class action suits aren't really about recovering damages for the class members. Or at least, not entirely. That's almost incidental. Rather, they're most often about leveraging a large class of injured parties--whose injuries are usually relatively minor on an individual basis--to force a change of behavior by adding up all of those small injuries. The cost of pursuing each claim individually would usual…
To be fair, class action suits aren't really about recovering damages for the class members. Or at least, not entirely. That was exactly what they were supposed to be about. The way it usually works out, however, is that the lawyers don't really negotiate on the same side of the table as the class and the class members end up with very little. The lawyers, however, get their fees. That's why everybody gets pissed abo…
The lawyers are getting their fees to pay for the service of causing class-action suits to happen. Even if the remedies for a class member are a joke, the amount the company pays is, supposedly, not a joke (and yes, a good amount of that is probably paying those lawyers), and that's supposed to be a deterrent for other companies who are thinking of making the same mistakes.
Whether this works out in practice is debatable, but the current system is coherent in theory.
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Info monitoring is what, like $29.99 a month? Perhaps reasonably ask for 3 years of monitoring, so $980 But those aren't actual costs incurred yet.
My SSN won't change for my lifetime, so really they need to pay that cost of monitoring. Equifax, you owe me $23,392.20. It's in your interest to pay upfront to avoid the cost of inflation.
This breach, I suspect, makes that less likely to be true. After all, one of the few reasons a new SSN can be issued to someone who has one is “A victim of identity theft continues to be disadvantaged by using the original number”.
https://faq.ssa.gov/link/portal/34011/34019/Article/3789/Can...