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As Equifax Amassed Ever More Data, Safety Was a Sales Pitch
- quuquuquu 9y agoNice. Equifax also has our employment history, our tweets, our salary info, and sells us protection from the risk they create. Love it, man. Pretty soon I won't have a job anywhere because of some erroneous data Equifax reports in their background check of me. I guess my principal source of income in the future will be recycling cans!
- katastic 9y agoIt's like credit report inflation! All my bad debt will seem better when everyone else's is inflated with fake debt! (p.s. Being sick in America is not a fun time financially.)
- zaroth 9y agoSorry to hear that. If you haven't researched it yet, you may be surprised how much govt assistance is available for sick people in the US. Short term disability insurance is provided by most employers and some states and is usually 100% tax free. SSDI and Medicaid also help a lot of people. If you're sick enough to be paying a large fraction of a years salary in healthcare expenses, the better bet may be to stop working entirely and get on Medicaid, SSDI, TANF, etc. until you are back on your feet. But you did say debt which means it's likely you're well past this point.
- quuquuquu 9y agoYeah to echo what zaroth has said, definitely see if you can get on SSDI. It is complex to get a calculated amount, but you deserve the money and I really hope it helps you out. Additionally I can't remember if I hallucinated it, but a lot of lenders have stopped looking at medical debt! Seriously! I read it in a few different places but I don't have official info for you. Lenders would have nobody to lend to if they considered medical debt. I once had a psycho hospital misbill me using fake insurance codes and etc for routine work. My insurance company refused to pay because of the codes the hospital billed me for. So I said lol I'm not giving you $800 for a free physical. They screamed and shouted that they'll see me at collections. Three years later and it never showed up on any of my credit reports. Get you some of that!!
- katastic 9y agoIt depends entirely on the lender. Most of my large medical bills end up going to a debt collector and they tend to 2-3 times a day per collector. But, they're not jerks on the phone at least, and try to setup a payment plan. However, I had one MRI that was ~$2000 (typical) and after ~6 months they lowered it to like $400-600. That's the only time any medical provider cut me a deal. Oh, actually, one debt collector gave me a large discount for paying it all in a one-time payment. But I've never had someone simply "not" attempt to collect their debt.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoI don't want to take away from your comment, but my mother spent 4 years attempting to obtain disability (and along with it Medicare), only to die 4 days after her final denial letter at the age of 59. 53% of disability claims are denied, and the average SSDI payment is $1171/month. Having helped my mother through the disability process, as well as helping build tooling for disability advocacy non-profits, I can tell you how little government assistance is available to sick people in the US. Are there services available? Possibly. Can you count on receiving them? Absolutely not.
- zaroth 9y agoAgree 100% on the SSDI - it all comes down to the specific condition. Some are easy (Blue Book listings with definitive diagnosis) and some are not at all. Getting Medicare through SSDI will take ~30 months so not too helpful. Medicaid at least, the only qualification is not having too much income. Medicaid I think is way better than Medicare, at least in the states I would live in.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tylersmith 9y agoNot Equifax, but Experian advertises that they "scan the dark web" for your person info which means either they're lying (hopefully) or they're actively contributing to the personal information market by buying information from criminals to see if their customers' data is present. These credit agencies are nothing but harmful for the majority of consumers.
- quuquuquu 9y agoI saw this commercial too. Utter lunacy. I am not even surprised anymore- these corporations have the green light to do whatever they want. Only wrist slaps for punishment if they do truly heinous things. Houses wouldn't be so expensive if nobody had access to credit. Nobody would be betting with 5-7x their yearly income.
- keganunderwood 9y agoThe only good solution is life in prison for the CEO and the board. Fines will not work. We need to fix incentives at the top.
- quuquuquu 9y agoI wholeheartedly agree. Iceland did it to their bankers. It was a thing of beauty. The financial world lost its collective shit and cut Iceland off from the global credit markets. Iceland doesn't seem to be suffering to me. And their prisons are nicer than club fed :)
- colejohnson66 9y agoFines would work if they were a substantial amount instead of what they are now. Look at the EU fining Google $2.7 billion. If the fine is more than the amount made doing something illegal, companies would think twice.
- keganunderwood 9y agoWhile fines can help ethical people make the case that they should do the right thing, I am afraid it isn't enough. What I'm talking about isn't the actual data leak but rather what equifax did or did not do before and after the leak. That is the real crime here. I don't see the CEO and the board facing prison which means we need to change something.
- Avshalom 9y agoWelcome to the glorious big data future.
- danjoc 9y ago>our salary info Now they have my attention! If the hackers got that data, I really hope they make it public. Imagine the shit storm that would follow. Those women who are "bad negotiators" would know EXACTLY how much less they were making for the same work. Please please please, dump that specific info! It would also teach all our companies a lesson about selling that private data too, wouldn't it?
- orange_county 9y agoSeems like the credit and banking industry is so dependent on the credit bureaus. Is there a way we can have credit cards, loans and mortgages without the need of centralizing pii data?
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoWe could have each bank (and so on) store the information you give them and allow requesting people to pull from every agency. That really just creates a lot of little credit bureaus, which fixes the centralization issue at least.
- function_seven 9y agoBut would that allow me to conveniently omit any negative info from future credit applications? The banks would quickly start sharing this info with one another and become de facto CRAs themselves.
- gwbas1c 9y agoI'm sure blockchain will magically solve that problem! (If you're not laughing then you need to admit you have a problem)
- tylersmith 9y agoI don't understand why they're proposed as a solution to this type of problem at all. I'm a big fan of blockchains, I work for a company/project completely reliant on them, but I don't get where people think they'll be useful for things like credit monitor and health care records. It makes no sense to me.
- Cerium 9y agoJust to play devil's advocate, since I don't think they are a good solution either. Unlike healthcare I think you could use some of the properties of a blockchain to help reduce the risk of leaking personal information during credit checks. For example: you could prove your identity by making a transaction and then show a timely series of past payments.
- blfr 9y agoEquifax persuaded more than 7,000 employers to hand over salary details for an income verification system How? Is it all from the Talx acquisition? If not, that is impressive. For many companies payroll is the most or even only really sensitive information.
- r00fus 9y agoQuite possibly. I understand some of the demographics information needed for TALX to process the unemployment compliance is salary for each employee covered.
- makmanalp 9y agoAren't there laws against releasing payroll data without the consent of the employee?
- PretzelFisch 9y agoPart of a Talx order is the employee giving their consent.
- KGIII 9y agoI know this is going to be movie. I can't decide if it will be drama, mystery, action, or comedy. At this point, I'm expecting someone to go on a shooting spree or commit a murder-suicide. Seriously, Hollywood screenwriters couldn't have come up with a plot this complicated. My favorite part is often overlooked. Earlier this year, they lobbied to remove what few rights we have in case of breaches/losses of PII. As in, they lobbied to not be held accountable or have to give notice in case they were breached. I think that was back in May of this year. There has been so much new information, I can no longer keep track. If this were a movie, it would suck - because it's too far-fetched and unbelievable. If someone were telling me this story, and I didn't know better, I'd assume they were lying. It has almost reached the point where it is comedic.
- PretzelFisch 9y ago
- paul7986 9y agoThings I’ve learned thru this that I’ve found appalling... 1. Freezing your credit is meaningless thru Experian. You or anyone can obtain your freeze pin using your personal now public info via their tool https://www.experian.com/ncaconline/freezepin https://www.experian.com/ncaconline/freezepin 2. If you freeze your credit with Experian they send you a letter in the mail saying you will no longer receive credit cards offers for five years. Also that they notified Equifax and Transunion to halt any and all offers to be sent to me. WOW who are these people the mafia? I just wanted to freeze my credit thru them.
- vanattab 9y agoIf I had known I could stop all the cc spam by freezing my credit I would have done it years ago.
- g051051 9y agoYou can do that at any time by requesting a promotional block on your credit file. This prevents you from showing up in credit sweeps.
- briffle 9y agoYou can opt out of prescreened offers from a single site. It works well, and has been around at least 15 years. https://www.optoutprescreen.com/?rf=t https://www.optoutprescreen.com/?rf=t
- IncRnd 9y agoThe terms are getting mixed up. A promotional block is different from a credit freeze. The first is a product. The second is a legal requirement on the credit bureaus.
- tylersmith 9y agoThe entire credit system is a security nightmare. They all appear to use very basic "security" that has not been upgraded along with the rest of the world. Conflating identity and authorization, using deterministic values instead of random ones when necessary, and even for Equifax plain old sending people to the wrong domain.
- gm-conspiracy 9y agoProject Mayhem?
- lwansbrough 9y agoSeems like the easiest way to do this would be to use all the data from this breach to create a massive amount of noise in the credit system, making it virtually impossible for people working for these companies to do their jobs.
- SmirkingRevenge 9y agoIt always comes back to Fight Club.
- chewz 9y agoFiat currency is based on trust. With so many security breaches around does it mean that currency is losing its value rapidly? Is a dollar on a credit card worth less post-Equifax?
- ams6110 9y agoFiat currency is actually based on the ability of the government, ultimately, to take assets from citizens at the point of a gun.
- thesagan 9y agoA bit of both, really. Users of fiat money have to trust the government's effective use of force in supporting the transactional utility of the currency. Examples of this sort of failure might be a hyperinflation scenario. Governments could try to place controls on wages or prices, but might (and will likely) still fail. Many historical examples of it.
- comex 9y agoForce helps, but all that’s really necessary for a fiat currency to have worth is for users to trust that it will remain reasonably scarce. Example: Bitcoin. In the case of traditional government-issued currencies, you’re trusting in humans rather than an algorithm, and that trust can be broken (which is what happens in a hyperinflation scenario), but it still exists in normal scenarios. (And even Bitcoin’s value is in part based on trust in government - specifically, that various governments won’t ban it. A ban might not be 100% effective but would clearly decrease its utility and thus its value; recent events wrt China are a small-scale demonstration.)
- gaius 9y agoall that’s really necessary for a fiat currency to have worth is for users to trust that it will remain reasonably scarce ... and that other people will accept it in exchange for goods and services. Scarcity alone is no guarantee of that. For the vast, vast majority of people Bitcoin is literally worthless - the only thing you can do with it is attempt to convert it into real currency so you can actually use it for something. And they would rather you did that rather than trying to fob them off with a bunch of numbers.
- blondie9x 9y agoThird paragraph, scraping, not scrubbing.
- otakucode 9y agoNaive question: Why would credit reporting companies resist allowing consumers to freeze their credit? I would think, if anything, it provides them another data point and does not otherwise affect their business at all. Is there something I am overlooking?
- azernik 9y agoIt absolutely affects their business; they are paid by companies that want to check your credit, and freezing means they can't get paid by all those credit card companies that send you random offers after seeing that your credit is good.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y agoCredit reporting agencies make the VAST amount of their money by giving your reports to companies that ask for it, even if unsolicited by you. Putting a credit freeze kills this ability to make money off you without your knowledge. In fact, I think one way to do more consumer-safe credit reporting is to make it so that agencies are ONLY allowed to give a person's report to that particular person. When a person applies somewhere for credit, they would need to ask a credit agency for their report, and then give it to a prospective lender (the report would be cryptographically signed). That way you at least control who has access to your information.
- austenallred 9y agoSafety was the pitch. That’s literally the only thing the company does. Gathers and stores information for you to access when you pay.
- dba7dba 9y agoEquifax was advertising an opening for DevOps engineer right around the hack took place.
- mtgx 9y agoI believe Equifax is even a certificate authority as I saw it in the root certificate list of a Xiaomi Android 6.0 phone.