To my view, collecting and storing that much information is presumptively immoral. It creates a public hazard, in the same vein as stockpiling explosives or tox

To my view, collecting and storing that much information is presumptively immoral. It creates a public hazard, in the same vein as stockpiling explosives or toxic chemicals. There is, however, a degree of respect for that hazard, demonstrated in concrete safety practices, that can override that presumption. I don't think Equifax has demonstrated that respect. To a layman's view, not many companies do. It's possible that the amount of respect necessary for a hazard as large as the one Equifax created is too onerous for a for-profit entity to realistically implement, but I don't know that there's a fundamental reason that sufficiently paranoid engineering practices couldn't make this moral.