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Accountability is a petty side show. Who, in the first place, gave the providers consent for all this, and who appointed them owners of PII? There is a gross l

Accountability is a petty side show. Who, in the first place, gave the providers consent for all this, and who appointed them owners of PII? There is a gross lack of information and consent, and a violation of the proper ownership of PII, which should be with the user. Right now data is collected under the cover of overly broad user agreements that are never read, if even that, and data is dispersed among third parties without further user knowledge. The user is completely in the dark. They did not really agree with the collection of data, and cannot really see what was collected, where it ended up, and how it was used, not even at an aggregate level. Furthermore the user finds it very difficult to withdraw, even if they had actually given informed consent, since it's so hard to delete anything off of premises you do not own. It's a distraction to talk about how to punish people for not safekeeping something they stole from you in the first place. After all, a so-called "breach" is just one thief stealing from another -- would you expect a thief to care that much on your behalf?

CuriousSkeptic 9y ago
Fully agree! This is the important point to stress here in my opinion. Was a bit surprised to not see more comments about this aspect of the problem here.
voidmain 9y ago
I'm not a big fan of contracts of adhesion. I think that to give up important rights by contract should require a correspondingly conspicuous degree of solemnity, not a link at the bottom of a web page to terms of service that state they can be changed at any time by one party. But the reality is that no matter how much contractual solemnity you require to let other people trade in your personal information, most people will do it in order to get credit. If to get a home loan you had to copy down a contract giving the bank the right to do credit monitoring in longhand with a fountain pen and sign it sixteen times in your own blood, my guess is that people would still be doing it, because credit monitoring really does make loans cheaper. So as a practical matter, I don't think the Equifaxes of the world would go away if the problem you point to was solved. Whereas there's no reason they shouldn't at least internalize the cost of losing your information through incompetence.

CuriousSkeptic 9y ago

Fully agree! This is the important point to stress here in my opinion. Was a bit surprised to not see more comments about this aspect of the problem here.

voidmain 9y ago

I'm not a big fan of contracts of adhesion. I think that to give up important rights by contract should require a correspondingly conspicuous degree of solemnity, not a link at the bottom of a web page to terms of service that state they can be changed at any time by one party. But the reality is that no matter how much contractual solemnity you require to let other people trade in your personal information, most people will do it in order to get credit. If to get a home loan you had to copy down a contract giving the bank the right to do credit monitoring in longhand with a fountain pen and sign it sixteen times in your own blood, my guess is that people would still be doing it, because credit monitoring really does make loans cheaper. So as a practical matter, I don't think the Equifaxes of the world would go away if the problem you point to was solved. Whereas there's no reason they shouldn't at least internalize the cost of losing your information through incompetence.