Power and prestige are another aspect. If companies like Equafax held only collections of public records (facts) then a 'breach' like this would have no conseq

Power and prestige are another aspect. If companies like Equafax held only collections of public records (facts) then a 'breach' like this would have no consequences; all of the data would already be public. What presently gives them power and what makes this breach so bad, is that these facts are used as proxies for an actual form of identification/authentication. A national ID based on strong cryptographic solutions and issued to all citizens, preferably with their own private keys being also signed by the government if they desire, is how we properly enable digital signatures and progress to an age where forgery of identity is far more difficult.