Seriously, Equifax? This Is a Breach No One Should Get Away With<br />Raj Joshi, an analyst at Moody’s, said in a note to investors<br />that Equifax was likely to be fine, as “the impact of the security breach will only modestly erode its solid credit metrics and liquidity.”<br />The two regulators that do have jurisdiction over Equifax, the Federal Trade Commission<br />and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, declined to comment on any potential punishments over the credit agency’s breach.<br />Here’s one troubling reason: Because even after one of the gravest breaches in history,<br />no one is really in a position to stop Equifax from continuing to do business as usual.<br />“It is troubling that Equifax is forcing people to waive legal rights in order to receive fraud monitoring after the<br />company’s breach put their personal information at risk,” Samuel Gilford, a bureau spokesman, said in a statement.<br />“There’s nothing in any statute or anything else that allows you to ask Equifax to remove your data or have all your data disappear<br />if you say you no longer trust it,” said John Ulzheimer, a consumer credit expert who worked at Equifax in the 1990s.<br />On its website, Equifax boasts that it “organizes, assimilates<br />and analyzes data on more than 820 million consumers and more than 91 million businesses worldwide, and its database includes employee data contributed from more than 7,100 employers.”<br />But if we are now conceding that hacks just happen<br />and no one can stop them — well, here’s a crazy thought: Maybe let’s not allow any company to house all this data.
