Don't waste your breath complaining to Equifax about data breach

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: September 16, 2017 at 5:49:09 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Don't waste your breath complaining to Equifax about data breach
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Judi Clark.  DLH]
>
> Don't waste your breath complaining to Equifax about data breach 
> By Bruce Schneier
> Sep 11 2017
> <http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/11/opinions/dont-complain-to-equifax-demand-government-act-opinion-schneier/index.html>
>
> Bruce Schneier is a lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School and a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and 
> Society. He blogs at www.schneier.com. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. 
>
> (CNN)Last Thursday, Equifax reported a data breach that affects 143 million US customers, about 44% of the 
> population. It's an extremely serious breach; hackers got access to full names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, 
> addresses, driver's license numbers -- exactly the sort of information criminals can use to impersonate victims to 
> banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, and other businesses vulnerable to fraud.
>
> Many sites posted guides to protecting yourself now that it's happened. But if you want to prevent this kind of thing 
> from happening again, your only solution is government regulation (as unlikely as that may be at the moment).
> The market can't fix this. Markets work because buyers choose between sellers, and sellers compete for buyers. In 
> case you didn't notice, you're not Equifax's customer. You're its product.
>
> This happened because your personal information is valuable, and Equifax is in the business of selling it. The 
> company is much more than a credit reporting agency. It's a data broker. It collects information about all of us, 
> analyzes it all, and then sells those insights.
>
> Its customers are people and organizations who want to buy information: banks looking to lend you money, landlords 
> deciding whether to rent you an apartment, employers deciding whether to hire you, companies trying to figure out 
> whether you'd be a profitable customer -- everyone who wants to sell you something, even governments.
>
> It's not just Equifax. It might be one of the biggest, but there are 2,500 to 4,000 other data brokers that are 
> collecting, storing, and selling information about you -- almost all of them companies you've never heard of and have 
> no business relationship with.
>
> Surveillance capitalism fuels the Internet, and sometimes it seems that everyone is spying on you. You're secretly 
> tracked on pretty much every commercial website you visit. Facebook is the largest surveillance organization mankind 
> has created; collecting data on you is its business model. I don't have a Facebook account, but Facebook still keeps 
> a surprisingly complete dossier on me and my associations -- just in case I ever decide to join. 
>
> I also don't have a Gmail account, because I don't want Google storing my email. But my guess is that it has about 
> half of my email anyway, because so many people I correspond with have accounts. I can't even avoid it by choosing 
> not to write to gmail.com addresses, because I have no way of knowing if newperson () company com is hosted at Gmail.
>
> And again, many companies that track us do so in secret, without our knowledge and consent. And most of the time we 
> can't opt out. Sometimes it's a company like Equifax that doesn't answer to us in any way. Sometimes it's a company 
> like Facebook, which is effectively a monopoly because of its sheer size. And sometimes it's our cell phone provider. 
> All of them have decided to track us and not compete by offering consumers privacy. Sure, you can tell people not to 
> have an email account or cell phone, but that's not a realistic option for most people living in 21st-century America.
>
> The companies that collect and sell our data don't need to keep it secure in order to maintain their market share. 
> They don't have to answer to us, their products. They know it's more profitable to save money on security and weather 
> the occasional bout of bad press after a data loss. Yes, we are the ones who suffer when criminals get our data, or 
> when our private information is exposed to the public, but ultimately why should Equifax care?
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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