For those who have forgotten, 2 years ago Equifax—one of the top three credit reporting services in the world—suffered a catastrophic breach that resulted in the loss of data on 150 million people. The details are drearily familiar: Equifax had an outdated system and had failed to apply patches that had been available for months. Congress and others have accused the corporation of negligence and stupidity.
Now the cost of their negligence is becoming clear. Moody’s, a Wall Street bond rating service, has downgraded Equifax to a negative outlook. Lawsuits and investigations have already cost Equifax 690 million dollars in 2019 and the company is expected to pay out another billion dollars through 2021 to deal with the breach.
Equifax, and companies like it, vacuum up every bit of information that they can about people. Much of it, I’m sure, is only peripherally, if at all, concerned with credit worthiness. That’s bad enough but what’s really bad is that Equifax couldn’t keep that information secure. The data was exposed not from an “act of God” but from negligence and a “who cares” attitude about security.
I doubt their problems are existential but I wouldn’t be sorry to see them sued into oblivion. Until society makes it clear that if you gather people’s information, you’re unconditionally responsible for keeping it secure, we’ll continue to see this sort of thing. Regular readers know that Irreal is invariably suspicious of government attempts to insert themselves into our lives but this seems a case where the government could benefit us all by making the penalties—both financial and criminal—for mistreating citizen’s confidential information explicit.