“There’s a consumer value proposition of being in control of their data.” That was an Equifax executive,
There's not a whole lot I can add about the disastrous Equifax breach that hasn't been said already. My colleague Rob Garver has an excellent
“Customer data might be a valuable asset, but it is also a huge liability. You could even call it radioactive. … “[I]t is painfully clear that the more information a company has about its customers, the bigger the prize for hackers….
“Apart from tightening up cybersecurity … this environment calls for a new mindset. A simple option would be to collect only what you absolutely have to in order to run the business and be compliant, and
dispose of it as soon as you safely and legally can .”
Of course, Equifax's flagship business is collecting highly personal information about consumers, so perhaps that last bit of advice wouldn’t have been as much help in this case.
This is where the executive’s line about
Shopping at Target or another retailer is a choice, a calculated risk (even if most people don't consciously make that risk assessment while shopping). The fact that Americans are all subject to Equifax makes the company's failure to protect people's data especially galling. Did I mention that the identity monitoring being offered to victims comes with an
There is a
The news of the breach is surely an awkward development for that venture. And perhaps for any such enterprise that proposes to vouch for people’s identities so they don’t need to fork over personally identifiable information to a gazillion different companies. It may be