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Visiting Equifax's site to see if you're a victim of the recent data breach can require you to waive lawsuit rights:
By all accounts, the Equifax data breach is, as we reported Thursday, "very possibly the worst leak of personal info ever." The incident affects possibly as many as 143 million people.
But if you want to find out if your data might have been exposed, you waive your right to sue the Atlanta-based company. We're not making this up. The company has now published a website allowing consumers to input their last six digits of their Social Security numbers to find out.
Like most websites, at the bottom of this new site is a section called "Terms of Use." There, in paragraph 4, is bolded, uppercase text of note. It tells site visitors that you agree to waive your right to sue and instead must "resolve all disputes by binding, individual arbitration."
AGREEMENT TO RESOLVE ALL DISPUTES BY BINDING INDIVIDUAL ARBITRATION. PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE SECTION CAREFULLY BECAUSE IT AFFECTS YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS BY REQUIRING ARBITRATION OF DISPUTES (EXCEPT AS SET FORTH BELOW) AND A WAIVER OF THE ABILITY TO BRING OR PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION, CLASS ARBITRATION, OR OTHER REPRESENTATIVE ACTION. ARBITRATION PROVIDES A QUICK AND COST EFFECTIVE MECHANISM FOR RESOLVING DISPUTES, BUT YOU SHOULD BE AWARE THAT IT ALSO LIMITS YOUR RIGHTS TO DISCOVERY AND APPEAL.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 09 2017, @11:26PM
On a page about its Insight score, Equifax says [equifax.com] it has "data on more than 187 million unique consumers, 27 million of which have no consumer credit file." By subtraction, 160 million have a consumer credit file. I wouldn't assume Equifax has files on all 160 million—there are other credit reporting agencies—but I would assume that it offers the Insight score of everyone for which it has a credit report. With those assumptions, I conclude that Equifax maintains no more than 160 million credit reports. It acknowledged that data on 143 million people was stolen. With my assumptions, that's at least 89% of the records it keeps. If they had a record about you, chances are excellent that it was stolen. I'm tempted to suspect that all of Equifax's credit reports were stolen, but I can't support that.