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posted by Fnord666 on Friday September 15 2017, @02:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the someone-always-pays dept.

Renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier has a story up on his blog On the Equifax Data Breach:

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.

Bruce continues with observations about the data gathering activities of such on-line behemoths as Google and Facebook, as well as companies as mundane as your cell phone provider. Sadly, massive data breaches such as what happened at Target, Home Depot, and Yahoo! gathered media attention for a while, but after a matter of time faded from public awareness and concern.

He suggests the only solution is government regulation. Maybe. But that also runs up against the problem of regulatory capture.

What, if anything, can be done? Mandate a minimum payment of, say, $100.00 to each person who had information disclosed? That would certainly boost a company's willingness to implement security best-practices.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @09:58AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @09:58AM (#568359)

    What can you do if you are standing at a desk in another city and they demand your private information to prove that you made the booking for the room.

    In Europe, every hotel demands that you provide their passport to them along with contact information. So unless you want to sleep outside, you need to provide it. Then they probably have it stored in some Excel sheet.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 16 2017, @05:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 16 2017, @05:50PM (#569051)

    No, they don't. I've been to London multiple times and stayed in multiple hotels. Not one of them required me to hand over my passport. Credit Card on a previously purchased room (via Expedia), yes. But never my passport. Perhaps it's different in different European countries or at different priced hotels?