Tell that to my coworker who spent all day on the phone last week fighting identify fraud with his bank. The impacts will be intermittent lightning strikes on random people at random times. To everyone else, business as usual.
Are you saying this anecdote makes the dire predictions accurate? Or are you just saying it had > 0 effect? The parent post was talking about the former as a whole, not sure it's worth countering with the latter.
Can your coworker trace the identity fraud to the Equifax breach? As opposed to all of the identity fraud that happened throughout the years before the breach?
Are you implying that, when a hurricane strikes, no one drop of water can be responsible for the resulting devastation?
(When in this case, to stretch the metaphor, the droplets all had strong profit incentives related to storing and making decisions based on peoples' data, and that they were pretty demonstrably negligent at protecting their charge?)
All I'm really saying is, these breaches won't ever stop if the cost of a response remains substantially lower for these companies, than the profitability of being the (ir)responsible ones and maintaining the data in a negligent state.
> > Nearly all of the dire predictions made at the time of the breach have been wrong to date.
> Tell that to my coworker who spent all day on the phone last week fighting identify fraud with his bank.
I'm saying that identity theft happened before the Equifax breach, and the Target breach, and the Yahoo! breach, etc. It will continue to happen. What we need is some sort of reform, like a national ID system with stronger ways to identify people (like fingerprints) and strong penalties for the criminals, not the organizations that get victimized. Note that anything like this will probably result in restricting access to credit or raising the cost of it.
People like to blame the CRAs for this, but it's the businesses that don't do due diligence in verifying identity that are at fault.
I would like, if you are one of the entities with control over this situation, if you bet against this. How much will it cost me to get you, as a service provider, to start betting against this?
I know this sounds crazy, but ... entities cannot secure their relationship with you if they cannot maintain some detail as private. (Until we all have PKI and use it?)
1) A few hours on the phone != getting hit by lightning.
2) It's still a bit early to trust the data, but so far identity theft rates do not appear to be up significantly in the aftermath of the equifax breach.
Since much of the information doesn't change easily it is my understanding the identity thieves will sit on the information and use it intermittently for years.
Revised revised headline: A year later, we do not have a full accounting of the impact of the data breach, but this weird blog quotes a fraud prevention company saying they saw big increases in online fraud rates: https://www.paymentssource.com/slideshow/data-fraud-after-th...
Ha, how will you know how the leaked information is being used ? This is the problem, once your data is out there there is no way to know how it will be used. Everyone i know had to take active steps to lock the credit history including me. This is the major blunder they got away with..unbelievable!
That's a fair change. I didn't love the use of "inadvertent" there and was struggling for the best single word adjective to use. There was definitely significant negligence on equifax's part.
Put your money where your mouth is. Publish your info and see what happens. If you later have a problem, how will you be able to show that it was because you published your info?
Nearly all of the dire predictions made at the time of the breach have been wrong to date.