"I checked myself, my wife, you and your brother. To the best of my knowledge none of us have Equifax accounts, but it says they probably got our address & driver's license for all four of us.
I don't want to waste money on LifeLock. What can I do? Just watch my accounts?"
Is Visa, MasterCard, etc. at least partially to blame here for picking a bad solution? My personal ties are not with Equifax, I have no direct means as a consumer to express dissatisfaction. Can I sue Visa? They are they ones (I presume anyway) who did the actual information collection from me, and then it was mishandled.
We need more tools for dealing with data breaches. Things aren't slowing down, and they aren't going to unless something big changes.
Your contract is with your card issuer, who provided your personal information to the credit agencies. But you probably agreed not to sue them as part of your agreement when you asked them to issue you a card.
If you don't want to pay for LifeLock, which I agree is a bit steep, you can usually get an identity theft protection policy from most major insurances companies. The premiums vary, but are usually a fraction of LifeLock's fees. Just be sure you understand what's covered.
I use both of those and it costs me $25/yr total.
You can check the Fair Credit Reporting Act for more information about various parties' responsibilities in handling your credit information. However, I don't think you'd be able to sue lenders/creditors in this case. They are distinct from the credit reporting agency that seems to be at fault.
> They only monitor TransUnion and Equifax data
Where do you see that they monitor Equifax data? I only see TransUnion mentioned.
Of course I told them to get lost and just used another mobile provider, but I learned from this episode that all of these consumer services companies share data both ways with these credit checking agencies.
A) A credit account is not the same thing as a checking account or credit union account
B) Plenty of people, even in the US, operate without any of these things. It's not fun, but it's absolutely possible.
After my company crashed, my wife divorced me and then I got cancer -- things were pretty grim on my credit-worthiness story. Net-net: I went without a bank-account for a few years and learned to live with pre-paid phones, money-orders, cashing checks at pawn-shops and pre-paid debit cards, and (for medical and other reasons - not able to drive. Good news: I saved on car insurance, gas and parking). All-in-all ... not a lot of fun (it's very expensive and time-consuming to be poor in America!).
But! As you say: it is do-able.
Monopolies aren't choices, and monopolies on essential services are coercive by definition.
It doesn't make much sense for borrowers, though. But since, by definition, the lenders have the money and the borrowers do not, the borrowers have no real ability to negotiate when lenders get together and do things like that.
But borrowers can vote just as much as lenders can, which is why such behavior is governed by law. So let's not pretend that borrowers somehow agreed to this system in any way. It was forced upon them, and the best they could do about it is pass laws to ensure that lenders at least had to be accurate when reporting, and had to respond reasonably to disputes. Since lenders can lobby and vote, too, borrowers were not able to mandate that the lenders would have much in the way of legal liability when they inevitably get lazy, screw up, and cause real damages to real people.
The law isn't fair; it's just the best compromise that adversarial parties with differing amounts of money, power, and motivation could reach a threshold level of agreement on. It just so happens that a savvy and motivated borrower can completely whitewash their own credit reports for the cost of a few stamps, and maybe some small claims suits, while an ignorant borrower, or one who lacks the time and energy to ride herd on the CRAs, can get completely screwed. It's a numbers game, and the lenders and CRAs can make more money from the latter category than they lose from the former.
Their announcement says social security, addresses and names have been stolen, this is really worse, this data is enough to do ton of things.
The credit agencies (of which equifax is one of 3) get their info from credit card companies and other financial institutions. If you've ever signed up for a credit card or gotten a mortgage or car loan the information from that transaction was sent to the credit reporting agencies. That's how they get data to make their determination of how credit worthy you are.
Doesn't "users" imply that we had a choice in the matter? As if we're Equifax's customers? I feel more like we're victims in this case.