Tag: Equifax

Unwise

I read this piece on the Equifax data breach by Gary Leff. I was looking for the punch line.

We’re stuck dealing with the consequences, and while the average consumer maybe should get a credit freeze I’m not going to, it’s a pain and slows down the credit origination process and not all issuers will follow up manually to get permission to access your credit. At this point I’m just going to aggressively monitor my accounts.

Unfortunately, he's serious.

While I hate the idea of the kind of personal information being freely available that would allow someone to social engineer access to my accounts, enough correct details to convince a bank to reset my password or make a wire transfer, that sort of attack is manual and time-consuming and not the sort of thing that will be done across 100,000,000 customers. So safety comes in the form of security by obscurity, sure I can be hacked but the odds that I’ll be one of the ones hacked are pretty low.

I'd like him to provide some risk assessment to back up that statement.

Saturday Links Week 37

What have we done?

“A lot of the designers and coders who were in their 20s when we were creating these things didn’t have kids. Now they have kids,” he says. “And they see what’s going on, and they say, ‘Wait a second.’ And they start to rethink their design decisions.” Nest founder and Apple designer Tony Fadell

Greg Joswiak, Apple’s VP of product marketing on Siri.

“We’re able to deliver a very personalized experience . . . without treating you as a product that keeps your information and sells it to the highest bidder. That’s just not the way we operate.”

Security guru, Bruce Schneier on Equifax and what needs to be done.

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.