The Equifax Breach Was Just as Infuriating and Dumb as You Thought ⇥ gizmodo.com

Dell Cameron, Gizmodo:

House Republicans spent 14 months investigating the 2017 Equifax breach only to reach the same conclusions that virtually everyone else with a brain did in the immediate aftermath of the company’s disclosure. The breach was “entirely preventable,” lawmakers found, and the credit reporting agency’s shit management did absolutely nothing to shield consumers from this mess.

Luckily for Equifax, the same lawmakers who helped produce a new report have managed to pass precisely zero laws that would deter future acts of negligence on this scale. The only recompense consumers have been offered is free credit freezes forever — a useful tool for the next time 147 million people minding their own business get screwed with their pants on.

Not only has there been little regulatory action taken against Equifax, its share price nearly recovered to its pre-breach level within a year. The company has few competitors, and even those companies aren’t true competitors so much as similarly-interested maintainers of the credit market.

A remaining avenue of compensation for victims would be to sue the company. So far, however, victories have been seen mostly in small claims courts, while Equifax’s lawyer argued that class action suits should be dismissed because they’re based on speculative identity theft arguments.