Your Equifixed identity

2017/10/13
The sordid story of Equifax gets worse and worse. Now they are in cohorts with sites pushing malware to your phone or laptop! It's that sadism-masochism story over again. Equifax is effectively roaming from door to door, slapping people in the face when they open the door, saying "put me down, please" and The People and their piss-ass lawmakers are going "nope!" The story is so absurd that even the first pilferage of over 140 million SSNs looks like it may be staged.

2017/10/03
In the worst case (for them), Equifax will lose those class-action and other lawsuits, and have to pay some cash. How am I helped by a few hundred to a few thousand dollars in my quest not to get my identity equifuxed? If I lose that kind of cash, I am far from broke. (If my bank silently deducts such amounts, I may never notice.)

What I cannot afford to do is to bandy words with random humorless government agents with their coats fitting awkwardly under their left armpits. Imagine flying into Trump's USA after someone has used your ID, gotten in, and bought some tear-inducing consumer items, like the ones used on Las Vegas or Oklahoma. Good luck getting your ass back from NSA with the kind of class-action largesse Equifax will pay out to you!

What people faxed by Equifax really need is restitution for crimes past and future. In any sane society, Equifax would be forced by the court to hire people who would then work with the federal government to create a new SSN to replace each old one.  They would have to port over the "clean" part of the old record to the new SSN, declare the old one void for ever, and consign the old record to read-only archives. Equifax must do this for each and every SSN they were monitoring. It's their reparation I want, not their cash. Most people would gladly learn to remember a new SSN if it will give them peace of mind from identity thieves.

Of course, we need to stop pretending the old or new SSNs are "secrets" of some kind. A number you give out to five new parties every year on average isn't a secret. A child of six knows that, but not grown people, apparently. Your SSN account has to keep up with the times, and be accessible online, with 2FA protection. Quoting part of your SSN with DOB on the phone should no longer be enough to get anything useful done.

For some reason, the above obviously-correct things to do are beyond what USA can legislate. The results will be as inevitable as they are obvious even now. Get ready for that cordial interview with NSA soon!

cheCahN8

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