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Comment by spinlock | Hacker News Reader

IMO, the best outcome would be to put Equifax out of business. I have had my identity stolen and they were complicit in enabling the fraud against me. Once you tell them you're NPI has been compromised, they get incredibly passive aggressive against you and refuse to allow you to manage the situation (i.e. they won't let you unlock your credit to apply for a mortgage).

In short, this breach of public "trust" is only the smoking gun that proves how horrible Equifax is. But, they have a long history of being a parasitic organization that will hopefully die soon.

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> they won't let you unlock your credit to apply for a mortgage

So how do you recover from something like that? Are you basically prevented from using credit for the rest of your life?

There are legal limits to how long the data can be stored for. (I want to say it's a federal 7 year limit, but I might be wrong and it might be state laws). Eventually it all times out and your credit resets.

That's not the issue. They are required to immediately remove incorrect information from your credit report. A freeze prevents them from reporting your credit to third parties (i.e. it prevents them from doing business). So, they hate people who freeze their credit. Their strategy seems to be to make having a credit freeze so onerous that you won't do it so they can continue to sell your information to their customers.

For many years I could not get a new credit card, overdraft protection on a checking account or a mortgage. I finally was able to completely remove the freeze so that I could secure a mortgage.

I'm not so sure about that, the data they have just gets resold to some other party when they go bankrupt, possibly many other parties and shit gets worse.

Is there any legal way to stop sales like that? If it were shown that Equifax were negligent in protecting the data on their systems, could a court demand that they remove all of the data to mitigate further harm?

There are already 3 main credit bureaus who have all of your data. It's not about the data it's about how unethical they are in preventing you from controlling the data.

Think about it: if every person in america put a freeze on their credit, all of these companies would go out of business because they would no longer have a product to sell. It gets even worse if you're a victim of identity theft because they cannot charge victims of identity theft to freeze or un-freeze a credit report.

C'mon we live in the real world here. What makes you think Equifax will be put out of business? I agree, the scumbags should be put down like a suffering animal but that will never happen.

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