Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

dannyw

Credit monitoring, * offered by Equifax *, should not be legitimate restitution.

It’s like Apple’s MacBooks blowing up and a judge ruling Apple can give iCloud storage as compensation.

View on HN

No this is worse, this is some fucking mafia shit.

Equifax: YOU NEED THIS PROTECTION. PAY US... or else maybe there will be an ACCIDENT with your data

Me: No, I don't, think so. Shit, sounds illegal to me

Equifax: WHOOPS. We had an accident.

Me: WTF? [calls authorities]

Equifax: Well, let us make this right, how about we now give you some _free_ protection as a sign of our goodwill... you know to try it out... just in case that WHOOPS ends up being a problem for you.

Me: [looks at response from authorities] This is okay? This is fucked.

This is state-sanctioned organized crime at its finest.

"And when you sign up, we'll ask for a credit card. And if you don't cancel the free protection, we'll start billing you for it soon enough."

We should have all collaborated to sign up for the monitoring and let them charge the cards, then all simultaneously issue chargebacks when the first charge hit to wreck their ability to accept credit cards and destroy their business.

You mean like the Zappos settlement where the restitution for the victims of the data breach was a 10% off coupon to Zappos?

Which also lets them spam all their old customers who do not otherwise receive promotional emails from them.

I got like 3 of these emails from zappos. At some level you just have to laugh that they're advertising a court enforced penalty.

A 10% off coupon that I not only received a few days ago, but has to be used before Jan 1, 2020. Just a middle finger to the people who's data they were irresponsible with.

This will continue until data protection legislation passes in the US. That’s the only way consumers will have any recourse.

Here’s EPIC’s summary of the legislation options: https://www.epic.org/GradingOnACurve/

This is the correct answer. The problem isn't how the class action suit was orchestrated; the problem is that class action is the only plausible and scalable form of justice currently available. Severe automatic penalties of X dollars per account lost and / or criminal liability for executives similar to SOX is what we need to deter these mistakes.

When they lied about their monitor size I got a coupon for a few bucks off my next purchase of an Apple monitor. Never used it.

It is exactly like that. What makes you think that wouldn't happen?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com