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Equifax offers us protection, but who’ll protect us from the protectors?

By Mark Saal, Standard-Examiner Staff - | Sep 19, 2017

I just hope whoever uses my identity next has better luck than I’ve had.

Twice in the last year and a half my wife and I have been the victims of identity theft. It’s forced us to go through the hassle of ordering — and waiting for — new credit cards. And now along comes this Equifax thing …

So, I went to the website equifaxsecurity2017.com to find out if I happened to be one of the lucky Americans who won — or rather, lost — this summer’s big identity-theft lottery.

By now, we’re all-too-familiar with the story. Equifax, a consumer credit reporting agency, was hacked this year beginning May 13 and continuing through July 30. Among the personal information compromised for 143 million Americans was names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and — in some instances — driver’s license numbers. In addition, about 209,000 credit card numbers were accessed, along with documents containing personal information for another 182,000 consumers.

So, how do you know if your personal information was affected? You go to the Equifax website and click on the link that reads: ”To enroll in complimentary identity theft protection and credit file monitoring, click here.”

Complimentary. I love the way Equifax makes their screwup sound like they’re offering free beverages and hot towels.

Anyway, once on the website you type in your last name and the last six digits of your Social Security number. (Only six? Relax, identity thieves should be able to get their hands on the other three.) The company then tells you if you’ll be looking over your shoulder for the next decade.

I checked my status at the company’s special website dedicated to damage control of the hack. And the results? Beneath a large “Thank You” heading, Equifax coldly informed me:

”Based on the information provided, we believe that your personal information may have been impacted by this incident.”

Three things stand out in Equifax’s delivery of this bad news:

1. The polite “Thank You” heading seems wholly out of place considering the gravity of the information Equifax had just passed along. Wouldn’t “Holy crap!” or “Grab your ankles and kiss your assets goodbye” be a more apropos icebreaker?

2. So then, they “believe” my personal information “may” have been among the data taken. If 143 million stolen identities doesn’t shake my confidence in Equifax, the use of hedging words like “believe” and “may” certainly will.

3. I love the way Equifax soft-pedals the bad news, using the vague euphemisms that my personal information was “impacted” by the “incident.” Because frankly, “impacted” sounds so much better than “stolen by very bad people.” And “incident” isn’t nearly as panic-inducing as “financial Equi-cluster-fax.”

Of course, after informing me that my personal info may or may not be in the hands of some mouthbreather from a former Soviet satellite state, Equifax instructed me to, “Click the button below to continue your enrollment in TrustedID Premier.”

This is the point where I paused in the process. After all, providing a bunch more personal information to the very company that lost my info in the first place feels a bit like hanging up posters around town telling the criminals who just burglarized your home: “Hey, you forgot the good silverware. We’ll just leave it on the front porch.”

OK, so maybe that analogy is a bit harsh, since in all fairness it wasn’t Equifax that stole my information.

Rather, they’re more like the residential alarm company whose home security systems didn’t trigger until burglars had already broken into millions of houses every day between May 13 and July 30. And then, the alarm company waited another six weeks after that before bothering to notify any homeowners of the break-ins.

Oh, and they’re offering victims the use of a free smoke alarm for a year.

Yeah. It’s more like that.

The ironies in this story are particularly thick, including the one where, as a potential identity-theft victim, I’m now invited to enroll in a “complimentary” Equifax product called TrustedID Premier.

Trusted. It just doesn’t seem like Equifax gets to use that word for the foreseeable future.

Gotta be honest: Before this whole data breach thing, I didn’t even know what Equifax was. I still don’t, even after reading the “About Equifax” section on the company’s website.

Because it’s there where we learn that Equifax is a “global information solutions company,” and that it “organizes, assimilates and analyzes data” to “power organizations and individuals around the world by transforming knowledge into insights.”

Listen, if any of you can tell me with a straight face what all that corporate-speak means, I’ll just go ahead and send you my bank account numbers right now.

Among the features included in Equifax’s Trusted(-ish)ID Premier service are credit monitoring, identity-theft insurance and Social Security number scanning. According to the website, that last one, “Searches suspicious websites for your Social Security number.”

Huh. Would that be suspicious sites like, say, equifax.com?

Contact Mark Saal at 801-625-4272 or msaal@standard.net. Follow him on Twitter at @Saalman. Friend him on Facebook at facebook.com/MarkSaal.

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