Before Equifax changed its name in 1976 — in the midst of a Congressional investigation and a national scandal — it was the Retail Credit Company, founded in Atlanta in 1899.
Three high-ranking Equifax executives are being investigated for selling shares of Equifax shortly after the company was hacked, but long before Equifax admitted it had been hacked. They are Equifax Chief Financial Officer John Gamble, President of U.S. Information Solutions Joseph Loughran, and President of Workforce Solutions Rodolfo Ploder. — Read the rest
Legalist is a Peter Thiel-funded startup whose business-model is to buy legal grievances in exchange for a license to sue on behalf of its users, a practice called champerty that was most notoriously used by Thiel himself when he backed the lawsuits that brought down Gawker Media in an act of petty vengeance.
One week after announcing the worst breach in American history, and days after it was revealed that the breach had been caused by simple negligence, Equifax has announced the "retirement" of its Chief Information Officer, David Webb, and Chief Security Officer, Susan Mauldin, though "the company's review of the facts is still ongoing."
Equifax's world-beating breach of 143 million Americans' sensitive personal and financial information was the result of the company's failure to patch a two-month-old bug in Apache Struts, despite multiple reports of the bug being exploited in the wild.
Joshua Browder (previously) is the delightful teen computer science student who created a the Donotpay to fight parking tickets that saved millions for its users, then repurposed it to help homeless people apply for benefits.
Two influential members of the U.S. Senate today demanded answers from Equifax on the recent massive data breach that affected 143 million Americans.
During the five weeks after hackers stole 143 million Americans' data from Equifax, and while its execs were selling off their stock by the millions, the company sprang into action, producing an insecure site for checking whether your own data was breached that produces the same output no matter what name and SSN you input.
Before Equifax doxed 143 million Americans (but after it had suffered repeated smaller breaches that should have alerted the company to deficiencies in its security), it directed its lobbying body, the Consumer Data Industry Association, to pressure the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to exempt credit-reporting bureaux from a soon-to-begin rule banning binding arbitration clauses in user agreements.
Equifax dumped dox on 143 million Americans (as well as lucky Britons and Canadians!), sat on the news for five weeks, let its execs sell millions in stock, and then unveiled an unpatched, insecure WordPress site with an abusive license agreement where you could sign up for "free" credit monitoring for a year, in case someone used the immortal, immutable Social Security Number that Equifax lost control over to defraud you.
From mid-May to July 2017, Equifax exposed the financial and personal identifying information of 143 million Americans — 44% of the country — to hackers, who made off with credit-card details, Social Security Numbers, sensitive credit history data, driver's license numbers, birth dates, addresses, and then, in the five weeks between discovering the breach and disclosing it, the company allowed its top execs to sell millions of dollars' worth of stock in the company, while preparing a visibly defective and ineffective website that provides no useful information to the people whom Equifax has put in grave financial and personal danger through their recklessness.
A hacker allegedly used LinkedIn's API to extract 700 million people's names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information such as "inferred salary," reports PrivacySharks. They are offering to sell it and have made a sample of 1 million records available for inspection. — Read the rest
Joshua Browder created Donotpay as a teenager at Stanford: originally it was a chatbot that helped you beat traffic tickets, but it has since expanded (thanks to an infusion of venture capital) into a Swiss Army Knife of automated consumer advocacy that can do everything from sue Equifax on your behalf to help you access homeless services to getting you a rebate when your plane ticket's price goes down after you've purchased it.
Back in 2011, I signed up for a Zappos account so I could buy pants for a wedding I was in. Then I returned them because they didn't fit. I ended up buying them at the local Macy's instead (although I bought the wrong shade of grey, oops). — Read the rest
Donotpay started as a project to help people automatically fight parking tickets, before its then-teenaged creator, the UK-born Stanford computer science undergrad Joshua Browder expanded it to help homeless people apply for benefits, then to help you sue Equifax for doxing you, then to apply for rebates if your plane tickets' prices went down after you applied for them, then to easily file small claims suits against companies that ripped you off, then to apply for airline compensation for late flights, lost bags, overbookings and cancellations, then to auto-cancel your "free trial offers" by letting you create burner credit-card numbers that would simply not accept future bills when they arrived.
One important detail from this week's admission from Doordash that they'd suffered (and remained silent about) a breach of 4.9 million records: Doordash, by its nature, includes the home addresses of people who otherwise avoid disclosing where they live.
Bernie Sanders has pledged to eliminate the $81b in outstanding US medical debt if he is elected president in 2020.
The Washington Post's Drew Harwell takes a deep look at the the use of facial recognition products like Bunk1 at summer camps, in a deliciously terrible piece that alternates between Bunk1's president Rob Burns and Waldo Photos's founder Rodney Rice explaining that everyone loves this and it makes everyone happy, and counsellors, parents, campers and photographers (as well as child development experts and civil libertarians) explaining how it is just fucking terrible, which Rice dismisses as "privacy hysteria."
If you only look at porn with your browser in incognito mode, your browser will not record your porn-viewing history; but the porn sites themselves overwhelmingly embed tracking scripts from Google and Facebook in every page: 93% of 22,484 porn sites analyzed in a New Media & Society paper had some kind of third-party tracker, with Google in the lead, but also including trackers from some of the worst privacy offenders in Silicon Valley, like Oracle.
DoNotPay (previously) is a collection of consumer-advocacy tools automated the process of fighting traffic tickets, help homeless people claim benefits, sue Equifax for leaking all your financial data, navigating the airlines' deliberately confusing process for getting refunds on plane tickets whose prices drop after you buy them, and filing small-claims suits against crooked corporations.
