TL;DR There is a company that is facilitating widespread use of small claims court to punish Equifax for their unbeleivably negligent use and poor protection of your privacy. Take the time to take equifax to small claims court and let this company help.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170914005511/en/Legalist-Pay-Data-Breach-Victims-Sue-Equifax
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Full Post:
I dont think I have to inform anyone about the Equifax hack and the astonishing discovery of their negligently lax security that put virtually every American at risk of identity theft. I think I put it lightly there in fact. The data made available to the hackers would let anyone take out a loan or get a new credit card with your identity. Read some identity theft stories, it can take years to correct.
To be clear, Equifax's security was so low that username/passwords to get into sensitive areas were as simple as admin/admin. I'm not kidding. PINs that they gave out to people were as easy as simple datetime. This company DOES NOT CARE about your security and in no way should benefit by having personal information about you. Worse, the hack information came out a whole month after it happened and a number of people sold stock before the release. For those that signed up for their credit tracking stuff, they put on the auto-renew. They used their failure to secure your data to grab more customers!
So what to do? First, follow the advice of this post, do all the things, but defintiely lock down your credit. Seriously, do as much as you can in this post.
Please note the ways mentioned in the post about getting retribution for doing such poor work. There will be class action lawsuits, but this will barely benefit you, and the result will be some negotiated amount that may or may not help you. The lawyers will take 40-60% of the payouts.
Before I continue on the best way to make Equifax take yourself more seriously, I want to mention that as a society, we should be past this. You clearly do not own your identity, you are not in control of information about yourself and you should be. We may be limited in being able to fully lock it down, but sticking to old ways of doing it and relying on centralized methods makes no sense at all in this day and age. And there is work happening to correct this. For example look at this, a blockchain encrypted method to hold your identity. You and only you can let this out.
https://hbr.org/2017/03/blockchain-will-help-us-prove-our-identities-in-a-digital-world
But that work can not proceed if old, government supported monoliths remain in place. It is critical that people do the small amount of work required to take Equifax to task. you can't "not use" them. When you want to take out a loan, the people you are getting credit from will use them. You aren't in control of this, but you should be.
As mentioned, taking them to small claims court will benenfit you the most, since lawyers wont be claiming such a huge portion of the payout, a payout you, yourself are not negotitating. Plus, millions of small claims courts will put extra expenses on the company itself, in lawyers, in paper work, etc. They will be paying more than the sum of the small claims courts payouts. Plus, in all likelihood YOU will be getting more moeny too.
So how? And what about the costs. Your time is valuable. sum up the costs of reading this, freezing your credit with all three credit agencies, filing stuff for court, etc.
The company mentioned in this article will help with any fees. I imagine they will help with other aspects of the proceedings too.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170914005511/en/Legalist-Pay-Data-Breach-Victims-Sue-Equifax
Use it. Do this. This should really piss you off.