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Comment by calvinbhai | Hacker News Reader

So, this basically is a way for Equifax to get a mass waiver from people to make a class action lawsuit less damaging to the company. Opting out of the waiver is a long winded process of mailing a form. another funny thing is that if you sign up for their crappy product, you have to come back on a different day and complete the sign up. There wont be emails or notifications. If you forget to signup, then you have basically waived your rights to sue to company.

For every SSN entered, Equifax can say in a class action lawsuit that they have waivers from all the following SSNs ....

IANAL, but this looks like a sensible strategy for Equifax to save itself after screwing with people's SSNs and personal info.

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> Opting out of the waiver is a long winded process of mailing a form.

I freaking hate tactics like this, so I am offering to go through the mailing process for anyone who fills out the form at https://unarbitrate.org/. I'll pay to mail it, just because I hate this sort of thing. If you don't trust me with your data, the site also provides a way to print it and mail it yourself. But whatever it takes, I encourage everyone to opt out of this; you have nothing to gain by giving up these rights.

(I've submitted it to HN as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15207151)

Let me know if you'd like a contribution to cover postage for people.

Thanks, I appreciate the support! I'll let you know if it comes to that; so far I have some money set aside and I should be able to keep costs under control by bundling them into one envelope.

It's going to take more than an envelope, if your site gains legs. There is also the expense of printing and shipping. Paper is heavy. You mentioned the idea of delivering them in person, you may wish to get some press and legal council.

Reach out, should you need financial assistance.

Hell of a thing to do, putting your money where your convictions are.

Thanks! It's money well spent :)

Thank you so much for doing this! I have one question though: how do I get my Equifax username?

Does everyone have an equifax username?

No, I don't have one either. Where do I find it?

> For every SSN entered, Equifax can say in a class action lawsuit that they have waivers from all the following SSNs ....

Equifax themselves have said they'll only use the waiver with respect to the credit monitoring service, and not to the security breach:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/08/equifax-says-it-wont-bar-c...

You could say, "Maybe they're lying", but it seems like it would be pretty easy for the class action attorneys to act on your behalf here.

They're not lying, because the act of saying it made it true. A court would no longer permit them that argument because the counterparty would just present that highly public statement. (Maybe there's a tiny chance they could wiggle out of it, but they would have to find a human judge who would let them, and I imagine those are in short supply in a case like this.)

See: http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Promissory+Est...

> they would have to find a human judge who would let them, and I imagine those are in short supply in a case like this.)

Would it be possible to find any judge who can try this case, since the set of people affected by the breach is basically everyone?

Yeah that actually makes it irrelevant. The concern of people being impacted is about biases. If everyone is impacted the bias is no different than the base concept of peer justice in the first place.

I am not a lawyer, but I have taken a bunch of law classes.

IIRC, the judge doesn't need to recuse themselves of any/all cases where they are impacted, only that they must recuse themselves where they would be unable to be unbiased, or where there would be an appearance of being unbiased.

In the lower courts, when in doubt, that's decided by other judges. At the SCOTUS level, that's decided by the individual judge on an individual level.

So, yes... They will find a judge.

They said that after New York Attorney General complained that this is not enforceable. I'm pretty sure they were hoping it would stick.

Are you saying that merely by seeing if you were impacted, you are waiving your rights, even if you don't come back on the scheduled day to complete the enrollment? That sounds ridiculous. Nowhere in the simple form that they provided is there any mention of waiving any rights. Nor is there one of those standard checkboxes about "I accept the terms.." when filling out that little form.

Not quite. They tell you you're impacted, then "helpfully" offer to sign you up for a service that will (supposedly) help to mitigate the damage. Buried in the TOS for that service is a clause that you give up your right to sue.

It's a textbook scam.

I received an enrollment date next week, but wonder if I do not follow through if I've already given up any rights.

This whole thing is just weird.

"Weird" is not the adjective that I would choose. "Despicable" is more like it.

A friend also told me the TOS for the monitoring includes, by default, automatic renewal of credit monitoring for a fee after the free first year.

Why am I not surprised?

You don't need to worry. Equifax can say whatever they want in their BS terms, however no judge in their right mind would enforce such language barring you from joining a class action suit. If equifax sent out some sort of compensation check, and you cashed it, that's a different story.

I would not be so certain of the right-mindedness of judges if it were me.

With this many people affected, it'd be political suicide to enforce such a claim - ideally. The ideally bit is because we may just have reached a point where judges no longer have to worry about doing the right thing.

Perhaps they were trying to do that, but after New York Attorney General mentioned that this can not be enforced, they updated their FAQ that this waiving is only for issues regarding to the service itself, it does not cover the data breach. So you should be ok, but frankly in this case the service is useless, it is only for one year, but the information is still valid after that. The minimum they should do is to remove all the fees for freezing/thawing the account and allow everyone to permanent freeze their accounts with ability to unfreeze whenever they need to open a new account.

The sad thing is that they think the current solution is adequate. They do it this way because we are not their customers, we are their product. I would encourage to complain about this to your representatives. We could have much better protections about identity theft, have account frozen by default and without any fees. Have their credit checking services available for free.

Sadly, the business is structured so they actually are making money when it is easy to open a credit line, even illegitimate one.

Im pretty sure lawyers would tear appart such a shitty tactic. But it will at least keep them busy.

This seems too overt, and related to too big an event, to work.

I agree

I'm confused. If I didn't fill out their form for TrustID, do I still need to mail some kind of form?

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