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Comment by conanbatt | Hacker News Reader

Equifax is not the result of a free market or lack of regulation, its a company that subsists in an artificial high barrier to entry space, where strange things happen like equifax is not liable for the mistakes it makes (which are grotesque and frequent).

Equifax receives government protection, not scrutiny, so more regulation means more protection..

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In what world would more competition and less regulation cause Equifax (or a company like it) to do a better job securing Americans data? Few, if any, of its important customers were harmed.

Equifax has had a terrible rep as a service long before the hack. Even john oliver had a segment on it before the hack happened, on how an egregious number of reports are grossly innacurate (like 40%, i cant remember). That has to be bad even for the banks: bad credit reports equals bad loans.

Regulation tends to decrease the number of players and increase the size of the incumbents, particularly because it puts requirements that can only be done with big bucks.

But none of that has anything to do with securing Americans' data. Also, even if that 40% figure is true, which I doubt, it's not like banks are going to care until they run out of people they'd like to loan money to.

Meanwhile, regular non-bank Americans get screwed in ways that could have been mitigated by regulation. In economic terms, that's called an externality, a concept which is covered in any reasonable Econ 101 book. The foolish solution to a market failure is more market.

So how would less regulation around data security (which is the thing that this is about) prevent another Equifax? Remember, you and I are not Equifax's customers, so we have no ability to choose anything in this scenario.

You need responsibility not regulation. Sue equifax into oblivion.

Equifax took care of this possibility by taking advantage of the freedom they had to place binding arbitration clauses in their customer agreements.

Unless you're independently wealthy, taking Equifax on by yourself in court is a non-starter. This, of course, was the point of adding these clauses in the first place.

I don't buy that, mainly because that only works if I can afford to sue those doing wrong. Most people cannot. Hence, why the government is there: to uphold these laws, and use everyone's collective resources to do that.

Class action lawsuits are pretty good at that. Which is what equifax is going through.

There are two problems with this view:

1) Sophisticated corporations have developed legal loopholes to eliminate their vulnerability to class actions. Wells Fargo used this tactic to have the lawsuits about the fraudulent accounts it created dismissed [1]. Equifax may or may not be able to benefit from similar provisions (they had one on their website terms of use, which their twitter said didn't apply to the breach as they were getting PR flak for it).

In a move you doubtless approve of, the regulation that would have restored consumer access to the legal system was repealed [2].

2) Money damages in a class action lawsuits aren't going to really make the victims of the Equifax breach whole. Valuing your leaked personal data is very difficult, as is proving that an identity theft was performed with information leaked from a particular source, and both of these will work in Equifax's favor in court. The data has been leaked, and a lawsuit isn't going to put it back into a bottle, nor is it likely to financially chastise Equifax adequately.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-wells-fargo-arbitratio...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/24/senate-kills-cfpb-rule-on-ar...

Are you going to start lobby to make it illegal for companies to put anti-class action clauses in their ToS? Are you going to lobby to make it illegal for a company to force mandatory binding arbitration on their customers? If not, then you're just trying to have your cake and eat it too. You're trying to keep the government from punishing wrongdoing, and trying to keep people from the very few remedies they have.

In what manner does Equifax receive government protection? (Aside from Mulvaney's dereliction of duty in this case)

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