• Equifax is getting away with our outrage

    September 25, 2017 | blog

  • Let’s pretend that I came to your house and gathered up all your gardening equipment — rakes, shovels, hoes and so forth — without asking. I took all your tools and stored them in a huge shed with enough room to hold the gardening equipment of 143 million of your closest friends and neighbors. All without asking.

    Equifax is getting away with our outrage

    Let’s pretend that I came to your house and gathered up all your gardening equipment — rakes, shovels, hoes and so forth — without asking. I took all your tools and stored them in a huge shed with enough room to hold the gardening equipment of 143 million of your closest friends and neighbors. All without asking.

    And then I left the back door of this shed wide open so that anyone with half a brain could cart off all the tools without so much as a whisper.

    But wait, it gets better.

    Instead of immediately letting you know about this thievery so you can do something to protect yourself, I wait a month while I sell my stock and make sure all my own tools are safe and secure. And then, for a small fee, I offer to look after your tools so that nobody steals them a little more.

    Experts in the business of writing call this an analogy, especially when you substitute the credit reporting agency Equifax with me and your personal financial information with the garden tools. I talk about gathering up all your tools because I never remember Equifax — or any other credit reporting agency — asking if they could record my Social Security number, income, loans and other highly personal information.

    Hackers stole the information and the company waited six weeks before letting anyone else know about the data breach. Three Equifax executives, including John Gamble, the firm’s chief financial officer, sold thousands of shares after the discovery of the leak. The executives claimed they had no knowledge of the situation.

    Something about this entire debacle tastes so foul. I should feel only outrage toward this company, but, to be entirely honest, it just feels like business as usual. We should be marching in the streets with our anger, carrying torches and pitchforks to the company’s headquarters. We have room in our prisons for people who walk off with a couple of thousand dollars from their employers’ petty cash drawer so we should have room for these jokers as well.

    To rub salt in ours wounds, Equifax offered to sign up consumers for its own identity protection service.

    To this injustice add hurricane damage, immigration challenges, the cost of health care, climate change, fake news, rigged elections, the closing of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus — before I know it, I’m completely out of outrage about anything. I will passively accept the next batch of nonsense that flows down the line because I can’t summon an ounce of outrage.

    Back in the days of my youth, gathering a crowd armed with placards and raised fists took nothing more than a few mimeographed fliers tacked to telephone poles near campus coffeehouses. Now I can’t even find a telephone pole. And nobody stops to read much of anything attached to an underground utility line.

    If I can’t scare up an ounce of outrage about Equifax, what will stir the righteous indignation that we so desperately need?

    Try this one for size: The bankruptcy of Toys R Us. The company announced it just this week. In a frivolous world like this we need something even more frivolous to entertain us until the next crisis arrives.

    Now, who took off with my pitchfork?

    Rick Brown is a Hub staff writer who needs to borrow a shovel to finish his column.

    Rick Brown
    Rick Brown