Headline is misleading and the beach is relatively small, but you should proactively freeze your credit anyway. I had my identity stolen a few years ago due to an insurance company I’d never heard of getting hacked and it was a huge mess. The whole incident taught me that it’s not a matter of if your identity will be stolen- it’s when. Thousands of companies have your PII (personal identifying information) even if you have never heard of them or have never done business with them because your insurance works with them or said companies legally buy your info from other companies or your state’s government. Most of these companies do alright protecting your data, but when there are so many parties that have it and it only takes one screwing up to get your identity stolen, it’s just kind of impossible for them all to do hold the line.
It really pisses me off that citizens are responsible for"protecting" their identities on their own. Obviously the system isn’t working but nobody gives a shit or wants to do anything about it. If everyone should freeze their credit by default then why is this not the default state? Why is a 9 digit number given to us as babies on an un-laminated paper card the main thing standing between us and identity theft when you have to give that number to everyone to do anything anyway? It’s completely absurd.
At this point everyone should be given new Social security numbers and freash starts. Because all our data is on the dark web.
That’d end up being breached and disseminated very quickly, especially under this administration. They’d vibe code it and all the data would be publicly posted in the source code.
We created a totally secure and definitely unguessable (Probably Unique)™ identifier system - an MD5 hash of FirstnameLastname-DOB
Oh also with this new totally flawless system, you’re now legally obligated to recite I’m full your (Probably Unique)™ 32-character hash to any ICE agents who request it. Failure to do so will result in detainment.
For immigrants, we will happily tattoo your (Probably Unique)™ hash on your wrist for your convenience.
This, or it would be entirely outsourced to the highest commercial bidder which also happens to be something like Google, Meta or Palantir.
Honestly, this one is pretty small potatoes.
Hackers have stolen personal information of a majority of insurance firm Allianz Life’s 1.4 million customers in North America, its parent company said.
The German parent company added that the hackers were “able to obtain personally identifiable data related to the majority of Allianz Life’s customers, financial professionals, and select Allianz Life employees, using a social engineering technique”.
A mere million or two.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/534628/the-biggest-data-breaches-of-the-21st-century.html
Not to imply that the broader security situation isn’t a problem, mind.
At this point I assume most data breaches are just a criminal conspiracy between the corpo and data brokers.
No corporation bothers securing their data to a reasonable extent, so naturally they might as well choose the additional revenue stream of an “accidental” “breach” which is extremely valuable to surveillance capitalism. It’s not like they face any significant consequences 99% of the time…
This is an absurd conspiracy theory that doesn’t hold up to even the lighter scrutiny. Which data broker was Equifax secretly distributing info to when it got hacked? Data brokers don’t need this type of conspiracy to buy and sell your data- it’s already completely legal. How do you think these companies got it in the first place?
I will always downvote Hanlon’s Razor. Not because it’s useless, but because it doesn’t really hold true in capitalism and fascism. I can’t speak to this specific example, but peoplle act out of malice all of the fucking time.
… unless money is involved
Yeah but like why not? Acting stupid is a thing.
Stop trying to stop bad guys from being punished.
“we should put social security numbers on the blockchain” - andrew yang, probably
Might be a cringe talking point, but it could be done with zero-knowledge proofs.
When you need insurance to protect you from your other insurance:
This headline is somewhat misleading.
They mean most of Allianz’s (1.4m) North America customers, not data of most people in the US.
First read of the headline, I thought it was another Equifax level thing - where a single company has way too much data.
welp, hoping someone logs in and pays the bil
