Ridiculous Opinions #257
This morning, I received an email from my credit card company that said, “IMPORTANT: DATA BREACH ALERT”. The email basically said that my Social Security Number and other data had been compromised as part of the National Public Data hack that happened, oh, probably three or four months ago.
This is something that I already knew. I read a lot of news and I already knew what had been happening, as well as knowing the fact that my information was in there already. There was no panic on my part.
Why? Because my information had already been a part of the Equifax hack from 2017. Back then, I saw that I was part of the list of folks who had their information stolen from a Equifax, a credit reporting agency. Back then, I was paranoid, so I did what I had to do and froze my credit reports. Here’s Jon Oliver from 2017 talking about this:
Ah, how the times have changed! Oh, wait…they haven’t.
What are their solutions for this current data breach? Surprise! It’s the same thing as 2017: Freeze your credit reports. The long and the short of it can be found in this paragraph from Vox:
“As many as 272 million Social Security numbers are floating around hacker forums after someone stole them from a Florida-based background check company called National Public Data, which is owned by an actor and retired sheriff’s deputy named Salvatore “Sal” Verini.”
The absurdity of that paragraph exists on many levels. We’ll exclude the low-hanging fruit of someone name “Sal” Verini having access to my data, and focus on the larger picture, which is the ridiculous idea that a company that I’ve never heard of, that I have absolutely no need for, and that has no real regulation or standards of security has access to information about me.
What can one do to prevent this from happening? Nothing.
I read a lot of news. A lot. And because I read a lot of news, I am sometimes (not all the time) able to put together a puzzle that speaks to the big picture of the state of the world. Around 2010, I started spouting off a particular opinion. I said, You know, someday we’re going to look back at this time in history and see the absurdity of the world in which we live, and then we will compare it to the idiocy of the Robber Barons of the early-1900s, or even worse, medieval times.
I rarely said this statement out loud, because it seemed alarmist and, on the surface, ridiculous. Randy, you might say, things are going great! Why would you feel this way?
Well, with each passing year, my predictions started to look more and more solid. Unfettered wealth (Musk, Bezos, the Kochs) has created a gap between the workers and those with infinite amounts of money that insulate the rich from consequence, and therefore, humanity. Private equity firms (Blackstone, Bain, Carlyle) are buying property left and right, creating a feudalistic society where we are mere renters rather than owners. Right-wing nutjobs (Trump, Netenyahu, Putin) have crawled out from under their rocks to say things in the light of day that they would have never said ten or twenty years ago. And, to bring it all home, corporations (Google, Wal-Mart, Nestle) can now act with impunity to do whatever the hell they want without facing a single consequence.
And we can’t do a single thing about it.
So, when I look at the data breach that happened and of which my data is a part of, I can do little more than shrug my shoulders, freeze my credit, and pay attention to what is happening in my world from a financial perspective. National Public Data will disappear as a company, a few people will get a slap on the wrist, and the world of capitalism will keep on turning, as we, the consumers, are ground to a pulp in its cold, uncaring gears.
My best solution to this? Vote. And hold your elected officials accountable. Real change takes time, so be patient. But hold your elected officials accountable. Every single one of them.
Equifax happened in 2017. Here’s a video from 1978. Pay attention to the words of the song…
Indeed.
