Last week, the Federal Trade Commission made clear that dishonestly undermining Americans’ privacy can remain a part of a successful corporation’s business plan. The commission closed its investigations into the two most prominent corporate data breaches in recent memory. The Equifax hack and Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal investigations have yielded back-to-back out-of-court settlements that are all bark, no bite.
That means there will be no real accountability to prevent these companies, or others, from getting careless with your personal information again. In Equifax’s case, 147 million US-based consumers—about half of the country—had their names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and even driver’s license details stolen by still-unknown hackers. It took Equifax two months to even notice the hack, and another month to finally admit it to the public.
Read more at the Daily Beast.