Slashdot Mirror
While Equifax Victims Sue, Congress Limits Financial Class Actions (marketwatch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a local NBC news report:
Stories are starting to pour in about those impacted by last month's massive Equifax data breach, which compromised the private information of more than 140 million people. Katie Van Fleet of Seattle says she's spent months trying to regain her stolen identity, and says it has been stolen more than a dozen times. "I kept receiving letters from Kohl's, from Macy's, from Home Depot, from Old Navy saying 'thank you for your application,'" she said to CNN affiliate KCPQ. But she says she's never applied for credit from any of those places. Instead, Van Fleet and her attorney Catherine Fleming say they believe her personal data was stolen during the massive Equifax security breach... Fleming has filed a class-action lawsuit against Equifax, saying they were negligent in losing private information on more than 140 million Americans... "Countless people, I mean, I've really, truly lost count, and the stories that like Katie's, the stories I hear are heart-wrenching," Fleming said.
But are things about to get worse? Marketwatch reports: It will become harder for consumers to sue their banks or companies like Equifax... The Senate voted Tuesday night to overturn a rule the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau worked on for more than five years. The final version of the rule banned companies from putting "mandatory arbitration clauses" in their contracts, language that prohibits consumers from bringing class-action lawsuits against them. It applies to institutions that sell financial products, including bank accounts and credit cards. Consumer advocates say it's good news for companies like Wells Fargo or Equifax, which have both had class-action lawsuits filed against them, and bad news for their customers... Lisa Gilbert, the vice president of legislative affairs at Public Citizen, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., said the Senate vote shouldn't impact cases that are already ongoing. However, there will "certainly" be more forced arbitration clauses in contracts in the future, and fewer cases brought against companies, she said.
But are things about to get worse? Marketwatch reports: It will become harder for consumers to sue their banks or companies like Equifax... The Senate voted Tuesday night to overturn a rule the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau worked on for more than five years. The final version of the rule banned companies from putting "mandatory arbitration clauses" in their contracts, language that prohibits consumers from bringing class-action lawsuits against them. It applies to institutions that sell financial products, including bank accounts and credit cards. Consumer advocates say it's good news for companies like Wells Fargo or Equifax, which have both had class-action lawsuits filed against them, and bad news for their customers... Lisa Gilbert, the vice president of legislative affairs at Public Citizen, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., said the Senate vote shouldn't impact cases that are already ongoing. However, there will "certainly" be more forced arbitration clauses in contracts in the future, and fewer cases brought against companies, she said.
Why are there and have there been, only 3 major credit bureaus in America? Is there some reason why there are not 5 or 6 or more? What gives?
Why do so many people (other than the 1% expecting their tax cuts) continually vote against their own best interests? This is what happens when "punishing" some group is more important to the masses than prosperity. If a rising tide lifts all boats, a falling tide eventually beaches them all, but the aforementioned people don't care so long as "teh gays" hit the shoals before they do.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
And it IS ONLY the Republicans!
Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Orin Hatch and everyone asshole with an 'R' by his name are the banks bitch. Bought and paid for.
You missed the Slashdot Troll option.
Wow, it hadn't even been a decade since the innovative crash of 2008. Let's make the same banks that gave out all those loans and left the tab with the tax payers bigger & more powerful because they weren't biggest enough to fail back then. We have finally recovered from the Great Recession so it's time for that same kind of innovation again!
Couldn’t you have tried a bit harder? Obvious trolling is obvious.
They aren’t trying to stop. The banks and Wall Street are coopting the concept as a new avenue to bilk people of money.
Trying to tie forced arbitration as part of a contract, to lawsuits against Equifax, where no contract exists, is quite ridiculous. I doubt many of the 140M people impacted by the Equifax breach have a previously accepted contract with a mandatory arbitration clause, or any clause for that matter.
This is all noise. The real, fundamental problem in the US is the fact that you can apply for credit with essentially *no* verification of your actual identity.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
How can I be forced into arbitration with a company that I never elected to do business with in the first place? Never once in my life have I signed a contract where the other party has the Equifax name. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, this company has been collecting information about me without my knowledge or consent.
Contract law should prohibit giving up rights. Also, unelected and unaccountable government bureaucrats(ie CFPB) should not be making laws. If Congress doesn't want to do it then let state legislatures do it.
I, for one, have NEVER signed any kind of contract with Equifax, so howdahell would this apply to me? Or, is Congress doing the usual "Fuck the poor!" approach, legal rights and non-contracts be damned?
"Katie Van Fleet of Seattle says she's spent months trying to regain her stolen identity, and says it has been stolen more than a dozen times."
Mitchell and Webb Identity Theft
You can't stop crypto-currencies.
Another tool for the already-rich to get richer.
Why am I not counting my Bitcoin riches right now? Because the last time Bitcoin crashed to $250ish, a strange thing happened: I still had to spend most of the money I make on cost-of-living expenses. But for the sake of argument, let's say I had $250 to blow on some cyber magic money back then. I'd have around $6k today, which would certainly be nice, but not exactly time to pack up the truck and move to Beverly Hills.
Hell, I could've made myself rich by investing in a shitload of R-22 (yes, refrigerant), years ago when the phaseout was first announced. But again, bills...
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
The simple answer to these combined events. One shows the need for greater oversight with measurable damages, but politicians beholden to niche interests act contrary to that. This is more than unrepresentative of the majority of their actual constituents, it shows that they hold the interests of the few who benefit from the policy above those who voted for them. That can be changed though. Leave the corrupt to get votes only from the corrupt, and deprive them of all others.
If "identity theft" is obtaining someone's personal information, doesn't that make Equifax is one of the largest criminal organizations in history?
You still have time to buy sub-$1 crypto-currencies, just in case they take off. There's still a lot of sub-one-cent cryptos, doesn't take much for them to fluctuate.
#DeleteFacebook
Its now a Bayou, so the swamp has gone.
Depending on your legal regime, signing a contract should not allow you or the other party to override statute law. That's a norm in common-law systems such as Britain, the United States and Canada.
For example, a clause making you promise to not report the software you bought was stolen is not enforcable (technically the clause prohibited discussing the asember code with anyone, but the reason was that it was recognizably a different company's product). We reported it, and the thief lost in court.
In Canada, the Supreme Court has overridden "choice of venue" and other anti-suit clauses, and allowed suits and charges to be laid in such cases.
davecb@spamcop.net
You are a commodity. Bought and sold like pork bellies. The more this happens the more I work to disentangle myself. Use more cash, no electronic payments, no credit cards, no crapplets on my phn etc. I might even switch to a land line + a trac phone. Never use the same browser made by the company who made my OS, i.e. no IE on Windows, shun social media, etc. Eventually I will sell everything, get a van and disappear.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The real question is: Why can organizations (commercial or otherwise) have access to all sorts of personal econonic histories of you _at_all_?
In many (most?) countries there are no such things as credit bureaus with people's information in them, and nobody needs or expect your "credit history". Sure, a bank may require that you provide them some information before they approve a large loan, but they don't have this Orwellian infrastructure in place.
it's a big part of it. America is a Christian country, and, well, God punishes the faithful for the sins of the heretic. Look at Sodom & Gamorrah, Noah's Ark or any of the raft of preachers who are currently claiming our sins caused the last round of hurricanes.
Basically, there's a good 10%-20% of the American population that really thinks they're voting in their interests because of social issues (abortion, gay rights, secularism, etc). If you take those parts of the Christian Bible literally they're right. Sure, they're getting hit economically, but will that really matter if God wipes us all out in a flood because there's too much sin?
And yes, I know there's a ton of counter arguments. That's the trouble with Christianity. You can find a reason to do damn near anything in it's history, good or ill.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
or get a bank account? Congrats, you have a contract. It's buried deep in there but you gave the credit agencies carte blanche to do as they please with your information.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's rule allowing consumers to sue banks and financial institutions was killed in Congress last week, it was done only with Republican votes. When it was killed in the Senate, it was done only with Republican votes. Not a single Democrat voted for this giveaway to the banks.
No, the two parties in the United States are not "two sides of the same coin". They are not morally equivalent.
They keep you all worked up about gays and NFL players taking a knee and blacks getting all the good looking white women, but when it comes right down to it, if you're getting fucked, you're getting fucked by Republicans.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Mandatory arbitration clauses are in contracts. People have contracts with their banks. People do not have contracts with Equifax, nor is it immediately obvious how it would indemnify any banks. Ergo, the CFPB's proposed regulation wouldn't have done anything in the first place.
Equifax did start with a mandatory arbitration clause in their post-breach credit monitoring services. After an outcry it was removed. And bear in mind there would have been no contract until someone agreed to their monitoring services.
There is not and never has fully been any way this CFPB regulation would in any way affect the ability to file a class-action suit against Equifax.
An honest argument would not bring up unrelated boogeymen, as a scare-tactic to short-circuit anyone from thinking about it.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Everybody who stayed home rather get involved in making sure candidates for office will stand up for them helped make this a reality. Get used to it. Most of the congressmen and senators from both parties would kick your children off a cliff if their corporate masters told them to.
My American friends (also UK and Canada, for that matter), when it comes to this kind of "screw the citizens" nonsense, you can expect to be served a large, steaming plate of "moar" until you decide to do something about it.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Why would it get harder to sue Equifax? Did anyone sign an arbitration clause? I never agreed for the credit agencies to collect my data. This is just a ridiculous post.
Make love, not reality television.
People are all up in arms about Congress limiting people's ability to sue banks but nobody talks about what really happens in most class-action tort cases. The lawyers are the ones getting rich with actual cash. The class members will wind up with discount coupons for cellphone accessories or something equally useless.
The first factor in the rampant "identity theft" problem is that there is no national "identity card" in the United States. The main document used to establish identity is a driver's license. Driver's licenses are issued by the 50 US states to their residents; any given US person (who drives a motor vehicle) should have one and only one driver's license issued by the state they "reside" in. There are some weaknesses in the proofing done by the state's when driver's licenses are issued (and in some cases these weaknesses are encouraged because eliminating them would prevent people who have not entered the country legally from getting licenses). These weaknesses can allow someone to get a license in the name ("identity") of another person. Perhaps more importantly, it is not mandatory that anyone get a driver's license, so most identity-proofing scenarios have alternative means of proofing.
The second factor is that the alternative means of proving identity (other than a driver's license) often depend on the knowledge of various bits of personal trivia, many/most of which are stored by creditors and credit bureaus (so that they can uniquely identify credit users). These authenticators are all fairly weak individually, but are treated as being strong when presented in combination. Historically, a certain piece of personal trivia is treated as strong all by itself (for no good reason ) - this being the "social security number". The SSN is a theoretically unique personal identifier assigned to each US person and originally used primarily to track their account status for two social welfare programs - "social security" (payments to retired individuals based on payroll taxes from their lifetime earnings) and "medicare" (health care and health insurance provided due to payroll taxes on their lifetime earnings). The SSN also became the primary tax id number for income tax purposes (because it was an existing government unique id number and was already known for payroll purposes I supposed). No where in law was the SSN ever presented as a "secret" the knowledge of which could be used to prove an identity, but credit-granting organizations made the assumption that if one knew the SSN that was associated with a given name, one must be that individual.
The third factor is that obtaining goods and services without immediate payment encourages consumption. Since encouraging consumption is seen as a "good" the system is tilted towards making it easy to obtain goods/services on credit. As long as one can present some kind of identity credential that ties into a credit bureau record showing an acceptable probability of repayment, one gets goods and services without immediate payment.
It is hard for victims to fight back because it is very easy for creditors to put information into the credit bureau files, and very hard for the subjects of those files to challenge/correct the information that is there when the creditor has the data showing that good and services were provided but not paid for (the idea that the creditor has to prove the identity relationship between the person to whom they provided goods/services and the person who is challenging the credit bureau records doesn't seem to exist).
A credit bureau exposing all of the identity-proofing information used for a large number of people is roughly equivalent to a system administrator exposing the unchangeable passwords for all of the system's users. In a sane world, this would be the nail on the coffin of the idea that knowing these personal bits of trivia "proves" you are the person to whom these bits apply. Hopefully there will be a few court cases where the creditors a