S.F. City Attorney Dennis Herrera registered the trial against the loan reporting agency in San Francisco Superior Court for “neglecting to protect the personal data of more than 15 million Californians,” according to a statement.
The lawsuit more accuses Equifax of breaking California state law, failure to present a timely notice of the data breach to concerned Californians and failure to provide complete, plain and clear information.
“Equifax’s inability would be funny if the subject matter weren’t so serious,” Herrera said in the statement. “This corporation fell asleep at the switch and upended the lives of millions of people. The data that Equifax failed to safeguard is what users need to open a bank account, buy a home or rent an apartment. Now Californians have happened to put at risk of identity theft for years to come.”
The suit seeks compensation for Californians who bought credit monitoring services from Equifax before the break was made public on September 7, 2017.
Equifax heard about a major data breach in its system someday in March of this year, well before it made knowledge of the breach public. The corporation finally released news of the breach earlier this month and then submitted up to a website for consumers to check if they were one of the 143 million affected by the hack.
However, the site seemed to randomize who was hit, creating uncertainty on who had been affected. Instead, it helped folks, whether they’d been told they were hit or not, to sign up for its paid product TrustID.
To complicate matters more, the language in the Terms of Service (ToS) stopped those who signed up from suing the company. Equifax later came out with a report that the ToS would not apply in the instance of this breach.
Obviously, several things went wrong during the breach exposure and in the aftermath, and people are fairly upset at the way Equifax has handled the situation.
Amidst the turmoil, Equifax’s CEO Richard Smith “retired” yesterday, following the company’s chief security officer and chief information officer also retiring, which all adds up to amazing pretty odd timing.
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