Offering incentives to white hats corrals market forces to put a value in the legitimate economy on something that only had value in the underground economy. It’s hard to tell who the winner is, but it’s crystal clear who the losers are. But protecting the status quo is to make permanent the identity of winners and losers. Perhaps we should ask why we’re considering reorienting a policy to reward the hackers who necessitate the policy to begin with while putting money in the hands of those who would gleefully leak our information if we didn’t pay them not to. This motivates hackers who would prefer to operate above board to act as a nefarious hacker might-but to lay out what they found to the company itself rather than to the dark web. will often offer what’s called a bug bounty, or a fund for ethical white hat hackers that report discovered vulnerabilities to be patched rather than sold on the open market. Photographer: Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images Bug Bounties as a Broad ModelĬompanies such as Apple Inc., Google LLC, and Meta Platforms Inc. It isn’t as though, in light of the Equifax and Experian breaches, one can simply take their consumer credit report information elsewhere. Because unlike the tech companies, there isn’t a tremendous amount of competition. And if you purchased said plan immediately in the wake of the breach news, you’d have paid in just shy of $1,500 by the time you’re reading this.Ĭredit reporting agencies may need to be incentivized through a fine or excise tax.

If the Equifax payout is any indication, most folks’ settlement checks will cover about a week of that plan. Experian offers a protection plan that costs about $25 per month. Experian is an information company similar to Equifax that, in 2015, leaked out a mess of data on T-Mobile customers and paid about 0.0004% of its value-derived chiefly from said data-to do so. Sure, and so are Equifax Inc., Experian PLC, and the like.

After all, what about the other 56% of the population that the company presumably didn’t have information on or somehow didn’t leak? Isn’t that worth something? The settlement pool was more than $380 million, but when the breach included just a shade under 45% of the US population, even hundreds of millions of dollars doesn’t go very far.īut we still need entities such as Equifax, and we can’t shut them down simply because they leaked out just under half of our identities. Recent news of the 2017 Equifax data breach settlement checks reaching the 147 million Americans affected focused on the paucity of the per-consumer amount-which were mostly in the single-digit-dollar range.

Experian data breach settlement