The Virginian-Pilot Kerry Dougherty column

Oct. 04–Do us a small favor, please and stop calling us consumers. Worse, customers.

I'm talking to you, Equifax. You, The Associated Press. And every other news outlet that has mindlessly employed these nouns to characterize the roughly 145.5 million Americans whose personal information is now at risk thanks to the enormous cybersecurity breach at Equifax.

We're Equifax's product. We're its victims.

If you have a credit card, a home mortgage, a car loan or simply pay your bills, Equifax and the other credit reporting agencies are quietly accumulating data on you. They then sell the information to lenders and businesses.

If any of your credit information suggests you aren't prompt with payments, you'll be denied credit or charged higher interest rates.

Have you ever found a mistake in your credit report? Tried to get it fixed?

Then you know what I'm mean when I say these are muscular companies.

When news first emerged about the company's gigantic data breach in early September, I dutifully checked to see if I was among the unlucky millions.

I was.

Then I learned that this magnanimous company was tossing me a bone: I had till mid-October to sign up for a one-year, free credit monitoring service.

With them!

On Monday — while the world was preoccupied with a massacre in Las Vegas — Equifax admitted that the breach was even broader than originally disclosed. Instead of roughly 143 million Americans whose privacy had been put at risk, that number jumped by 2.5 million.

Backlash from angry victims — and no doubt, plummeting stock value — caused the company to extend the credit monitoring sign-up period and goosed Equifax into offering free credit locks.

Not enough. Neither are all of the “sorries.”

That includes apologies from the interim CEO of Equifax who penned a mea culpa in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago. One that most people couldn't read because of that paper's digital paywall.

And the ones from former CEO Richard Smith, who sashayed out of Equifax last month with a roughly $18 million pension package.

It appears that Equifax was warned that its security was vulnerable and failed to fix it.

“In early March, the Department of Homeland Security sent Equifax and others an alert about a critical vulnerability in software that Equifax used in an online portal for recording customer disputes,” reports The New York Times. “The company sent out an internal email requesting that its technical staff fix the software, but that was not done.”

The Times also claims that Equifax discovered the breach in July and waited almost four weeks before telling the company's board.

Naturally, the victims were the last to know.

On Tuesday, Smith was hauled in front of a congressional subcommittee for a bipartisan beat down.

“It's like the guards at Fort Knox forgot to lock the doors and failed to notice thieves emptying the vaults,” said Republican Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, “… I don't think we can pass a law that, excuse me for saying this, fixes stupid.”

“How could a major U.S. company like Equifax, which holds the most sensitive personal data on Americans, so let them down?” Walden asked.

Smith offered Congress an apology: “I'm ultimately responsible and take responsibility, ” he said. “I'm truly and deeply sorry for what happened.”

That's nice.

A Chicago Tribune account of a speech Smith gave at the University of Georgia in mid-August detailed the easy genius of this Atlanta-based company.

“Smith explained that the company gets its data for free; regular consumers hand it over to the banks when they apply for credit. Then, he said, the company crunches the data with the help of computer scientists and artificial intelligence and sells it back to the banks that gave Equifax the data in the first place. The business generates a gross margin of about 90 percent.

“'That's a pretty unique model,' Smith told the audience.”

Profitable, too.

For everyone but the victims.

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