Equifax: a system beyond repair
written by Jed Grant, CEO at KYC3, Board Member at Infrachain, Founder at Peer Mountain
If it wasn’t bad enough already, Equifax has now revealed that 10,900,000 — ten million nine hundred thousand — drivers licenses have also been taken by the hackers.
Nearly half of all adult Americans have had their personally identifying information stolen and now we learn more people than the entire population of Greece, Sweden or Czechia have had their driving license stolen. This is a primary form of ID document in the United States and can be used to open accounts and access most financial services.
There are now two kinds of people in the United States: those who know that their identity has been stolen and those that don’t know it yet.
This is saddening on so many levels. Were these licenses stored on disk in the clear? Why didn’t Equifax disclose this earlier? What else has been hacked? Is Equifax really as clueless to not even know what data was at risk? Is their hubris so great that they think a web site to my personal data will actually stay secure? Why would we even want to have some kind of web access to their broken system anyways? Are we really ever going to be able to trust any such institution again?
The Equifax incident is the latest in a long list of data breaches that will continue until we change the way we manage data. It’s highly probable that, even if you think you’re safe, your personally identifying information is already being traded on the dark net.
With respect to trusting any such institution, I say “Never again”. We cannot and should not ever trust such a broken system again. Ever.
This is why I created Peer Mountain (Peer Mountain: Own Yourself), a distributed circular economy of trust where you own your data and choose who to trust and when. Let everyone identify you by a public key and there is nothing to steal. The only way forward is to own your personally identifying information yourself and to keep your private key in your own safe and secure wallet.
Let’s work together toward the day when we can declare all this archaic identity data obsolete, take back control and own ourselves. Join us on Peer Mountain. This way, you can choose what data to share with businesses, whether you are seeking a credit card or booking a hotel room. Peer Mountain enables businesses to provide services more efficiently for you without the usual security risks.
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