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181 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 21 Dec \ on: Anyone else participate in the Equifax Data Breach Settlement? privacy
I hadn't heard of this, but I have an insider story on the bad security / privacy practices of these companies.
Early in my career, I worked with one of the 3 major credit reporting companies to obtain credit score data.
- We would send them the names and addresses of people using data we already had, along with a number of other data columns.
- They would send us back our data, with credit scores attached, and the names and addresses de-identified (since we didn't really care about the names and addresses per se)
However, we were worried that they'd inject noise into the data columns we did care about, as a way to prevent the data being matched back to the original dataset.
We asked our contact whether they would do anything like that, but the sales contact didn't understand our question.
When we ultimately did the transaction, they didn't inject any noise into our data, which was good, but which also meant we could easily have matched the data back to our original data and recovered everyone's names and addresses.