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Cybersecurity: A Year After Credit Agency Breach, Americans Are Gaining Trust – Slowly

By August 3, 2018Article

Americans are known as a forgiving lot, but where Social Security numbers, credit card information and other personal data is concerned, forgiveness comes slowly. 

It’s been nearly a year since the cybersecurity breach of the Big 3 credit reporting agencies – Transunion, Experian and Equifax – which affected an estimated 140 million people, nearly half of all Americans. And according to a July 2018 survey of 1,000 Americans concerning Equifax specifically, conducted by LendEDU, 46% of respondents who were aware of the breach said Equifax should lose its ability to act as a credit reporting bureau. In a similar LendEDU survey last year, conducted soon after the breach, that percentage was marginally more in favor of gutting Equifax’s business, with about 54% saying that Equifax should no longer be trusted to act as a credit bureau.

In response to the massive privacy breach in September 2017, Equifax and other agencies took steps to mitigate consumer harm and to improve public relations, including offering a year of free credit monitoring and waiving arbitration requirements, allowing numerous individual lawsuits and a nationwide class-action lawsuit to proceed.

Still these results seem to indicate that people may not only need more done to restore their faith in the credit agencies but that they’ll need more time to forgive them.

 

Clare Christopher is editor of SandHill.com. 

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