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by dwd 1000 days ago
That is not correct for a data brokerage as the data is the business. Lose your monopoly on that data and you have no business.

If it is information collected as part of doing business, then yes; they don't care. A good reason to question any Gov attempt to implement centralisation of data like identity or medical records.

2 comments

> Lose your monopoly on that data and you have no business.

But do these breaches affect their monopoly? My thinking is:

1. B2B customers won't go on darknet to source illegal data dumps.

2. This data, even if it doesn't quickly become effectively stale, would be considered stale by businesses very quickly if it's not connected to the continuous data ingestion pipeline.

1) Customers, probably not. Competitors I would not be so sure they wouldn't have look.

2) This is not specific to the data that underlines consumer credit scoring; a broker could be selling products derived from data on historical house prices or car sales for example. A competitor might use it to compare and validate their own dataset or simply have a look. Third party investigators, journalists, etc though could have a field day fact-checking it.

> Lose your monopoly on that data and you have no business.

Could you elaborate on how Equifax would have gone out of business if all their data had been stolen?

Doesn't track to me. There is no loss to Equifax really from losing all the data besides a fine. I doubt many of their customers are willing or able to purchase their data from dark markets at a discount, and the data would age unless the hack remained in place.