“encouraged customers to be cautious and take steps to protect themselves.”
TF does a average customer know what to do to protect themselvests when a company they use gets hacked.
Can I ask a company to delete all their data on me after I signup? Probably not…
No, the average consumer has no idea what to do about it. Which is why the respinsibility has to shift to data holders. But that won’t ever happen without a hard push by people. It’s cheaper to put the responsibility on the peasants.
Just like everything. We pay for the rich tax cuts we pay for cheaper power for companies. We pay for fucking everything it is getting to be to much.
Relatively minor breach, honestly. Name, address, phone number – all things that were historically available in a phone book, and are difficult to use to steal an ID (ie. no CC’s, no SINs, nothin like that).
You can ask orgs to delete your personal data, and they ‘should’ so long as its not retained for legal reasons (eg. tax stuff). That said it doesn’t really matter, as once the data’s out, it’s out. Most people I know in Canada just assume that their basic details are leaked, period, due to the volume of leaks reported in Canada annually.
The ones to watch for are CCs and SINs, really. CCs as they can directly impact your wallet, SINs as they can get used in ID fraud / setting up things like loans in other cities.
For CC breaches, you just call in and cancel the CC and get a new one. For SIN breaches, I think there’s a process to replace a SIN, but Im not sure, and I imagine its got a hefty wait with the govt / lots of bureaucracy. You can mitigate the ID theft risks by getting Credit Reports periodically, and/or signing up for regular ones with Equifax or whoever. When getting a credit report, I’d suggest checking how its getting run, as if you go through a third party it could translate to ‘hits’ on your credit score.
I wish we could freeze our credit in Canada. 8 don’t know why we don’t have that.
Not sure what you mean, can you elaborate? “In theory” you can contact the CB if there are erroneous entries under your name, though to see those you need to get periodic CB reports to see what all is listed there… which can be a pain in the arse to fetch. I admit I’ve never personally had to cancel/dispute anything though, so I’m not sure how easy that process is first hand.
My personal pet peeve about credit scores in Canada, is that they’re all maintained by companies with ties to US parent companies. Equifax is a good example, where tons of sensitive information gets submitted, and it’s potentially within reach of the US govt. As an anecdote to clarify why this bothers me – I recently worked for an org that submits regular data extracts to equifax for credit bureau purposes. There was an error on a submission that required fixing. They told us they were going to charge us ~$20k to correct the error (which is crazy, as the org was a small business). We pushed back, basically pointing to Canada’s privacy legislation that states we as an org have an obligation to inform other orgs of issues/mistakes, and that they have an obligation to fix it. As part of that, we asked them to confirm they were in compliance with Canadian privacy legislation.
Instead of answering, they dropped the $20k bill and fixed the mistake.
Is their data theirs? The billionaires would argue it’s not even their data. If it is, or was theirs, it isn’t any more.
But seriously, fuck the billionaires.
At this point it should even be a concern. There have been a zillion data breaches, your infos already out there and we’re all fucked. 🤷♂️
Yah my info is in so many breeches the weird one is the French one. Don’t know how my info ended up in France.
