Last year I got a letter from one of the big data collection firms telling me that my data was part of a set of records that might have been accessed by an unauthorized person. It was very vague. Their way of saying “Oops, sorry we built a profile of you and weren’t careful enough about keeping it secure” was to give me a year’s subscription to a credit monitoring service from Equifax.
You’ve probably gotten pitched for these services – you know, they alert you of suspicious activity on your bank accounts, and so on. If you’re smart you’ve never taken the bait.
Well, this was free, so I thought, “Okay, why not?” And it’s been interesting – because the service is far more useless than you could ever have imagined.
Basically, they alert you when your account balances change. So, for example, when my Amex has a balance of $150 and then I spent $100 on something, I get an email warning me that OMG OMG the balance went up more than 30%! Or if I buy something expensive with my MasterCard, they tell me about it.
Oh, and you get the warning a week after the purchase, so if somebody was using your card information, they would have been using it for the last week.
People pay money for this?
It would be possible for a company like Equifax to come up with some kind of monitoring service that was useful. They do not appear to have done that. The service that I’m getting is their “gold” service – they charge $9.95 a month for it. Ten bucks a month… for, basically, nothing.
They pitch it as an identity theft protection service, but that’s not the theft anybody paying for this service ought to be worried about.
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