Equifax Data Breach

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University of the People *

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1404

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Philosophy

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Jan 9, 2024

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docx

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1 The Equifax Data Breach Department of General Studies, University of the People PHIL 1404 - Ethics and Social Responsibility Dr. Jacqueline Thomas Feb 1, 2023
2 Introduction In this paper, I will answer the questions about the hacking incident of the Equifax company in my personal opinion. Questions 1 Which elements of this case might involve issues of legal compliance? Which elements illustrate acting legally but not ethically? What would acting ethically and with personal integrity in this situation look like? The fact that the company sold off 2 million dollars worth of stocks without publicly announcing the hack into information could be a "violation of insider trading rules" (Byars, S. M., & Stanberry, K., 2022). That the "chief information officer and chief of security retired" (Byars, S. M., & Stanberry, K., 2022) and the "the CEO resigned" (Byars, S. M., & Stanberry, K., 2022) without any consequences to their failure of keeping personal information of half the US population safe might be legal, but definitely not ethical. They should have received some kind of punishment. Acting ethically with personal integrity could have been the company announcing the hack much earlier before they sold millions worth of stock. They should have apologized to the customers. That the company "offered free credit monitoring and identity-theft
3 protection" (Byars, S. M., & Stanberry, K., 2022) might have been a nice gesture but came too late and was too little. Also, the CEO and chief of security should have taken more responsibility and stayed to fix the issues that happened on their watch, instead of resigning and retiring to leave the problem to someone else. Questions 2 How do you think this breach will affect Equifax ’ s position relative to those of its competitors? How might it affect the future success of the company? Equifax is "a major credit reporting agency" with information on millions of US residents. Therefore I don't think that they would go out of business because of this incident, but they might lose customers to competing companies if the customer can choose to whom they report their credit. I think generally, some companies who do credit checks might choose other credit reporting agencies to seem more reliable and respectful of their customers' information. Questions 3 Was it sufficient for Equifax to offer online privacy protection to those whose personal information was hacked? What else might it have done? To offer "free credit monitoring and identity-theft protection" is a start, but I
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