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Article snippet: Equifax, you had one job. Your only purpose as a corporation, the reason you were created and remain a going concern, is to collect and maintain people’s most private financial data. Now you have fallen down on your only job — and spectacularly so. Hackers penetrated the spectral gauze of security surrounding your website, and over the course of nearly two months, they made away with the personal information of as many as 143 million Americans. It is the most important financial data available on any of us — our names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, home addresses and in some instances a lot more — and it was just sitting there on your site, all but wrapped up in a red bow. So, Equifax, I have to ask: Now that you have failed at your one job, why should you be allowed to keep doing it? If a bank lost everyone’s money, regulators might try to shut down the bank. If an accounting firm kept shoddy books, its licenses to practice accounting could be revoked. (See how Texas pulled Arthur Andersen’s license after the Enron debacle.) So if a data-storage credit agency loses pretty much everyone’s data, why should it be allowed to store anyone’s data any longer? Here’s one troubling reason: Because even after one of the gravest breaches in history, no one is really in a position to stop Equifax from continuing to do business as usual. And the problem is bigger than Equifax: We really have no good way, in public policy, to exact some existential punishment on compa... Link to the full article to read more