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Article snippet: It’s time for all of us to play defense, because Equifax clearly did not. In the wake of the epic breach of as many as 143 million of our Social Security numbers, names and addresses from the company’s credit files, the company put up a website that attempted to make sense of things for consumers. The company’s first order of business ought to have been to create a simple way for people to figure out if their data was potentially compromised. On this count, Equifax failed at first. On Thursday night, I entered my last name and the last six digits of my Social Security number on the appropriate Equifax web page. (They had the gall to ask for this? Really? But I digress.) I received no “message indicating whether your personal information may have been impacted by this incident,” as the site promised. Instead, I was bounced to an offer for free credit monitoring, without a “yes,” “no” or “maybe” on the central question at hand. By Friday morning, this had changed, and I got a “your personal information may have been impacted by this incident” notification. Progress. Except as my friend Justin Soffer pointed out on Twitter, you can enter a random name and number into the site and it will tell you the same thing. Indeed, I typed “Trump” and arbitrary numbers and got the same message. So my default assumption quickly switched to this: Equifax has no earthly idea who is affected. I tried calling a phone representative for clarification, too, but she gave me incorrect i... Link to the full article to read more