Warren introduces ‘anti-Equifax’ bill
Looking to curb potential fallout from the Equifax data breach, US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) introduced legislation on Friday that would stop credit bureaus from charging customers to freeze their credit.
Warren, who has led crusades against major companies like Wells Fargo, introduced the bill with US Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), even as she launched a probe into how the credit-monitoring company allowed 143 million people’s personal information to get stolen.
“The idea behind our bill is simple: @Equifax doesn’t pay you when they sell your data. You shouldn’t have to pay them to stop selling it,” Warren (right) tweeted on Friday.
“Companies like @Equifax make billions selling access to your data without your consent, then charge you if you want to stop them. It’s nuts,” she added.
Warren called the bill the Freedom From Equifax Exploitation Act, singling out the embattled company by name. Nevertheless, it doesn’t specifically punish Equifax, making it constitutionally kosher, John C. Coffee, a securities law expert at Columbia Law School, told The Post.
She also reintroduced a bill that would stop employers from asking potential hires about their credit histories.
Separately Friday, Equifax said two of its top executives who oversaw information and security are leaving days after the credit bureau disclosed it had failed to update its software to prevent hackers from making off with the personal information of millions of Americans.
David Webb, the chief information officer, and Susan Mauldin, the chief security officer, are “retiring,” the company said Friday
he credit-monitoring company has been reeling from the giant hack, which exposed the Social Security numbers, addresses, credit card information and driver’s licenses of clients.
The company claims that hackers took advantage of a vulnerability in Apache Struts, a Web site application.
Hackers first broke into Equifax’s servers on May 13, the company said on Friday.
Apache, the group that manufactures the software, had come out with a fix for the software weakness about two months earlier.