Cullen Lawson

01027198
10/9/2022
PHIL 355E

Equifax: Qui Passus?

Consider the following: you go to the store to indulge a little, and you buy some junk food to satiate your weekend appetite. Perhaps you even buy yourself a pack of cigarettes, whatever it is that you use to settle your spirits. Years later, you lose your job after they find out that you bought a pack of cigarettes twelve years ago. These are the sorts of worries that stem in the minds of people who are concerned about breach in data security. Two years ago, Equifax had their data breached by Chinese hackers, and the question stands; who was it that was harmed by this data leakage? After some time spent considering the facts, I’ve come to determine that it was everyone who was damaged. This includes companies, businesses, individuals, even the hackers themselves. In this Case Analysis, I will argue that the ethics of care shows us that the Equifax breach harmed all peoples involved by the tangible element of data leakage, but it mostly harmed their clients, and the more intangible element of degradation of trust, and this was morally bad due to a lack of care in their customers.

In Milton Friedman’s “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”, Friedman discusses what it is that the social responsibility of the business man is. He muses that assuming the statement isn’t just persuasive dialogue, then he must occasionally act in a way that is not in the interest of his employers. Though it would make sense in a manner to increase price of products, as a means of reaping a profit, you mustn’t increase them for such a long duration that it causes inflation, and in doing so increasing the cost of everything for everyone, negating the increase of money that you might’ve expected. Relating this case to the present case on hand, Equifax disregards people, and at each step of the way conducts predatory practices on their own customers, examples being unreachable customer support, charging people to freeze their credit files, and the over-collection of information when signing up an account with their services. What this represents isn’t so much a violation of law, or an overreaching of the bounds of privacy. Indeed, what is happening here is dishonesty, plain and simple, which leads to what went wrong here; in trying to perform damage control on their business, they stifled their opportunity to mutually flourish with their established community. Really, what’s happening here isn’t something that couldn’t be ramified, but rather, what happened was an attempt to disorient and confuse, to give themselves a way to avoid blame, hemmed in even further by the fact that their initial policy was a dishonest over collection of personal information. Had they been following the ethos of care, the situation would have played out in a different manner entirely. If you care about someone, you don’t breathe down their backs trying to pick up every little piece of information about them, and so too should a company not be expected to collect every piece of your information. When it comes to their treatment of the effected individuals who suffered from data loss, their misstep here was their inability to reasonably allow clients to access information about their accounts, their monetization of freezing accounts, and their lack of reach-ability in regards to customer support. The ethics of care dictate that you make the time for those who you have chosen to form a bond with, not just because of any law or societal force, but because the ones closest to you are the ones who allow mutual growth. Equifax is built on the interdependence of many different organizations, since as a credit bureau, they alone do not dictate anything. Their existence is based upon interdependence of banks, the IRS, and other forms of currency-based businesses. What they failed to realize is that they themselves are also, as a business, interdependent on their clients, who provide the basis of their wealth. Without care for their own people, they stifle themselves, and commit themselves to a period of decline, and even worse so, with their attempt to charge money for a chance to prevent further damage to accounts, may even qualify them to be described as decadent.

Melvin Anshen, another writer who covered a similar topic, discussed in their paper about an element that exists in the minds of both political theorists and philosophers, and how it has been around for a very long time. Indeed, what is being discussed here is the social contract, an intangible concept of the relations of humans and the bonds of society, and the attempt to establish it as a true form of law or contract, rather than it be an implied one. The bonds that hold people together, as flammable and un-diagrammable as they are, are a very real force, and one that needs to be considered when you go into business, especially one that requires good understanding of human connections, like a credit bureau. To directly relate this point to the case at hand, when you operate a business, there is an implicit contract that is being signed when you operate; a fair deal, I give, you give. A business without a fair deal is no business at all, indeed, it is only a scam propped up by fancy words and dishonesty. A business can’t always operate on a perfect plan, as no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Really, in this day and age, businesses get hacked and breached every few minutes. I would bet right now if I was to research the latest large security breach, there was probably an incident that occurred a day or two ago. It was probably a massive breach, with thousands of usernames leaked, credit card information stolen, social security numbers lost to some sort of crazy hacker. What will probably be the difference in both of these incidents is how the companies will react to the damage. A sensible company will make it clear what the damages were, announce their plans to resolve the issues, and clear the air with their clients to demonstrate how they care for them. The prime word is care; a businesses cannot operate only on an influx of money from unwitting customers, because that is not how a business flourishes. Money is disloyal, and moves easily from one hand to another, preferably in the form of the path of least expenditure; cheaper options. A business grows on trust, a belief that they will maintain quality, long term, fair dealings to all who take the chance to work with them. Again, this is all tied to the ethics of care; look out for those who you are connected to, who took a chance on you, and work for them. Taking care of your own is a good way to know that you will have someone who will watch out for you, too. This is where Equifax went wrong. Equifax tried to skirt the line of their responsibility, and in doing so, branded themselves as bad deal-keepers. They have demonstrated themselves as an uncaring business, unworthy of the patronage they have thus far received, not just because of the breach in data and security, hell, that sort of thing happens even to the government nowadays. Their lack of ethical care for their clients shows a gross disregard for the well-being of those who cared to use their business, and are all the worse off for it. Care Ethics would have dictated that they give a fair, or perhaps even better means of understanding what the issue was and steps taken to try and remedy the situation. As it stands, the clients were left high and dry to a foreign nation.

So to wrap it all up, Equifax harmed their clients, and their reputations. This harm was bad mostly due to the lack of trust that arises going forward in all of their dealings. You could have considered this from a different perspective, namely the focus on the literal damage that was caused by releasing information like this to strangers, or the failure to act in their role as guardians of information. Alas, the argument presented isn’t even as bulletproof as all that; there is only so much a company can do to reach their clients when they are nationwide like this. The ethics of care feel like they tend to break down a little when you start using it to describe quantities that number in the millions, as care ethics are person to person, mostly. Even so, I do believe a utilization of ethics in a similar vein or strand of this quality would be a good way of achieving a more beneficial means of running a business, and dealing with issues such as this when they come up.

Works Cited

Friedman, Milton. “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Odu.voicethread.com, ODU, 13 Sept. 1970, https://odu.voicethread.com/lti-student/1643660/?tok=131109643863431c8a933a31.50599978.

Anshen, Melvin. “Changing the Social Contract: A Role for Business.” Odu.voicethread.com, Columbia Journal of World Business, https://odu.voicethread.com/lti-student/1701578/?tok=30137369463431c55bbed87.01365946.

Lieber, Ron. “Why the Equifax Breach Stings so Bad.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 22 Sept. 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/your-money/equifax-breach.html.