Why is it whenever I get yet another letter saying "Our systems have been breached and your personal information may have been accessed by attackers..." it is always... always... prefaced by "We were the target of a sophisticated cyberattack?" Sophisticated? Is that supposed to make me feel better? Like I'm sitting here thinking "Boy, I WAS going to be outraged that this company was so careless with my personal information... but since it was a sophisticated attack, I guess there's nothing that could have been done, so I'm totally okay with it!"
I'm guessing they think that putting "sophisticated" in there (usually multiple times) makes them not sound like the incompetent fucking morons they are. But all it does is make me even more outraged that they're trying to whitewash their gross negligence by playing the victim. The company isn't the victim here, it's their customers who trusted them with their personal shit that are the actual victims.
But that's not even the worst part.
At no point in any of these letters do you ever get an actual apology, statement of liability, or admission of negligence.
All you get is worthless promises to do better in the future and possibly a membership in a credit fraud monitoring company for a year or two. In other words, there are zero consequences for a company completely fucking you over by failing to protect your privacy.
Not counting the billions of dollars that insurance company lobbyists pay our politicians to look the other way, of course.
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I hate those letters. I recently got one from a former health insurance company and now I have to go through all the steps to see if anyone actually stole my information. Ugh.
I got two of those letters last week!
Home Depot. Get a new credit card. Update the dozen or so places that hold your card on file.
Target. Repeat.
Last week… at a hotel at 1:30am (thank you United and O’Hare) … can’t check in… call Capital One… “sorry sir, your card has been deactivated”… “oh ok… but when, you say ‘deactivated’ you mean within the next 24 / 48 hrs so I can at least go to bed, let my wife (a timezone away) know, etc.” … “no sir, it’s been deactivated *right now*”. Fuck you.
If Capital One didn’t have such a great travel rewards program, I would drop them. But what would it matter? As if Bank of America is any better? Chase? …
Sigh… my “grow a beard and grow hemp in Montana” plan is sounding better every day.
Matt