Are you a mini Equifax?

[Steve Hodgdon]

The Equifax hack is a major deal. EVERYBODY should lock their credit report. Period.

Our personal information is now in the hands of who knows who!?!

Are you protecting consumer data that you see when shopping for notes to buy? I see tapes all the time with borrower name, address, etc. Unencrypted, downloadable, no NDA's or protections at all.

Is your laptop 100% free from malware, Trojans, or simply theft? Probably not.

So, here we are. An "industry" without a standard of care for consumers personal data. I wonder what the CFPB, State Attorneys General or consumer lawyers would do about that?

I know what happens in the unsecured debt space. Its ugly when you get caught not protecting consumer information. Fines are PER ACCOUNT, not violation.

What do you think? Do we need a standard of consumer protection? 

[Paul G.]

Uhm.  Anyone who took statistics would read your comments and would raise a BUNCH of red flags.

If those numbers are true for easy numbers:

For 1000 small to medium sized businesses: 

800 have been hacked

480 of those that have been hacked go bankrupt.

*cough* Correlation does not imply causation. *cough*

What are the percentage of businessed that go bankrupt, regardless of being hacked?  Sure hacking might have had something to do with SOME of those companies going under, but to say that 50% of all companies fail because of hacking sounds a lot like someone is trying to sell a product.

Your numbers imply that 50% of business go bankrupt solely because of being hacked (and not being able to afford the cleanup after) and no other reason.  

There are waaaaay to many reasons for a small to medium sized business to go under: their business model was flawed, they mismanaged money, they didn't know how to run a business, couldn't get a loan, or they just plain aren't good at their job to name a few.

As far as the original topic, I think there is no way for that.  So much of your information is online now, I'm not sure it would really matter.  All through a public forum, I can find out who owns what property, what they paid for it, who owns the note, what liens they have against them, and what their current address is.   With enough digging, I can probably find a phone number as well.  You're talking about putting protection on public files at the government level (since all of those documents are readily available on government recorder websites).