Equifax, Experian Must Pay More Than Pennies for Data Breaches

Personal data is big business. Recent news of the 2017 Equifax data breach settlement checks reaching the 147 million Americans affected focused on the paucity of the per-consumer amount—which were mostly in the single-digit-dollar range. The settlement pool was more than $380 million, but when the breach included just a shade under 45% of the US population, even hundreds of millions of dollars doesn’t go very far.

But we still need entities such as Equifax, and we can’t shut them down simply because they leaked out just under half of our identities. After all, what about the other 56% of the ...