In response to the news that Brian Krebs has reported that an identity theft service that sold Social Security and drivers license numbers — as well as bank account and credit card data on millions of Americans — purchased much of its data from Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, Tim Erlin, director of product management at Tripwire comments:
"The custody chain for the personal data involved in this breach clearly demonstrates the complexity of the ‘data broker’ industry, and the complete lack of transparency for the individual consumer. While I may have elected to share my data with a specific organization in order to apply for a loan or obtain a government service, my data is then sold, aggregated and re-sold through multiple companies into which I have no visibility. How can a consumer protect themselves when all of that process is perfectly legal and perfectly opaque? Experian, a company offering ID theft protection, cannot even unravel this tangled web itself."