John Oliver Tears Into Equifax Executives for Colossal Data Breach

“In their eyes, we’re not the consumer, we’re the product.”

On Sunday, John Oliver turned his attention to Equifax, one of the three big credit reporting agencies that revealed last month that hackers had breached into the company’s data—compromising millions of people’s personal information including social security numbers, birth dates, and home addresses. 

“The point here is that it’s a huge problem and in any other era this would have been the biggest news story for a month, but now that every day’s headline is simply the words ‘Everything Batshit Bananas Again Today,” it slipped under the radar,” Oliver said. “But it is worth asking how the hell did this happen.”

The Last Week Tonight host then broke down all the ways Equifax executives have screwed up since the massive breach was announced. He also slammed the company for treating its customers as products, not people.

“To think of it in terms of KFC, we’re not the guy buying the 10-piece buckets, we’re the fucking chickens.”

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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