The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has found that as many as 19,000 Canadians were affected by the 2017 Equifax data breach and has placed the consumer credit reporting agency on six-year probation, the Ottawa Citizen reports. The OPC's investigation revealed Canadians' personal information through products customers obtained from Equifax Canada, such as credit monitoring or fraud alerts. Customers' data would end up being processed in the U.S., where the personal information was vulnerable as the American system had been compromised by hackers. “Given the vast amounts of highly sensitive personal information Equifax holds, and its pivotal role in the financial sector as a credit reporting agency, it was completely unacceptable to find such significant shortcomings in the company’s privacy and security practices,” Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien said in a release.
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