Did Capital One Inform You of a Data Breach?
If you are a Capital One customer, chances are good that you are likely complicit in a recent company data breach affecting 106 million people (100 million in the US and six million in Canada). This is our question. Did Capital One really tell you if you were hurt?
This may sound like a silly request, but we want to know if you’ve really heard anything from Capital One or not. Chances are, you learned about the hack from the news, not from Capital One itself. And while the company promised in the fine print of its press release that it would start reaching out to affected customers, it really doesn’t seem to have started.
To a (small) Capital One loan, the company now has a pop-up announcement when you log into its banking service, warning you that you might want to read the latest Capital One news.
This link takes you to a prettier version of Capital One’s gruesome press release , which itself contains links to a somewhat helpful FAQ about the incident. None of the pages tell you if you are specifically affected or give you the opportunity to know if you have been affected by the disease or not.
Capital One also posted a tweet about the hack, as you saw earlier. However, this is far from actually notifying people whether they should be a little worried or very worried about their data being leaked. This includes:
- Approximately 140,000 Credit Card Clients Whose Social Security Numbers Leaked
- About 80,000 credit card customers whose bank account numbers have been leaked
- Who knows how many customers are facing less serious, but still problematic data breaches, including “names, addresses, zip / zip codes, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth and income reported by the people themselves.”
We’re still curious. Has Capital One contacted you at all? Let us know in the comments.