Crisis Management for Equifax About Equifax As one of the nation’s three major credit reporting agencies along with Experian and TransUnion, Equifax Inc. is a consumer credit reporting agency that has access to confidential information of over 800 million people and more than 88 million businesses globally. It has more than 9000 employees in 14 countries. It offers credit and demographic insights to businesses, in the meantime, also provides customers with credit report and services directly. With the intrinsic identity- “Powering the World with Knowledge”, Equifax has their codes of ethics and business conduct, which is they must be vigilant and protect confidential information. “Confidential information includes all non-public information that might be of use to competitors, or harmful to the Company or its customers, if disclosed. The obligation to preserve confidential information continues even after employment …show more content…
To deal with rumors, we can use Allport and Postman model of rumor dynamics- R ~ i x a to control the effect. R represents rumors, i is the importance of the rumor to the hearer or reader, if true, and a is the level of ambiguity or uncertainty surrounding the rumor. To reduce the effect of rumors, Equifax could reduce the effect of ‘a’ which is to eliminate ambiguity around the factual basis of the rumors. After Equifax announced the data breach, there are some rumors about the data breach among the public, such as “if someone’s personal information was affected” or “whether Equifax will inform everyone if their information has been compromised”, etc. Equifax can post the certain answer of these rumors on their website to eliminate the ambiguity of them. Also, according to Doorley & Garcia, to prevent more rumors, Equifax provides sufficient clarifying details and information on their website as well as Twitter and Facebook platforms as early as