Originally Posted by
AtomicLush
Wow, people are jaded on this forum. Breach of your privacy should not be the norm. There are data privacy laws that specifically try to prevent these from being the norm. In any case, OP - your best bet for compensation would be joining the class action (which will net customers next to nothing, but the lawyers in millions) or opt of the class action and suing individually. There are too many people affected by the breach (me being one of them) for Marriott to handle one by one.
But was there a breach or just more Marriott IT incompetence?
Originally Posted by
NdaNo
OK, here's the deal. There never was a data breach. The file they "found" was created as part of the due diligence process when Marriott and others were evaluating Starwood for acquisition. Ask yourself what hacker capable of penetrating deep into a secure data center and gaining total access to the database would then extract a copy of the data, encrypt it and then leave it there? No hacker ever. Because there has been no evidence that any of this data has ever been found outside of Starwood/Marriott, they had to invent the story that it was the Chinese and state sponsored spying. Really? The file was stored on the most secure system available to Starwood primarily because Marriott had the habit of asking for the same data over and over. So instead of going through the extract process multiple times, the original file was resent. Since all of the former IT staff had either left or been released when the file was discovered, there was no one around to tell them why it was there and they simply assumed the worst.