Hi, I'm RAN Levy.

Welcome to Malicious Life in collaboration with Cyberreason. reason.

Facebook collects so much information about you that its algorithm can sense when you're falling out of love with your partner. But it started out in 2003 as a game for college kids.

Google can tell when you're pregnant before you do.

Its original purpose was to index the world's

collective knowledge. Typically speaking, you don't just build a big data company.

The story goes that a couple of young founders starred in a garage with a small business idea,

setting books maybe, or a Kichy concept for an app.

Only years later, after massive growth and success, does a company seize their potential

for information trafficking. But in the 120 year history, Equifax never sold anything or provided any service to ordinary folks in order to grow their business.

It's a multi-billion dollar cooperation today, so it appears to the eye quite different than it did

at the beginning.

But before we dive into the story of the notorious Data Bridge of 2017, it's important to understand

that underneath the surface, though, Equifax is the exact same company it has always been.

And it's because long before high-speed internet,

before a single employee was hired,

the founder of the company had an insight that most of us would come to only a century later,

that there was big money to be made in collecting and selling people's information

whether they liked it or not. Keter Wolford was a former bank employee from Maryland who in 1899 owned a grocery store in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Back then, being a grocer meant something different than it does today.

Wolford personally knew many of the folks who walked in his front doors.

A few of them were his suppliers, others were his neighbors.

...