【1985 Archives】

When Joshua Browder woke up at 6 a.m. Tuesday morning985 Archives he says he had about 1,000 new emails.

Some sought legal advice. Others just wanted to thank him. But nearly every message was about a chatbot he built that could make it easier for people to sue Equifax in small claims court.

Equifax, a credit reporting agency, announced on Sept. 7 that hackers stole a trove of personal information -- including social security numbers -- from up to 143 million people in the U.S. between May and July.

Outrage is manifesting in the form of potentially giant class action lawsuits, but those lawsuits can take years to come to a conclusion. Browder -- a Stanford student and angry former Equifax customer -- wants people to take action in court while the breach is still on everyone's minds.

"There's so much righteous indignation," he said. "The kind of computer science mistakes they were making -- in a Stanford class, you would fail."

Browder is relatively well-known for building a chatbot called DoNotPay that has reportedly helped people get out of around 375,000 parking tickets in the United Kingdom and the United States. This newest bot takes some basic information -- your state, your name -- and generates the legal paperwork necessary to file a lawsuit against Equifax in small claims court. The idea is to streamline the process so more people are willing to take legal action against a company that failed to protect their personal information.

Think of the bot like software that helps you do your taxes -- it asks for the specific information, and puts it where it's supposed to go on all those forms that require multiple cups of coffee to get through. Such things, to many people, are extremely useful. The bot generates the forms with all your info and tells you where to file them, but you have to serve them in person.

But a word of caution comes by way of Ryan Calo, a privacy expert and law professor at the University of Washington.

"You have to trust that the person who designed the bot knows what they're doing," Calo said. "A small error could invalidate whoever's using it, right?"

A misplaced keystroke in the code or a misunderstanding of some part of the law could theoretically result in a slew of invalid legal forms. Calo didn't imply that Browder's bot is generating worthless papers, but he did say that "the law around whether or not you can recover from securities failure is not well settled."

Browder says people have already filed around 7,000 claims, which he loves, though it means he's on constant duty to make sure the site doesn't go down for long stretches of time.

Who knows how successful any of those people will be, or even if they'll show up in court to serve the forms. If they do, courts will theoretically have to decide whether Equifax wronged these individuals to the point that plaintiffs should be awarded damages. If plaintiffs win, they could be in line for up to $25,000 depending on their state of residence (congrats, those of you who live in Tennessee).

The bot's here, if you want to check it out. If it's down when you click, that's likely because it's popular.

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