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>?A careless programmer makes a bad choice and the CEO has to go to jail? Come on An institutional failure of review, testing and security that will lead to te

>?A careless programmer makes a bad choice and the CEO has to go to jail? Come on An institutional failure of review, testing and security that will lead to tens of billions of dollars of identity theft goes unpunished completely? Come on. A CEO is responsible for his organization. If you ruin lives, you have to pay the price. Can't handle the heat? Don't take the job. I hate how CEO's get hundred million dollar parachutes because, the risk and danger and difficulty of such a position warrants such extravagant pay. But, then, we ask them to be responsible, bear responsibility for the organization which paid them a hundred million dollars to be responsible,and we say "come on?" Utterly ridiculous. CEO's bear responsibility for their organizations, or the organization should not exist. There must be responsibility for private organizations, lest the concept of private organization be nothing more than a cheap trick to remove criminal and civil liability from wrong doing.

iamdave 9y ago
An institutional failure of review, testing and security that will lead to tens of billions of dollars of identity theft goes unpunished completely? I'm going to agree with you in wanting to see someone punished for this, I'm not sure if I'm on the side of jail time in the absence of malicious intent.
grovegames 9y ago
But what law specifically was broken? Should we have a law that punishes the CEO for data breeches? Is a CEO responsible if his experts recommended the practice? Is the CEO responsible if their staff went around and did this without conscent? That seems rife for abuse. Don't like your CEO, leak some data and have him go to jail.
- karmelapple 9y ago
  I think data that has to do with voting records, or suspected voting records, would be very reasonable to be under the purview of being treated as sensitive data that, if breached, should have consequences to a company.
  - grovegames 9y ago
    I'm not saying this shouldn't have consequences. What I'm saying is this is far too nuanced to just say "lock up the CEO"
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      How about making positive proposals of your own instead of negating everyone else's? Clearly many people find the existing rules and practices inadequate and propose heavy burdens of responsibility commensurate with the substantial incentives and rewards that accrue to success in business. CEOs are not an oppressed class groaning under the burden of social structures that keep them locked up in the C-suite. Even if they are confronted with draconian penalties for naive misadventure, most CEOs of medium and large firms can afford A+ legal representation. If you're more worried about them than you are about the potential first and second-order effects upon tens or (in this case) hundreds of millions of people, then you are essentially choosing to be a pawn of the powerful.
      - ryb73 9y ago
        I think you're blowing grovegames' original post out of proportion — he asked some pretty reasonable questions.
        anigbrowl 9y ago
        Of course they're reasonable. But problematic large scale data breaches are not a new problem. The last financial crisis was almost a decade ago, and yet we haven't developed a new culture of organizational responsibility since, despite the massive societal costs. Not to make overly sweeping generalizations, but 'hold on, let's think through all the ramifications here instead of being too hasty' is a great way to maintain the status quo while avoiding any responsibility for it. Who benefits? It sure ain't the general public.
        sdenton4 9y ago
stale2002 9y ago
This isn't social security numbers. This is all publicly available data scrapping stuff. Like your public Facebook profile. If you don't want that stuff to be leaked, then don't put your info publicly on Facebook.
- wutwutwutwut 9y ago
  I didn't put mine on Facebook. What's step 2?
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Are you registered to vote? Then your info is publicly available for anyone to get. The government will just give it to you.
- throwawaymaroon 9y ago
  facebook is irrelevant to this conversation
- sixothree 9y ago
  It's still not clear that this is all publicly available information.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Don't want your freedoms threatened? Avoid attention by never exercising them! I reject the argument that those who aggregate vast troves of data about people, publicly available or voluntarily shared though they may be, are exempt from any sort of responsibility for the curation and deployment of said data. Informational asymmetries lead to power imbalances, and sufficiently severe power imbalances lead to oppression.
- phil21 9y ago
  I'm starting to kind of hope there is just a giant "leak" of every single US citizen's basic public information including SSN, etc. Get it all out there so we can stop having the debate over what is private information vs. public. Then we can stop having this conversation constantly. None of this information is secret, I would put SSN into "quasi-secret" land since it takes such minimal effort to get at it. We've been relying on security through obscurity for far too long. If the only thing stopping mass identity theft is someone compiling a list of otherwise public information, it's far beyond time we re-evaluate where the true problem lies. So yeah, I agree. At some point society is going to actually have to confront this in a useful manner vs. hysterics and patching over an obviously failed system.
wdr1 9y ago
Jail is a bit much, but I do think corporations should be financially accountable for the clean-up of privacy spills. (E.g., similar to environmental disasters.) If corporations face the prospect of a big bill, and the cost of that bill far exceeds the cost of keeping user data safe, a lot of the right things will start happen.
edanm 9y ago
"A CEO is responsible for his organization. If you ruin lives, you have to pay the price." If you break the law, you pay the price of jailtime. If you haven't broken the law, you might pay the price in the marketplace, but that's all. If a law was broken, then of course whoever broke it should be prosecuted. But I don't think anyone disagrees with that, nor does it need to be explained in a lengthy HN comment. The only reason we need such an explanation is exactly because this isn't the way our society works. We set up the rules of the game and expect people to play within those rules, but we don't go around jailing people because we dislike them or disagree with their choices. "CEO's bear responsibility for their organizations, or the organization should not exist." Don't forget that a CEO is an employee, and just one employee. A particularly important and influential (and well-paid) one, but "just" an employee. An organization is not solely defined by its CEO, nor does it make sense to think of them as all-powerful in terms of what the organization does. A CEO who doesn't perform can (and probably will!) be fired at some point.

iamdave 9y ago

An institutional failure of review, testing and security that will lead to tens of billions of dollars of identity theft goes unpunished completely? I'm going to agree with you in wanting to see someone punished for this, I'm not sure if I'm on the side of jail time in the absence of malicious intent.

grovegames 9y ago

But what law specifically was broken? Should we have a law that punishes the CEO for data breeches? Is a CEO responsible if his experts recommended the practice? Is the CEO responsible if their staff went around and did this without conscent? That seems rife for abuse. Don't like your CEO, leak some data and have him go to jail.

karmelapple 9y ago
I think data that has to do with voting records, or suspected voting records, would be very reasonable to be under the purview of being treated as sensitive data that, if breached, should have consequences to a company.
- grovegames 9y ago
  I'm not saying this shouldn't have consequences. What I'm saying is this is far too nuanced to just say "lock up the CEO"
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    How about making positive proposals of your own instead of negating everyone else's? Clearly many people find the existing rules and practices inadequate and propose heavy burdens of responsibility commensurate with the substantial incentives and rewards that accrue to success in business. CEOs are not an oppressed class groaning under the burden of social structures that keep them locked up in the C-suite. Even if they are confronted with draconian penalties for naive misadventure, most CEOs of medium and large firms can afford A+ legal representation. If you're more worried about them than you are about the potential first and second-order effects upon tens or (in this case) hundreds of millions of people, then you are essentially choosing to be a pawn of the powerful.
    - ryb73 9y ago
      I think you're blowing grovegames' original post out of proportion — he asked some pretty reasonable questions.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        Of course they're reasonable. But problematic large scale data breaches are not a new problem. The last financial crisis was almost a decade ago, and yet we haven't developed a new culture of organizational responsibility since, despite the massive societal costs. Not to make overly sweeping generalizations, but 'hold on, let's think through all the ramifications here instead of being too hasty' is a great way to maintain the status quo while avoiding any responsibility for it. Who benefits? It sure ain't the general public.
        sdenton4 9y ago

stale2002 9y ago

This isn't social security numbers. This is all publicly available data scrapping stuff. Like your public Facebook profile. If you don't want that stuff to be leaked, then don't put your info publicly on Facebook.

wutwutwutwut 9y ago
I didn't put mine on Facebook. What's step 2?
- stale2002 9y ago
  Are you registered to vote? Then your info is publicly available for anyone to get. The government will just give it to you.
throwawaymaroon 9y ago
facebook is irrelevant to this conversation
sixothree 9y ago
It's still not clear that this is all publicly available information.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Don't want your freedoms threatened? Avoid attention by never exercising them! I reject the argument that those who aggregate vast troves of data about people, publicly available or voluntarily shared though they may be, are exempt from any sort of responsibility for the curation and deployment of said data. Informational asymmetries lead to power imbalances, and sufficiently severe power imbalances lead to oppression.
phil21 9y ago
I'm starting to kind of hope there is just a giant "leak" of every single US citizen's basic public information including SSN, etc. Get it all out there so we can stop having the debate over what is private information vs. public. Then we can stop having this conversation constantly. None of this information is secret, I would put SSN into "quasi-secret" land since it takes such minimal effort to get at it. We've been relying on security through obscurity for far too long. If the only thing stopping mass identity theft is someone compiling a list of otherwise public information, it's far beyond time we re-evaluate where the true problem lies. So yeah, I agree. At some point society is going to actually have to confront this in a useful manner vs. hysterics and patching over an obviously failed system.

wdr1 9y ago

Jail is a bit much, but I do think corporations should be financially accountable for the clean-up of privacy spills. (E.g., similar to environmental disasters.) If corporations face the prospect of a big bill, and the cost of that bill far exceeds the cost of keeping user data safe, a lot of the right things will start happen.

edanm 9y ago

"A CEO is responsible for his organization. If you ruin lives, you have to pay the price." If you break the law, you pay the price of jailtime. If you haven't broken the law, you might pay the price in the marketplace, but that's all. If a law was broken, then of course whoever broke it should be prosecuted. But I don't think anyone disagrees with that, nor does it need to be explained in a lengthy HN comment. The only reason we need such an explanation is exactly because this isn't the way our society works. We set up the rules of the game and expect people to play within those rules, but we don't go around jailing people because we dislike them or disagree with their choices. "CEO's bear responsibility for their organizations, or the organization should not exist." Don't forget that a CEO is an employee, and just one employee. A particularly important and influential (and well-paid) one, but "just" an employee. An organization is not solely defined by its CEO, nor does it make sense to think of them as all-powerful in terms of what the organization does. A CEO who doesn't perform can (and probably will!) be fired at some point.