4 ms·

It's very difficult, if not impossible, for society or government to enforce moral judgments, shame, punishment, condemnation, etc on every individual / company

It's very difficult, if not impossible, for society or government to enforce moral judgments, shame, punishment, condemnation, etc on every individual / company that deserves it. The amazing thing about our society is that in most cases, the incentives of individuals are such that even bad people engage in good behavior. You say that businesses and business persons have been making destructive decisions "for decades" but there's definitely a reporting bias there; an overwhelming majority of businesses quietly ship bacon, pack boxes, deliver fertilizer, fold laundry, etc without any moral/shame oversight from senators or society at large. In fact, many of these businesses are likely ran by sonofabitches, but they still engage in good behavior because their incentives are aligned with their consumers. The problem with Equifax and other headline news behaviors (pollution, bank crashes, etc) is not 'bad people made terrible decisions' but 'bad people had no incentive to make right decisions' because, for example, the credit bureaus are simply not motivated to protect consumer data. Legal and financial incentives are both aligned against consumers, not for them. It's a little unfair to pile on the CEO of Equifax or the company because that's just fighting yesterday's battle too late. What we should be doing is fixing the incentive structures such that future Equifaxes don't happen. Also, as other commenters have pointed out, we don't want to discourage good people from running credit bureaus out of fear that innocent mistakes may get them hung.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
>It's a little unfair to pile on the CEO of Equifax or the company because that's just fighting yesterday's battle too late. No it's not. He and the CSO are ultimately responsible. That is part of why they get high pay and golden parachutes. That is their job. Their incentive to make the right decisions is being shown right now via investigations and congressional testimonies which may lead to other charges.
- bmmayer1 9y ago
  My point was not that they don't deserve condemnation, but that punishing them doesn't help correct the system to prevent the same problem from happening again.
vec 9y ago
> Also, as other commenters have pointed out, we don't want to discourage good people from running credit bureaus out of fear that innocent mistakes may get them hung. I couldn't agree more with the rest of your comment, but I draw an almost opposite conclusion. We should discourage people, good and otherwise, from running credit bureaus. Collecting and holding sensitive personal data on millions of people is inherently a mistake, and after the last few years of data breaches it's getting hard to argue that it's an innocent one. Companies have proved time and again that they can't be trusted with huge datasets on the general public. They don't have much incentive to apply the level of paranoia necessary to actually protect data that valuable, and even when they do they rarely have the level of InfoSec skills and, more importantly, culture to actually pull it off. In practice we see 2 or 3 nines of reliability when we actually need about 5 nines. We should stop waiting until leaks happen. Holding sensitive personal data on hundreds of millions of people ought to be congressional hearing level scandalous whether that data has leaked yet or not.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago

>It's a little unfair to pile on the CEO of Equifax or the company because that's just fighting yesterday's battle too late. No it's not. He and the CSO are ultimately responsible. That is part of why they get high pay and golden parachutes. That is their job. Their incentive to make the right decisions is being shown right now via investigations and congressional testimonies which may lead to other charges.

bmmayer1 9y ago
My point was not that they don't deserve condemnation, but that punishing them doesn't help correct the system to prevent the same problem from happening again.

vec 9y ago

> Also, as other commenters have pointed out, we don't want to discourage good people from running credit bureaus out of fear that innocent mistakes may get them hung. I couldn't agree more with the rest of your comment, but I draw an almost opposite conclusion. We should discourage people, good and otherwise, from running credit bureaus. Collecting and holding sensitive personal data on millions of people is inherently a mistake, and after the last few years of data breaches it's getting hard to argue that it's an innocent one. Companies have proved time and again that they can't be trusted with huge datasets on the general public. They don't have much incentive to apply the level of paranoia necessary to actually protect data that valuable, and even when they do they rarely have the level of InfoSec skills and, more importantly, culture to actually pull it off. In practice we see 2 or 3 nines of reliability when we actually need about 5 nines. We should stop waiting until leaks happen. Holding sensitive personal data on hundreds of millions of people ought to be congressional hearing level scandalous whether that data has leaked yet or not.