"Let's Stop Giving Retailers a Free Pass on Data Breaches"? What a joke; the very headline conveys a sentiment that frames the debate around how out of touch co

"Let's Stop Giving Retailers a Free Pass on Data Breaches"? What a joke; the very headline conveys a sentiment that frames the debate around how out of touch corporate media (and thus any blind repeater site) is. Corporate media has been giving passes with one-off coverage that often neglects to mention any proposals for remedying long-term public ramifications. But the public's interest isn't well served by corporate media nor is public interest properly evaluated by corporate media. Let's also stop thinking the stock market is a proper means of evaluating something applicable to most people's interests, because that's never been true. The stock market has more to do with wealthy people than most people. The corporate death penalty seems right and proper for very egregious offenses like credit rating agencies because the public will suffer the most and for the longest time (possibly the rest of their lives) when these records are insecure. Organizations will continue to lazily make evaluations based on these records but the records could have been tampered with. And judging by Equifax's successful lobbying, the ratings agencies get away with scarce punishment and therefore have little reason to care about fixing what they broke. Relatedly, it's time we stopped trusting so few organizations with something so precious. The market just isn't designed to handle truly important things, so we should stop trusting it to do so. No, let's not give them or any other organization passes, but let's also realize that most of these organizations use proprietary software (untrustworthy by default) to keep that data secure where nobody (including the organization) simply can't do effective audits. How proprietary software works is a secret, so such software is structurally incapable of ever being reasonably considered a sound choice for data safety. And organization's choices affect user's data safety, so users have an interest in this but not enough control over how their data is stored.