>As much as I love the free market, we're completely failing to protect consumers. I think we need the government to step in and align incentives. >Medicine ha

>As much as I love the free market, we're completely failing to protect consumers. I think we need the government to step in and align incentives. >Medicine has malpractice suits. Engineers have a professional duty of care. Builders have building codes. We need an equivalent for software engineering. The key difference is that when a doctor or engineer screws up, people die. The burden is on the people calling for regulation to show the tangible, measurable harm to peoples' health or finances resulting from these data breaches, otherwise the average person won't take them seriously. It's also the case that doctors and engineers aren't dealing with adversarial input. If somebody blows up a bridge nobody blames the engineer, and if a patient deliberately harms themselves nobody blames the doctor. Yet web infrastructure is constantly dealing with adversaries across the world trying to breach it.