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Toothless fines. Indict corporate officers or employees that did it... then you’ll get change.
by dd36 7y ago
Toothless fines. Indict corporate officers or employees that did it... then you’ll get change.
- t-writescode 7y agoDepends on the size of the fine. GDPR fines theoretically hit plenty hard. I think income-based fines are illegal under ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ though, in the United States, (not a lawyer), so maybe that won’t fly.
- ska 7y agoFines don't have to be toothless.
- acdha 7y agoThis is technically true but the odds of a fine being levied which is high enough to register on huge companies like this is exceedingly low, especially since everyone involved in that decision could walk away from a bankruptcy and still be fabulously rich. Punishing shareholders has a lot of collateral damage but personal liability has almost none.
- warent 7y agoIt depends on the perspective. Imagine an FCC shopping page for businesses that says something like: "Gain ability to sell customer location data for a year: $10,000,000" "Fine" is a euphemism for market price. If the profits outweigh the fines and the poor PR can be controlled in a timely manner, then they'll do it every time.
- cnasc 7y agoWhat about an FCC shopping page that says the price is “throw one scapegoat to the wolves”?
- ska 7y agoMarkets prices work the other way too; if fines are at least perceived to be more expensive than any benefit you'll see, they are a good disincentive.
- kortilla 7y agoThen you just increase the fines. That’s so much more trivial than throwing people into an already overcrowded prison system and destroying their life.
- craftinator 7y agoI think fines should act against the shareholders who let it happen! FCC forces more shares and acquires them, decreasing shareholder value, which is the gold standard of publicly traded companies.
- dudus 7y agoAnd they must be worse for repeat offenses.
- Reelin 7y agoUnless they knowingly and intentionally broke criminal law, that's completely over the top and unnecessary. Fines should presumably start small and have a graduated structure to prevent the "just a business expense" approach from becoming a viable one. The current regulatory problems are due almost entirely (IMO) to lack of active enforcement; why care what the penalty is if you know it won't happen to you regardless?
- dd36 7y agoYou don’t have to knowingly break the law to be criminally charged. If you’re in a position where a law might apply, you should do your due diligence or get legal counsel sign off. Selling private location data should easily cause a competent executive to think twice and confirm it’s okay.
- ClumsyPilot 7y agoWhy should fines for selling private data of millions of people start small? Will they ever get large enough to get companies to care?
- vageli 7y ago> Unless they knowingly and intentionally broke criminal law, that's completely over the top and unnecessary. Why? If I drive drunk and a cop pulls me over, lack of knowledge is no defense. As the head of a company, why is a lack of knowledge of the goings-on of the company a defense? If you don't know the goings-on when you are in a position to, at the very least that should be categorized as criminally negligent.
- KarlKemp 7y agoThis is civil law, not criminal. Maybe criminal liability s needed, but it’s just not reality. Also: beware what you wish for. Criminal law may allow your bloodlust to be satisfied. But it’s just as likely that the higher burden of proof it requires, and various other differences such as the 5th amendment, make prosecution difficult or impossible.
- sailfast 7y agoNot to mention when you accidentally leave some data out there with a misconfigured server you’d maybe go to jail, but in their outrage people don’t think it could happen to them, or be used by someone with other goals.