3 ms·
Yes, we are at the primitive end of history, even the first transistor is still within living memory. What these breaches do is normalize the loss of privacy, t
by rhizome 7y ago
Yes, we are at the primitive end of history, even the first transistor is still within living memory. What these breaches do is normalize the loss of privacy, the protection of which eats into the profits that fuel the growth of the companies that collect it, and threaten their foundational roles in this early history. That this is early in the game is also why protective laws need to be passed for people to retain the power over their own information. Data is not as cheap as the law treats it, Google makes almost $100MM every week.
Furthermore, how much time do these breaches steal in lost productivity, or in diminished free time, for all of us? Quite a bit, but the only time you hear about that metric is when management is complaining about employees talking to each other in the hallway.
Protections not established early become harder to impose later, which is why the companies and lawmakers to which they donate downplay the severity of these breaches via pittances of penalties, 30min of revenues or something. Fines should be $1000 per individual exfiltrated, or a year of revenues (at last year's number), or other figure that would be actually effective...and with strict liability.
- rlucas 7y agoA big problem with slapping huge statutory damages / fines onto data breaches is that only the "suckers" will ever pay or even own up to it. Recently in Washington State, a small research group at WSU lost a couple of hard drives that had PII data on them on order of 1 M people. They even had them in a safe; the safe was stolen and no real evidence of the data being the target of the theft was found. Nonetheless, being good civil servants they scrupulously reported what happened and carried out required notification procedures to the million folks. Their reward was to be sued for basically the maximum that their insurance would pay out. How many thousands of times per year do similar things happen in private industry? Nobody knows. You don't even have to posit malice or a coverup; just think about how many times a year a hard drive backup of a database with a mere million records gets accidentally thrown away or sold off with surplus.
- rhizome 7y agoThe stolen hard drive story appears to be a bit different than you portray: https://healthitsecurity.com/news/washington-state-university-settles-4.7m-data-breach-lawsuit https://healthitsecurity.com/news/washington-state-universit... If the liability had been $50MM or $500MM, you can bet their storage practices would reflect it (not to mention actually telling people you're collecting their data). "Eh, whaddya gonna do?" is absolutely a normalization and a devaluing well out of proportion to the damage that is done.