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You are advocating creating perverse incentives. A specific branch of government, a select agency, to become a profit center through continuous finding and fini
by dexen 6y ago
You are advocating creating perverse incentives. A specific branch of government, a select agency, to become a profit center through continuous finding and fining of ever more wrongdoings. All morally excused because the victims are faceless multinational corps.
We all know how badly that goes with speed traps and red light cameras - instead of improving, the road conditions and sometimes even local rules are tweaked to maintain steady cashflow.
Say no to revolving doors of regulators, say no to moral hazard of what effectively amounts to vice tax. Apply criminal penalties when reasonable, don't make data leaks & privacy breaches just another cost of doing business.
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Clarification: a fine works well when it's expected to be a rare penatly enacted on a singular player - as it makes that player noncompetitive in the market. Conversely, when fines are expected to apply regularly and at proportional rate to most, or all, players in a market, the fine no longer makes the player noncompetitive - it merely shifts the market. Perhaps some alternative markets (print? radio & TV?) would pick up some of the advertising slack, but largely it'd be a regular money transfer from corps to the government. And a "vice tax" like that is a clear moral hazard, with no natural end in sight.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoThey’re advocating the removing perverse incentives, so that data leaks and privacy breaches are not “just the cost of doing business.”
- Bluestein 6y agoFine. Slippery slope perhaps.- Make it a "third sector", properly audited NGO (watchdog, thinktank, foundation ...), with ties to some appropriate umbrella (UN, ICJ), that uses some sort of blockchain solution to fine as needed, and then allocate compensation from this to aggrieved parties, or social programs, compensating not only for loss of privacy, but for the other nasty effects (fake news, emotional distress, political polarization ...) that F'book is causing.- Otherwise, our souls are just another cost of doing business to them.-
- dexen 6y agoNow it makes more sense. Going a bit further you could perform it within the already existing framework: apply criminal penalties where sufficient threshold of harm have been reached. Perhaps even judicial doctrine a bit to better handle cases of large number of small, or statistical, harms - there are parallels to how we already tackle health hazards and other stochastic, broad harms. The key consideration is avoiding perverse incentives. A stellar example is how the GDPR disaster is unfolding: the smaller websites are still plastered with "cookie warnings" making them less usable, while the larger platforms - Youtube, Google - already pivoted the warning dialog into nagging for logging in, making anonymous browsing incrementally less practical. The difference in power lets the larger players use as a moat the regulation that's prima facie about privacy.
- Bluestein 6y ago> there are parallels to how we already tackle health hazards and other stochastic, broad harms. I like your approach to these damages as stochastic, broad, ergo "actuarially" manageable ...
- dexen 6y agoThank you. We want to develop morals and jurisprudence around the subject for more reasons. Computerization, in particular networked computerization, has introduced problems like "wormable" devices - were impact of a single device or data item is tiny - however at scale they can quickly rack up considerable damages and losses.
- ric2b 6y ago> continuous finding and fining of ever more wrongdoings. How perverse indeed. > A specific branch of government, a select agency, to become a profit center So don't directly give them the money from the fines, simple.