this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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I have a solution:
governments should heavily fine companies that are subject to data breaches.
If it cost them real money (proportional to their market cap, the amount of customers affected, and/or the severity of the breach) to allow a data breach, I’m betting they’d shore up those holes REALLLLLLLLLL QUICK.
This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. You don't fine a bank for getting robbed. This reeks of frontend engineer idiocy, which is ironically the exact type of idiocy that tends to cause breaches like this.
Every time some corporatist replies to me, they’re always kbin.
Your analogy falls apart with even a cursory thought about the differences between banks (which are required to be insured against loss which would make a customer whole again without any negative effects) and corporations that just throw all of their customers’ data onto a portal that lacks basic protection. Once that personal data is compromised, there’s no way to repay the customer and no amount of fines will EVER right that wrong. In a properly-regulated, just society, a bank would ABSOLUTELY be fined back to the Stone Age if they left their customers’ cash in the middle of a town square, for example.
Be better, you corporate cuck.
Ok then, how about considering that this will only serve to benefit the big tech companies because they're the ones that can afford the fines? A breach is usually enough to make a smaller company go out of business already between cleanup and lawsuits. Why make it easier for the big tech companies to maintain power?
Did you even read my comment? I specifically mentioned that the size of the fine could be tied to their market cap.
If you work in cyber security, you’d know that there are best practices in place for cybersecurity and it is a WELL UNDERSTOOD FIELD. The main advice everyone gives is to never roll your own cryptography…and that is EXACTLY what many of the hacked companies did.
Taking a shortcut and hiring shitty devs who just use some random NPM package for security and call it a day is exactly why there are so many breaches. Just as bridges need to be built to withstand double or triple their weight, there should be STANDARDS in place that if violated are subject to fines.
Companies like Google would basically have to build SUPER SECURE technologies lest they be bankrupted by a breach.
In conclusion, please try to remove your tongue from your exploitive employer’s back side.
I did miss that, but again, it's additional fines on top of an almost guaranteed lawsuit for something that may not even be their fault. If they got owned by a Heartbleed exploit back when it was first announced and a fix wasn't available yet, should a company be responsible for that? What about when they get hit by a vuln that's been stockpiled for a couple years and purposely has no fix due to interference from bad actors? There are a lot of situations where fining someone for getting breached doesn't make sense.
You make great points but my final point is this: if a company simply cannot guarantee protection of user data, it shouldn’t be trusted with user data in the first place.
And I'll counter with this: no system is perfect, especially when major parts are made by non-employees. Mistakes can and do happen because corporations, regardless of size, are made up of humans, and humans are really good at fucking up.
I’m not trying to get the last word, I swear! 🤣
Go back to my bridge analogy and test that against what you just said.
Your comment equates to: “oh well, that bridge falling killed thousands of people. At least we were able to allow them to fail in the crucible of the free market!”
Your bridge analogy falls apart because there already are standards (FIPS, among others) that are shockingly insecure despite having been updated relatively recently, and yet we still have breaches. If the standards were effective, places like AmerisourceBergen, the country's largest pharmaceutical distributor, wouldn't be supplementing them with additional safeguards. No standard is going to work perfectly, or even particularly well, for everyone. Bridges still fall down.
EDIT: Alternatively, there would need to be a provision that allows companies to sue the government if they get breached while following their standards, since it was the government that said they were safe.
Anyone who says, “think of the corporations” before they think of the people being PERMANENTLY compromised is a lost soul indeed. You are blaming the inadequacy of standards rather than the demagogues working for the corporations that enabled these lax standards. Of course there are going to be 0 day exploits that no one could protect for but that is a red herring. That’s something that could easily come out and be considered when that company is brought in front of a civil court to decide the fines, obviously!
I think we’re too dissimilar for this conversation to bear any fruit. Thanks for the well constructed devil’s advocate stance but you certainly haven’t convinced me.
When you say "corporations," it seems like you're exclusively counting companies like Google, Meta, etc, whereas I'm also including the mom and pop, 15-person operations that would be impacted by the same regulations you suggest. Those underdogs are the ones I want to protect, since they're the only chance the world has at dethroning the incumbents and ensuring that the big guys don't outlive their usefulness.
I just realized you’re the Tesla guy from yesterday. I’m glad we could have a more mature discussion on this topic and I’m glad I didn’t block you. 🤣
NGL, my first comment was partially meant to see if you actually had blocked me lol
😃 Wholesome AF. Sorry about yesterday. That was a SUPER immature discussion after a while.
I wouldn’t consider you my best friend or anything but I’m glad I didn’t put in blinders to someone critical of my ideas. Cheers, fellow fediverse user. After all, you don’t seem like a dummy; just a person with different perspective than me.
Hey man, it happens. I could tell that you had some valid arguments in there, I was just trying to get you to express them. I definitely didn't help by joining in the immaturity either.
Side note, I'm legit starting to hate my Tesla anyway, but I wasn't about to admit that yesterday lol. There are absolutely a lot of valid criticisms of them, I just think the majority are overblown, especially as they relate to FSD. I'm in the beta and it's basically the only reason I still have the damn thing.
Anyway, I'm sorry too. I probably should have just walked away when things got heated, but there was a part of me that was secretly hoping to see how long we'd keep going back and forth calling each other assholes because I thought it would be funny.
Just want to say that I appreciate how you two ended up haha. It was a wide eyed "Woah" from me at the beginning there (both), but I do love that you guys talked it out and ended up all civil and complimentary. There's hope for us all to understand each other is my takeaway. Thanks to both of you for showing us the way.
This interaction definitely improved my day even more than our interaction yesterday perhaps soured my day. Thanks for that!
This fediverse thing is really nice sometimes. I look forward to some really good discussions. I promise to try to keep my cool. If I call you a name, you should know that it is with a smirk and only meant as a soft, subtle jab. :)
I’m not.
And what I proposed (see my revised original comment) actually protects those companies because it takes into account:
See, I figure all of those things would be accounted for in whatever civil suit gets brought against the company. Frankly, I think that's much more fair to companies both big and small because it involves a group of people working together to figure how much of a fine to levy in each individual instance, rather than having a blanket policy that may or may not account for edge cases. If the company is huge and the fuckup egregious, then the jury is (theoretically) going to throw the book at them.
At the very least, I'd want a jury in between the company and whichever government body is fining them, because regulatory bodies are prime targets for corporate shills to take over and it's harder for that to run rampant if you have a bunch of regular jackoffs acting as gatekeepers.
There's also the issue of ongoing compliance for small companies. Cybersecurity engineers are not cheap, and being all but required by law to employ one could (1) drive small companies out of business (180k a year may be cheap for Facebook, but it's definitely not for Joe Buttsniffer and Sons Catering), and (2) cause market saturation so bad that the average salary makes nobody want to do the job anymore.
Agreed. Corporate regulatory capture was a 100% success in the United States. It has been that way since at least Reagan. It always comes back to government corruption and what I see in these kinds of civil suits against corporations that were breached is a gentle slap (actually more of a caress!) on the wrist (and a wink and a nod when the cameras turn off) between the demagogues and the corporations that own them.
Yeah it really comes back to "fines are only for poor people." Google can just count the fines as the cost of doing business while simultaneously leveraging their dominance to force other companies to break regulations in order to work with them.
It’s VERY similar to how we (in the US) allow Congress to decide the rules that THEY THEMSELVES have to follow when you have the legalized bribery that is known as lobbying in the US.
You know what I bet we both agree on? Limited liability in general being a shit idea.