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120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

forbes.com

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Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#92

Personal data right now is considered an asset. It needs to be seen as a liability. Maybe the solution is a data tax. You pay a set amount every year for every piece of personal data you have. If you buy personal data from another company, you still have to pay the tax for the data you acquired. If you have a breach of data, your tax goes up for a period of 10 years. In addition, every piece of personal data needs to…

But why is it an asset to begin with? Why did it not stay a liability?

I hear things about how the data is the 'real' product, and how it's mostly used just to train algorithms that are then used to sell ads. More data, better training algos, better ad targeting, more money spent.

But that data can be remarkably easy to spoof and goof with. Garbage in = garbage out. That would be a liability to the algos, the real weak links.

So, I think that a tax is not the best idea.

Rather, the data needs to be made into 'garbage'. Yes, an obfuscation race will ensue, but there is always more trash than gold, more noise than signal.

If we really want to change the game, we need to have easy to use apps that will throw a minute amount of static on the instagram photos, that will put just a bit of background on the phone calls, and that will throw a small bit of random words into the emails.

Yes, PGP does this already, but we all know PGP is not easy to use (by design?).

We don't need 'total' security and safety, just a bit of fuzz will screw with the algos enough (thus the start of the obfuscation race/war)

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#93
post #55
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just shut down every personal blog and small (or medium or large...) forum on the Internet.

Anonymous data is not the same thing. There's no reason to jump to regulation of data without a legal trail.

What's anoymous data? If I have an e-mail, a screenname, and IP, I bet I could identify at least the household with a much greater than 0% success rate.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#94
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it doesn't need to be insured, you could just spin off a smaller entity responsible for holding the data for you, and shut the company down if the data leaks. You can do the same if insurance is required of course, but any brand new 'personal data holding' company would likely have very high insurance premiums to offset the risk.

Its fairly common in the temp employee industry that if a temp worker gets injured the temp agency folds and restarts to avoid the penalties. It would be nice to require insurance or a bond to hold personal data so a company can't just disappear when data is lost. [0]: http://projects.thestar.com/temp-employment-agencies/

And people wonder why I am so hostile to the our way of creating and governing corporations, and our way of divorcing business from the lives and reputations of of those who run it.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#95

Personal data right now is considered an asset. It needs to be seen as a liability. Maybe the solution is a data tax. You pay a set amount every year for every piece of personal data you have. If you buy personal data from another company, you still have to pay the tax for the data you acquired. If you have a breach of data, your tax goes up for a period of 10 years. In addition, every piece of personal data needs to…

It's my data, why should they pay a tax to the government for it? How about a data royalty. You use my data, you must pay me a royalty.

"It's my data" - this is absurd.

Observations I make are mine, if I observe you it's my observation.

I can tell stories about my observations, but if I make public statements about you that are false, that's a tort.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#96

The linked article is not very good imo. It goes into almost no detail, despite including two directly contradictory statements: "Yet another cloud storage misconfiguration has exposed personally identifiable information (PII)" and "the data in question contained no names of any individuals or any other personal identifying information" Can we change this to link to the Forbes article referenced in the linked one? It…

The Forbes article also points out that the DB is now secured. I have 2 take-aways: 1. This isn't an announcement that our details have been leaked, so much as a reminder that our details are now and will perpetually be leaked, in one form or another by an externalized party. 2. Databases mapping all American households exist.

| 2. Databases mapping all American households exist.

And they can be pretty comprehensive. Short anecdote but the last time I moved, and before I had updated any address information on my accounts/ID, the first piece of non-forwarded mail I received addressed to me was a credit card offer from AMEX. I still have absolutely no clue how they knew where exactly to send it to me.

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#97
post #2

The data is just way too spread between too many companies. Someone will screw up somewhen for sure. Not sure how to solve this. Make it illegal to store data and instead only allow access with permission for specific purposes?

Let companies share and do whatever they want but put huge fines on data breaches. Make it a felony to hide, fail to report or otherwise lie about data breaches. Money if you fuck up, prison if you lie about it. that should align some incentives and get you a good way along. It will incentivise proper security measures, and help quench the thirst for data in the first place.

[deleted]

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#98

Personal data right now is considered an asset. It needs to be seen as a liability. Maybe the solution is a data tax. You pay a set amount every year for every piece of personal data you have. If you buy personal data from another company, you still have to pay the tax for the data you acquired. If you have a breach of data, your tax goes up for a period of 10 years. In addition, every piece of personal data needs to…

Instead of a data tax, I like the idea of mandatory data insurance, with payouts to users whose data is leaked/stolen. If your company has shitty security, or a history of leaks, your data insurance provider will charge out the ass. The financial math has to clearly be on the side of it being more profitable to practice proactive security.

payouts to users whose data is leaked/stolen

What would the actuarial standards be for something like that?

Re: 120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak

#99
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Forbes article also points out that the DB is now secured. I have 2 take-aways: 1. This isn't an announcement that our details have been leaked, so much as a reminder that our details are now and will perpetually be leaked, in one form or another by an externalized party. 2. Databases mapping all American households exist.

| 2. Databases mapping all American households exist. And they can be pretty comprehensive. Short anecdote but the last time I moved, and before I had updated any address information on my accounts/ID, the first piece of non-forwarded mail I received addressed to me was a credit card offer from AMEX. I still have absolutely no clue how they knew where exactly to send it to me.

I'm assuming a lot here but there is always the chance that your door-to-door post man or woman went to deliver any generic piece of mail to your old address only to find out you no longer lived there. I'm fairly sure there is a mechanism in place where a post man or post office can set a recipient as "moved" or "moving" to let the entire postal system know that until that recipients new address is figured out that no mail should be going to the old address.

That said the cynic in me won't allow the positive optimist within me to win this one. While I do believe there to be many wonderful postal workers I am going to assume that corporate greed is winning out over the kindness and caring of the human heart in this specific situation :(

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