Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Proposed Jail Time for Tech Companies Who Steal Data

trofire.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 203 posts

Re: Proposed Jail Time for Tech Companies Who Steal Data

#131

Post by ncallaway »

wbl wrote: post #57
coldtea wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is personal information really a kind of property, that can be stolen? If it is, aren’t we doing this all the time, any time we perceive anything about anyone? We are flexible and smarter than Vulcans. Something doesn't have to be necessarily expressible into a single, unambiguous universal formula to be made illegal. We can e.g. allow people to perceive things about other people in their brains (or even notebooks)…

Rule of law demands it be clear what is and is not illegal. Make it illegal to film people in public and the guy who made the Rodney King tape is going to jail.

> Rule of law demands it be clear what is and is not illegal

While it would be nice, there's actually not really such a requirement. New legal theories are brought in criminal cases from time to time.

The existence of novel legal theories in criminal cases means it's not always knowable precisely what is and is not illegal.

The world is shades of grey, not black-and-white, and that's especially true in criminal law.

Re: Proposed Jail Time for Tech Companies Who Steal Data

#133

Post by rfrey »

leroy_masochist wrote: post #52

> There is no reason why any person on Capitol Hill should vote against this. If I were an elected official, one reason why I would be very cautious about voting for this is that, if we make allowing a data breach a felony punishable by imprisonment, it is likely to have a somewhat chilling effect on the likelihood of engineers to start new companies where they as founders would be potentially prosecutable for such f…

A chilling effect on the likelihood of engineers to start new companies whose business model is the collection and monetization of user data, to be a bit more specific.

Re: Proposed Jail Time for Tech Companies Who Steal Data

#134

Post by enriquec »

Apocryphon wrote: post #84
dmix wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rules always get written to control the big companies like FB, despite the fact the laws effect the whole marketplace of thousands of companies of different sizes. But big companies like FB have enough lawyers and influence and never really change. Meanwhile the laws cripple all sorts of harmless small-medium sized companies, including potential future better competitors to FB. And the laws stay law for decades b…

> There are countless examples of this in other industries. But do you have an actual example of this happening in tech? And beyond that, a series of examples showing this to be a systemic problem? Because high-tech has long been a Wild West with little regulation, and many many firms have been built upon finding ways to dodge existing regulation and social conventions. They will likely be fine.

yes, GDPR. furthermore, regulatory capture is indisputably proven.

Re: Proposed Jail Time for Tech Companies Who Steal Data

#135

Post by blub »

betterunix2 wrote: post #89
Apocryphon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is the tip of the iceberg. For every bad story about Facebook there's at least a dozen about Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Uber, AirBnB, and smaller players. Regulation designed to rein in the heavy hitters will not harm small startups, especially ones whose innovation is built upon careful flouting of law and loophole-seeking, anyway.

Except that in practice regulation nearly typically protects big incumbents from startup competitors. That is exactly the effect GDPR had in Europe: https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/09/gdpr-has-cut-ad-trackers-i... Incumbents, especially in the tech industry, face a greater threat of being unseated by a startup than being unable to handle regulations. The "heavy hitters" have plenty of cash available to pay for the law…

No, that's not what happened with the GDPR. Most small companies rightfully came to the conclusion that they can't afford to not comply, so at least they tried to.

Google though they can afford not to, so they didn't. Now Google is starting to get hit with fines (e.g. France), so they'll probably change their minds.

Re: Proposed Jail Time for Tech Companies Who Steal Data

#136

Post by blub »

enriquec wrote: post #134
Apocryphon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are countless examples of this in other industries. But do you have an actual example of this happening in tech? And beyond that, a series of examples showing this to be a systemic problem? Because high-tech has long been a Wild West with little regulation, and many many firms have been built upon finding ways to dodge existing regulation and social conventions. They will likely be fine.

yes, GDPR. furthermore, regulatory capture is indisputably proven.

GDPR is so far a success. In fact several countries have fined or are looking at fining the big players.

But one wouldn't know that from the whining and moaning of oh so many advertising fans around here.

Re: Proposed Jail Time for Tech Companies Who Steal Data

#137

Post by timonovici »

sperm wrote: post #97
chatmasta wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really love the simplicity of this argument. If you generate the metadata, you own it, no questions asked.

This would enable a black market for the data, at which point good luck regulating

Are you saying that this doesn't already exist? There are tons of people selling passwords, profiles, credit cards info, social security numbers et cetera. Or are you trying to say that legit companies will begin doing that? Aren't they already doing that too? Facebook and Cambridge Analytica being just one example that we know about.

Re: Proposed Jail Time for Tech Companies Who Steal Data

#138

Post by blub »

srkmno wrote: post #58
fzeroracer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering right now companies like Facebook are very actively making the world a worse place I would say this would be a strong move towards something better.

Facebook is people and people suck. Facebook is also a scapegoat and to the contrary of what a resentful media industry would like you to believe the sum of their contributions to the world is overwhelmingly positive

When ignoring the facilitation of election manipulation, age and race discrimination in ads, genocide and their paychological manipulation experiments and the mass surveillance and them targeting teens with their fake VPN and them purposefully allowing kids to be preyed on by IAPs and many others...

...one can say indeed that their contributions have been overwhelmingly positive.

Certainly only a case of scapegoating and envy comrade.

Re: Proposed Jail Time for Tech Companies Who Steal Data

#139

Post by blub »

simplecomplex wrote: post #28
vjeux wrote: post #3

“Oops, we didn’t notice, but it’s another to be a company like Facebook that takes your private messages and sells that data. It takes your address, it takes your interest, it takes your browsing history and sells that to people without your permission Wydens.” Does anyone know what context he refers to? I wasn’t aware that Facebook ever directly sold private messages. Same for address, interest...

They don’t. It’s just part of the privacy and Facebook hysteria being pushed by the rage-machine that is the news cycle now.

When people start realising they've been getting proper fucked for more than a decade by the SV surveilance capitalism machine (led by Google and Facebook) they will get a bit hysterical.

I'd prepare myself for the incoming fines and regulation if I were you, instead of trying to do damage control.

Re: Proposed Jail Time for Tech Companies Who Steal Data

#140

Post by chillacy »

pfisch wrote: post #116
chillacy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time those case studies exist it'll be too late. Regulations have a way of coming into existence more than going out of existence. I don't see why we can't learn the same lessons from banking or manufacturing. An example of regulation I'm glad didn't pass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Are you saying the banking industry should be deregulated? That is not the big takeaway from history...

As someone in the tech industry I'm far too deep in conflicts of interest to make any good judgements on "should be" type questions :)

Just like the clipper chip was a tradeoff between public safety and privacy (ultimately not passed because the cost was too large), any upcoming regulations will trade something away.

As long as legislators are aware, then that's fine. However I will remark that our senators seem to be especially clueless about technology.

Post reply on HN