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Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]

texasattorneygeneral.gov

251–260 of 366 posts

Re: Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say it with me now: "Transpose EU GDPR into US law yesterday !"

We can learn from GDPR’s mistakes and do better. A single national regime and enforcer. No obligation for every complaint to result in an investigation. Fines based on gains and damages, not revenue. Liability that can be privately enforced. And a trebling of damages where noncompliance is shown to be willful.

> Fines based on gains and damages, not revenue.

That's already the case (cf. article 83(2)). The percentage of revenue thing in articles 83(4) and 83(5) is a cap, not a fixed amount. I don't think anybody was ever fined the maximal amount possible.

> And a trebling of damages where noncompliance is shown to be willful.

This is taken into account, cf. article 83(2)b. Not a trebling though, it's up to the DPA to decide, and cannot exceed the cap.

Re: Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]

#252
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And ECUs make it so easy to manage all of these things! I love 80s/90s Japanese sports cars, but I don't think we need to go back to the era of using a gazillion vacuum lines to control all kinds of esoteric valves and sensors. But I agree with everything else; I don't want my car to connect to the internet, I don't want my car to track my travel and driving habits, and I definitely don't want that data sent to the m…

> It really just smacks of greed and nothing else... selling cars has a long history of being a profitable business on its own. You don't need to steal your customers' data to turn it into another revenue stream, but it sure looks good on a financial report. Its not only greed, its also a race to the bottom. If you're GM, you might prefer not doing that, but if your competition starts doing that, then you're at a com…

but to what end? making 5$ more per car probably does not even cover the software engineering costs to develop the system.

Re: Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]

#253
post #218
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jail for executives who approve or have knowledge of illegal activities sounds good to me. I suspect one possible outcome is many people wouldn't want to take the risk to become an executive, and the percentage of executives who wouldn't mind taking risks of going to jail will increase, which is not a desirable outcome.

Then don't commit crimes? I'm usually pretty sympathetic to executives being used as sacrificial lambs by constantly being put in the position of having to bet their jobs on a coin flip they're calling in the air. But this really isn't defensible. Jailing people with only knowledge isn't the right move compared to having a fully anonymous whistleblower program, with fine sharing. It sucks that there has to be zero tr…

> Then don't commit crimes?

But that's the problem. Crimes are profitable.

Suppose there are two insurance companies. One is following the law, the other one is bribing a mid-level employee of a car company to give them driver info and then using it to set rates and solicit policies. The CEO of the car company doesn't even know it's happening and the CEO of the insurance company does, but isn't telling anyone about it and it just looks like they have above-average margins on their policies.

As long as they don't get caught, the ones breaking the law are not only making money for themselves, they're the ones investors will choose to invest in when all they can see is the bottom line. The honest CEO of the other insurance company gets deposed because investors want someone who can get the same returns as the cheating one, so they cycle through executives until they get one that posts better numbers because they're cheating too.

Some of them will never get caught and come out ahead. The others expect that to happen, which is why they're willing to do it, and if they do get caught then they get replaced by someone else who thinks they won't get caught.

The underlying problem is the structure of the system. The owners want higher profits but are also a diffuse group without the capacity to pay detailed attention to how it happens, so you create evolutionary pressure to cheat. What you actually want is for companies to be operated by their owners because then the owners know what's happening inside the company and can distinguish between a company which is making more money because it's well-managed and one which is making more money because it's cheating and putting their investment at risk. But then we need to stop having megacorps with diffuse passive investors and instead have small and medium businesses which are operated by the owners.

Re: Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forcibly removing books (about very specific topics related to oppressed cultural minorities) from public school libraries is not the same thing as enacting a national ban on printing or trading those books, no. But it's a lot closer to a total ban than it is to not banning books. (And I stand by "forcibly," if you've seen any of the adults screaming at school board hearings or issuing threats over these books)

What’s really funny is that these books are usually so obscene that just reading from them at a school board meeting is a good way to get “forcibly” removed. A few stories: > A speaker at a Florida school board meeting was removed for using vulgar language after reading aloud from a highly sexualized book available at the high school’s public library. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/florida-school-board-remove... >…

Here’s a comprehensive list of books banned in Texa, school district by school district: https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/list-of-texas-banned-boo... . On there you will find obscene books like “the Handmaid’s tale” and “the hobbit”

Re: Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Driving a car uninsured should have some extremely stiff penalties. I want to agree with you, but wonder if you have ever been poor? When you need the car to get to work so you can feed your kids, but you can't afford all of - feed kids - rent - insurance because you got hit by a surprise medical bill (kid got sick, maybe?) I'm strongly in favor of your end goal (less car-dependent life), I'm just cautious about us…

Let's expand that. Let's name your hypothetical person, Bob. He's living on the edge financially, and decides to go without insurance. Let's bring in another person, Alice. Alice is also not in great financial shape. But Alice is able to pay for insurance and follows all the rules. Alice has a small amount of savings, go Alice! One day, Bob hits Alice. It causes medical issues for Alice. Alice might have insurance, b…

That scenario is completely missing the point. Bob has to drive because of the lack of good public transportation and the fact that he can't afford a house near his work. Not to mention if he can't afford a car with insurance it's because his job simply doesn't pay enough.

It's much more likely that external factors put him in that situation, rather than himself. Yet you propose we should punish him personally and paint only Alice as a victim. That's naive. Both are victims.

These are systemic problems and trying to solve them with individual punishments is only going to hurt individuals while not fixing the underlying issues that really matter.

Re: Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]

#256
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And not just massive. It needs to be an order of magnitude more than they made from those deals. Too many times companies get slapped on the wrist for an amount considerably less than they made from their illicit activities. Which I never understood. Normal people that get caught doing things like selling stolen goods have to pay a fine on top of all money they may have made from selling it. Why aren't companies trea…

> Why aren't companies treated the same? It's more of a hostage negotiation. You want to hurt the company and it's owners, but if you sue too hard, you're likely to just hurt it's workers and it's customers. It's why preventing companies from reaching _anything near_ monopoly size is so important for corporate jurisprudence. "Too big to fail" is just the tip of this insane iceberg we've allowed to grow into our econo…

> but if you sue too hard, you're likely to just hurt it's workers and it's customers.

Something tells me the concern is more about the current shareholders than either mentioned party.

Re: Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why aren't companies treated the same? It's more of a hostage negotiation. You want to hurt the company and it's owners, but if you sue too hard, you're likely to just hurt it's workers and it's customers. It's why preventing companies from reaching _anything near_ monopoly size is so important for corporate jurisprudence. "Too big to fail" is just the tip of this insane iceberg we've allowed to grow into our econo…

> You want to hurt the company and it's owners... The owners of big companies include lots of pension plans, index funds, etc. Hurting those owners, who didn't have any say in the bad decisions, is probably not what we want. Jail for executives who approve or have knowledge of illegal activities sounds good to me.

Pension plans are nearly gone and the whole point of index funds is to weather volatility. We have unemployment to assist workers (or we would if workers had modern rights to begin with). meanwhile whole draw of market investment to everyone but the shareholders goes tits-up if failure is weathered by the market as a whole rather than the incompetent or malicious actors.

I mean, people will put up with a lot, but eventually they'll realize that the market isn't magic and its continued failure to address our the economic and social conditions can be blamed on a specific enumerable class of person.

Re: Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]

#258
post #199

If every state sues GM, GM might go bankrupt. Then the American tax payers will be footing another bailout. Thus earning GM the moniker, Government Motors (again).

What's the alternative? Let them keep breaking laws because they're too big to fail?

That's what makes me so angry with this stupid economic model. Once these monopolies/oligopolies are inevitably formed (after all, competition breeds monopolies), they are essentially untouchable.

I don't think there's a way to fix this within the current system.

Re: Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]

#259
post #199

If every state sues GM, GM might go bankrupt. Then the American tax payers will be footing another bailout. Thus earning GM the moniker, Government Motors (again).

What's the alternative? Let them keep breaking laws because they're too big to fail? That's what makes me so angry with this stupid economic model. Once these monopolies/oligopolies are inevitably formed (after all, competition breeds monopolies), they are essentially untouchable. I don't think there's a way to fix this within the current system.

Hopefully the people running the scams will eventually just get lynched

Re: Texas sues GM for unlaw­ful­ly collecting and selling dri­vers' pri­vate data [pdf]

#260
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As they say, even a stopped clock is still right twice a day.

A backwards clock is right 4 times a day. A clock running at 10,000 rpm is right 14,398,560 times a day.

The relevant metric is surely the proportion of time for which the clockhands are within epsilon of the correct value.
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