[anigbrowl]

How about making positive proposals of your own instead of negating everyone else's? Clearly many people find the existing rules and practices inadequate and propose heavy burdens of responsibility commensurate with the substantial incentives and rewards that accrue to success in business.

CEOs are not an oppressed class groaning under the burden of social structures that keep them locked up in the C-suite. Even if they are confronted with draconian penalties for naive misadventure, most CEOs of medium and large firms can afford A+ legal representation. If you're more worried about them than you are about the potential first and second-order effects upon tens or (in this case) hundreds of millions of people, then you are essentially choosing to be a pawn of the powerful.

[ryb73]

I think you're blowing grovegames' original post out of proportion — he asked some pretty reasonable questions.

[anigbrowl]

Of course they're reasonable. But problematic large scale data breaches are not a new problem. The last financial crisis was almost a decade ago, and yet we haven't developed a new culture of organizational responsibility since, despite the massive societal costs.

Not to make overly sweeping generalizations, but 'hold on, let's think through all the ramifications here instead of being too hasty' is a great way to maintain the status quo while avoiding any responsibility for it. Who benefits? It sure ain't the general public.

[sdenton4]

Indeed, lock up a couple CEOs and the others will feel a much stronger need to create better protections. Right?

[anigbrowl]

I don't think it's so simple, but it's clear that most businesses take a reactive rather than a proactive approach to security and many other important considerations. Guillotining a few corporations is likely to have a salutary effect upon the others.

To some extent this is a cultural divide; anglo-Saxon capitalism has an unspoken ethic of 'forge ahead, cross bridges when you come to them' while continental European capitalism is far more accommodating of social considerations and has a 'first do no harm' approach. There are upsides and downsides to both approaches - and of course these are very shallow and incomplete characterizations of complex economic and cultural factors, which I have no intention of trying to defend if someone complains about them.