This doesn't make any sense. Capital punishment has existed since forever - yet the fact that they are still carried out means that they are not stopping all of the crimes punishable by death.
A lot of people fear losing their money more than they fear death. I think corporate capital punishment, in theory, could work. The other side of that coin, however, is the number of people put out of work if that were to happen.
Either way, there needs to be far stiffer penalties levied against companies who don't secure their systems better and lose sensitive customer data.
It does make sense. You're confusing corporate liability with personal liability. The parent's point is that if the investors / shareholders would be responsible. Stuff like this would be severely reduced because resources would be allocated to prevent it. Right now, the only damage is a financial one. And as long as the damage is lower than the cost of prevention, hacks like this will continue to happen.
So isn't the solution here to up the penalties, specifically with codified minimums ($X per leaked phone number, $Y for leaked SSN, etc)? The corporate death penalty would end up hurting the consumers significantly more than this method, which would primarily hurt the share/debt-holders, which is the intent. Corporate dissolution seems like a concern when fraud or malfeasance is specifically involved.
For context, I'm very likely in this breach, but it wouldn't make me any happier to hear T-Mobile was shut-down tomorrow.
No that wasn’t the point at all. Corporate death penalty was a completely overblown analogy by someone else. What this is about is that a manager / CEO / shareholder can be held personally accountable with punishment that could include jail time. As a deterrent.
Right now only the company is accountable as if it’s some sort of living creature, and the penalty is always money. Which as you aptly put, they have in abundance!
And a corporate dissolution isn't the outcome. The outcome is that T-Mobile goes into bankruptcy, with its customers as the debtors. The outcome of that is that a bankruptcy court divides up the assets to maximize payout to you.
Most likely, this means:
- T-Mobile, as an entity continues to exist, as-is..
- Shareholder value is wiped out...
- And handed to customers, as the customers become shareholders.
T-Mobile has a 180B market cap, which probably means you acquire stock worth a grand or so.
If punishment for murder was sitting in a luxury European prison with a vintage PS3[0] and not death or life, I’d have whacked my former con-artist business partner years ago and likely be out by now.
Either way, there needs to be far stiffer penalties levied against companies who don't secure their systems better and lose sensitive customer data.