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Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

No laws will ever be strict enough to prevent crime, the countries with the harshest laws in the world still suffer from it.

Legal penalties don't matter to people not thinking far enough ahead for them to enter the equation. They don't matter to people who think they can get away with breaking the law (much easier for electronic crime) and they don't matter to people who think they are above the law, which may be he case here.

Harsher penalties can even be counter-productive. If you're on death row for killing one person then you better make sure you kill any potential witnesses, the penalty is the same either way.

> This is exactly why victim blaming is pointless and stupid.

Fine, I'm being pointless and stupid. But if you don't care who you're giving your data too then don't expect me to care next time it ends up with someone you didn't want.

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Sure, legal penalties don't stop people who don't believe in them. But we believe in legal penalties, so we put people in prisons. Even if they don't believe in them.

>then don't expect me to care next time it ends up with someone you didn't want.

You say that until someone gives your information away for you. Then you'll be crying about how unfair it is that nobody else protected you. Possibly from threats you didn't even know existed.

So we make it illegal, punishable by the death penalty, let's think about how that plays out. Facebook might be destoryed, Zuckerburg might be strung up, but what happens after that?

Some company in Nigeria starts a funny website with quizzes like "what telly tubby are you?" that convinces your friends and family to provide data. The let them upload photos so they can be photoshopped onto the telletubbies for a good laugh. Now that company in a different jurisdiction is building up profile data. They'll build crappy android apps to track GPS data. There won't be one of them, there will be many and they will buy and sell data, accumulating it into bigger and bigger data sets. This isn't even a hypothetical, it's been happening in the west for a long time.

Do you want to attack the root of the issue or keep chopping heads off the hydra?

So what is the root cause then?

Fine, I'm being pointless and stupid. But if you don't care who you're giving your data too then don't expect me to care next time it ends up with someone you didn't want.

I’ve never had a Facebook account, yet friends and family do, and through them they can get info on me. You don’t have to care though, and I’ll just get with not caring about you. Meanwhile the public at large is starting to care, and your attitude won’t impress them any more than it does me.

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