Genuinely curious on your view: what is an appropriate response?
Bugs and security vulns are literally inevitable. Security is important but it this was the standard I'm not sure that any company would still exist.
What evidence is there that this was gross negligence?
If you had an error that leaked private information, it's worth an investigation. If it made it through despite controls, that's understandable. If they find you failed to do analysis on the risk to users privacy, if you failed to have controls in place, if you didn't code review or test the code, then you have made specific choices that harmed users. That should be criminal.
We need to take software engineering seriously as a discipline. We have the potential to do more wide scale aggregate harm than any structural engineering collapse. We need to start acting like it.
I'm a huge security person. It's my job. But its unbelievably difficult to secure programs even if there are clear steps in hindsight that could have prevented a bug.
All of the above, possibly. Other engineering disciplines seem to have defined what constitutes due diligence just fine. This isn’t a novel problem.
It’s obviously not possible to make anything perfectly safe or perfectly secure. But it’s certainly possible to define a minimum amount of effort that must be put towards these goals in the form of best practices, required oversight, and paper trails.
Edit: Even “fuzzy” disciplines like law have standards for what constitutes malpractice or negligence when representing a client.
This is true and it's also the reason why there are more software vulnerabilities than necessary. Software could be a lot more secure. There will always be bugs, but its is possible to build software and platforms with many fewer vulnerabilities. But it's expensive, so we don't, and users suffer the consequences while the companies shrug their shoulders and count their money.
CRIPPLING fines to start. Or shut down the freaking company if you can't secure it. Not everything is forgiven with a "we're sorry for 27845th time." Private pictures can and do ruin lives. (We can question the wisdom of posting private pics on FB but after all it's a huge company and they said they're private)