Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

The absolute impunity with which large corporations operate never ceases to amaze me.

Let say that I, as an individual, report my car stolen when I’ve actually lent it to someone, and then I do it again, and again, and dozens more times, resulting in false arrests and jail time for law-abiding citizens.

I’m pretty sure this couldn’t happen. I’d end up in jail myself for filing false police reports before I got anywhere close to double digits. But when it’s a giant company, they make a statement about how it’s extremely rare and continue on with business as usual.

It’s often said that “corporations are people,” legally speaking. This is clearly wrong. Corporations occupy a much more privileged position than people in the legal world!

View on HN

The asymmetry with the criminal penalties individuals face versus the civil penalties private organizations face feels like a rejection of the idea of the rule of law.

The worst part, for me at least, is I'm not even sure how you would sue Hertz for something like this. It's negligence resulting in false imprisonment, but not all false imprisonment tort statutes have negligence as a valid cause of action. There's also malicious prosecution and defamation, but that typically also requires intent, rather than just negligence or recklessness. I suppose that it could fall under the blanket "unfair business practices" tort, but the damages would probably be limited. In PA for example, you couldn't get more than $1,000 out of that claim.

This is an absurd set of factual circumstances, and there are almost no accountability structures in place to fight it. It's incredibly disheartening.

If it happened to me I would leave let the lawyers worry about that

Do you know what lawyers generally charge per hour? For clarification, this question is intended to be rhetorical.

For certain occasions a court victory is its own reward

It reminds me of a certain book by Franz Kafka.

> I’m pretty sure this couldn’t happen. I’d end up in jail myself for filing false police reports before I got anywhere close to double digits.

To your point, just this week Chicago Alderman Proco "Joe" Moreno was charged with "disorderly conduct, obstruction of justice and insurance fraud" for saying a woman stole his car after he lent it to her.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2019/5/15/18626936/ald-pr...

“Judge John Fitzgerald Lyke Jr. said the evidence as provided in court ‘outlines... if, true, at least a terrible lapse in judgment.’”

So much for everyone telling me that Hertz shouldn’t be culpable because they didn’t do it maliciously.

Not to disagree with your assertion that corporations get away with a lot of things they shouldn’t but in this case, a corporation is many many people. Hertz isn’t the equivalent of just one person, it would be insane to treat them as such since they rent out hundreds or thousands of cars a day.

Plus I’m not even sure what you’re suggesting here...that we put the entire company on trial or in jail? Operate like that and you’ll quickly find the boundaries of innovation receding.

The board pretends to be responsible. Seems like a reasonable place to start looking.

Scale isn’t an excuse. If I personally rented out hundred of thousands of cars a day, the judge isn’t going to tell me, “Well, don’t worry about those dozens of false police reports, nobody’s perfect.”

Ok, they’re many many people. Are the individuals who made these false reports being held responsible, then?

That’s the problem: if you try to hold the corporation accountable, people say that it’s made up of many individuals and most of them had nothing to do with the crime. If you try to hold the individuals accountable, people say that they were acting on behalf of the corporation and it’s not right to punish them alone.

I don’t know what the solution is, but allowing large companies to get away with crimes that would ruin my life if I committed them myself is not the way to go.

Holding C-level executives responsible for the companies they're supposed to be responsible for, for starters. That's their whole job. They get paid enough for it.

Secondarily, regulation of software quality when it can cause problems this big.

> regulation of software quality

That can only end well. Have you seen government-quality software lately?

> Let say that I, as an individual, report my car stolen when I’ve actually lent it to someone, and then I do it again, and again, and dozens more times, resulting in false arrests and jail time for law-abiding citizens.

Isn't the legal concept here 'mens rea' 'a guilty mind'. In your case from the way you describe this you know you are doing what you are doing. The argument would be that in order for a company (or individual) to be liable the same way (if there is even that or a similar concept for a corporation) they would have to have a reasonable knowledge that something like this was happening and that they could prevent it given the large scope of rentals that they do. I don't think it's actually reasonable to expect that in millions of transactions everything can and will go perfect. It's simply not the same standard as for an individual that has much fuller control of the transaction.

You said after all 'report my car stolen when I've actually lent it to someone and then do it again and again'. So you know you had 'lent it to someone'.

Equivalent would be if you could prove that the branch manager did not simply make a mistake and not put the right paperwork in but that he knowingly called the police when he knew the car was lent out. In one case it's a mistake (or shoddy work) in the other (as in your example) it's intentional.

Hertz knew they had lent it to someone too.

I’m sure it was a mistake. But after a couple of times, such mistakes graduate from “oops” to negligence. Why is Hertz not checking their records more thoroughly before reporting a car stolen? After the first dozen false arrests, why are they not poring over all of their camera footage and paperwork and interviewing every employee from the site where it was supposedly stolen before they report it to the police?

> But after a couple of times, such mistakes graduate from “oops” to negligence.

Once again I think when you are dealing with a very large number of transactions there will simply always be screwups. To insure zero defects would raise the cost of the good or service to an unacceptable level. It's bad but my opinion is it's not criminal.

What's interesting though is that the tech business (and software in particular) is probably the most vocal (say here on HN) when mistakes happen in some other business (or a software business that is not theres) but at the same time for what they do (their own product or service) they regularly turn out non perfect products and experiences that regularly annoy, aggravate and create problems for users. Now none of this gets people picked up by the police but who says that that in particular is the gold standard of 'bad thing to happen to someone'. I wouldn't want to be picked up by the police obviously but then again some companies crappy software can actually create much greater aggravation and harm than that police event.

Your argument applies equally well to the general population. If I lend my car to a friend and then get him arrested by falsely reporting it stolen, do you think the judge will listen to me when I say that it’s a big country and it’s not reasonable to expect a zero defect rate?

Filing a false police report is criminal, literally. Writing bad software is not.

The root of my complaint is the massive inequity in treatment between individuals and large companies. If you want to argue that companies should be punished for making crappy software or that private citizens should get a pass when committing crimes, go for it, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about. The issue isn’t merely that Hertz gets away with this, it’s that they get away with it where you and I would not.

I'm going to be the last one to defend corporation (or any other large faceless group) but your comment is preposterous.

>The absolute impunity with which large corporations operate never ceases to amaze me.

Hertz is likely to wind up getting sued and settling. They are going to pay to make this right. If they don't then the lawyers will have a field day.

>Let say that I, as an individual, report my car stolen when I’ve actually lent it to someone, and then I do it again, and again, and dozens more times, resulting in false arrests and jail time for law-abiding citizens.

If the bug was doing this only for a particular jurisdiction then it would be ignored by cops like you weould be. If you had the geographic reach that hertz does you could probably report 30 cars stolen.

Gosh, they’re probably going to spend hours’ worth of revenue on settlements, I guess that makes it alright then.

You’re right, if I spread out the reports, I probably could report 30 cars stolen before I get found out. Then what happens when law enforcement finds out? Are they going to ask me nicely to stop and let me spend a few hours’ wages settling with the victims? Hell no! I’ll probably spend the next ten years being extradited from one state to another, assuming the Feds ever let me go after convicting me for dozens of counts of interstate crime.

If you made as much money per hour as Hertz does then it would likely only cost you a few hours of wages too. It might even cost you less because not being some "faceless corporation" is an advantage in court and you'd have more bargaining power when negotiating settlements.

Hertz will probably wind up paying more than any normal individual would because Hertz has far more money. You can't extract blood from a stone but Hertz is no stone so the lawyers will sink their teeth in.

These people being arrested was likely not the result of intentional action or negligence by Hertz. If they're anything like every other BigCo this is a known low priority but that nobody expected could result in something like this so it hasn't been fixed.

You keep trying to compare this to some malicious or comically negligent individual filing police reports but that comparison is absurd because no individual has the massive reach that Hertz does so no individual could file 30ish false police reports without noticing whereas a corporation where everyone is just doing their job without seeing the bigger picture could do that.

You’re telling me that this is not negligence, but at the same time this was probably a known problem they did nothing to fix? I don’t think those two statements are compatible.

My whole point is that the comparison should not be absurd. Giant companies get all the advantages of being treated as a single legal entity but with none of the downsides. They’re giant machines for laundering responsibility. What’s absurd is that you can falsely imprison people and get away with it clean because “everyone is just doing their job.”

>You’re telling me that this is not negligence, but at the same time this was probably a known problem they did nothing to fix?

You're on a board called Hacker News and you don't understand the difference between a known bug and establishing that bug as the root cause of bad things that are actually happening in production. I think you're being willfully ignorant for the sake of your own argument.

Everyone with a large code base has thousands of known bugs with low priority because they are now known to be negatively affecting the system. There simply are not the resources to fix all these bugs. Nobody knows which ones (if any) are can actually cause bad things to happen until those bad things actually happen and get traced back to one of the known, low priority bugs.

Simply put, they probably knew there was a bug, they didn't know that bug could ever lead to people being falsely imprisoned until it actually happened.

>They’re giant machines for laundering responsibility.

I generally agree with that.

>What’s absurd is that you can falsely imprison people and get away with it clean because “everyone is just doing their job.”

The cops bear some blame here too. Hertz didn't imprison anyone. Part of the cop's job is to act as a filter for BS police reports. When you pull someone over who claims to have legitimately rented the rental that should get you to start asking further questions. Two organizations screwed up here.

When you said “this is a known low priority” I thought you were referring to the false police reports. I guess you were referring to a bug in a computer system? I’m not talking about bugs. At some point, someone had to inform the police that these cars were “stolen.” Either someone involved in that process negligently failed to make damned well sure the car was really stolen before making the report, or someone elsewhere in the company negligently failed to design a process where people would do this.

Mistakes do happen. If this was a one-off, or even a two or three-off, I could buy that. But at some point on your way to thirty false arrests, it stops being a regular mistake and starts being negligence. You can blame a computer glitch a couple of times, but after that it becomes your fault for trusting the known-glitchy computer.

That Hertz hasn't put in procedures to verify reports before telling the police sort of puts the responsibility on Hertz doesn't it?

How hard would having people double check be?

You are absolutely right, and I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted for that. It isn't as if Hertz has any vested interest in this that would make them desire to make stupid mistakes like this. Arguably the individuals responsible for the failure could be culpable, but we generally do not do that for honest mistakes.

The proper analogy for an individual would be if someone with a mental impairment loaned a vehicle and then called the police. There would be consequences, but none would likely involve criminal (or possibly even civil) charges.

In the real world, mistakes do happen.

Continuing that analogy, the mentally impaired person takes in billions of dollars in rental revenue each year and you let him keep on doing that even after you find out he can’t be trusted to keep track of his stuff.

They've been sued and have settled multiple times. This was reported in the article linked in the OP from a year ago.

> Hertz is likely to wind up getting sued and settling. They are going to pay to make this right. If they don't then the lawyers will have a field day.

The thing is the potential fines they're going to face are nothing compared to the problems you'd face as an individual. They can easily mitigate such costs.

Lend your car out 100,000 times (not just once). That would "earn" you the "impunity" to falsely accuse one of your clients of stealing your car.

But remember, that you will have the "impunity" for only 1 in 100,000.

  report my car stolen when I’ve actually lent it to someone

Knowingly filing a false police report is itself a crime (in CA, anyway). Even false verbal content is a misdemeanor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com