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Arguing for jail, aka literally locking a human being in a cage, for any non-violent offense, let-alone getting hacked because your employees mad a mistake, is mindblowing to me.

I'm as irritated as you at data leaks from negligence, but jail? I thought jail was not supposed to be for "punishment" but rather to protect the public from someone too dangerous to allow free, and even then it should mainly target "rehabilitation."

You're now talking about using it clearly just for punishment (which I would argue we do all over the place, totally inconsistent with it's stated purpose). This is before we discuss whether jail is torture. Even if the "jail" is well regulated to prevent thing like violence and sexual abuse, it's terrible to lock a person in a cage. There are plenty of studies about the effects that has on a person's mind. Then you consider that you're soft blackballed from employment (and therefore society) when you get a "record" and can't pass a background check, and that the positive feedback loop leads to a life of poverty, crime, and suffering that is avoidable.

Please consider the significance of what you are arguing for here.

Are you against jail-time for all non-violent white collar crimes or just negligence in the realm of technology companies?

Please don't assume that anyone with a different view hasn't considered the significance of their position.

Yes, I am against jail for non-violent crimes. I'm open to modern non-medieval ideas even for violent crimes. I don't have the answers there, but I wish there were more people caring about this. So far it seems to be only the far left (I don't consider that an insult) and anarcho-capitalists, but I wish more people that fall into the middle somewhere (like myself) would think about this. Usually people don't think about stuff that affects strangers all that much until it affects them or a loved one. That's a people problem in general and I don't know how to solve it either.

Let's say someone steal a billion dollars through fraud and hide it. What should be done? Should they just walk free?

There's a difference between non-violent crimes (white collar crimes usually) and victimless crimes (possessing a small amount of controlled substances).

First things first, they could pay back the $1 billion?

First of all, that's not a deterrent, though. If I can steal your money and all I have to do is return it if you catch me, I'll keep doing it. So you need some sort of punishment on top.

Which brings us to the second point... At minimum you should be fined, at least to cover interest gained while you held the money, probably more to cover emotional distress and otherwise.

Plus, at those kinds of sums, we're somewhere into "stole pension money territory" where we're only a few minutes away from "old lady took her own life after losing life savings".

So things are a lot murkier than they might seem.

I also expected the money is hidden away, such that the the legal system cannot get it back. Money can be laundered away. These are smarter criminals, not ones that just robbed a bank for cash and have it under their beds.

I'm generally supportive of more understanding sentencing, but I do think you're failing to consider how theft can be as damaging as violence (sometimes worse).

If someone breaks their spouse's ribs through domestic abuse, you'd apparently agree they need to be imprisoned.

But if someone steals someone else's identity and entire savings, ruins their identity, robs them of the ability to get another job or take out loans, which then results in them being unable to pay for medical treatment for their child, who dies, followed by their own suicide, I'd argue that's a far more tragic outcome, resulting from what you're categorizing as a "nonviolent crime". I'd argue that the latter crime is much more damaging, and should perhaps be treated as such in the justice system.

Not even the most liberal societies on Earth, usually the Scandinavian ones, go as far as you describe. And they do have a prison system meant for prevention of recidivism and reintegration into society.

What you're saying is closer to an utopian ideal or who knows, something at least 50 years from now, in the future? :-)

Less utopian than people who cannot imagine themselves committing a violent crime (either because they are not physically imposing, or because the tiny gains of violent crime wouldn't make a dent in their monthly nut) thinking that the people who actually commit the crimes that they themselves consider committing might not be all bad.

White collar crime kills more people than violent crime by multiple orders of magnitude.

I am against jail for anyone that is not a danger to others, That danger can be Physical or danger to their property.

"White Collar" crimes absolutely could entail jail time if the offender has proven themselves to be untrustworthy and would continue to commit said crimes if allowed to be free

Jail should be used to protect the population from offenders, far too often however it is used for many other purposes including to punish people for "victimless" crimes or for being poor (like the inability to pay parking ticket)

Jail is used for a lot of "non-violent" crime, such as fraud if the judge/court thinks it's warranted. Jun Ying, Equifax's previous CIO did 4 months in jail and another did 8 months of home confinement.

Handling data is a privilege, not a right, and can come at a huge cost. Just look at Parler for example, they weren't even stripping EXIF data which depending on how you look at is is either great for those involved to be tracked and arrested or a terrifying oversight that will lead to huge repercussions...

Data can end lives, this has been proven time and again, it's just as dangerous as a knife or gun in certain circumstances and the crime of having it leaked must have an appropriate punishment

Is there any deterrent benefit from potential jail time?

Companies with armies of lawyers are pretty good at establishing plausible deniability, so the "because your employees made a mistake" argument, while you advanced it in good faith, is constantly exploited as an excuse.

I honestly don't know. I worked with a company once that had regulatory burdens. They were young enough that they hadn't yet hired the first IT person, let alone a security team, so it was just regular devs trying to comply. Needless to say when I came in (as a regular dev that happens to specialize in security) I waved the red flag and pointed out the possible jail time to the executives, and they were not concerned, even though the laws explicitly lay out that "because your employees made a mistake" was unequivocally not an excuse (and this has held up in court by the way). I'm being ambiguous intentionally here so I can't give details.

But regardless whether there is a deterrent benefit, I think the reality is that jails effect non-executives and normal people (especially the closer to poverty you get) far more than they ever would executives. A much better approach IMHO would be to develop alternatives and phase out incarceration altogether (or at least as much as possible) by rolling them out broadly, would be a better, more humane solution.

Well in that case the person would be going to jail because he can't be trusted with not exposing private information, so another form of protection

What really disappointed me about the fitbit was that it required it to be tethered to the phone and my account before it would function as a pedometer.

It seems broken that I also have to have a phone, app store access to get a device to drive the pixels for data it already has.

Every piece of hardware that does this is effectively "app store locked", your phone is now your software dongle for your hardware.

See the section "Don't have a mobile device available?" on https://www.fitbit.com/setup for desktop apps.

Some functions, like sleep tracking, are too computationally intensive to do on a wrist computer.

Such functions can be done on a more powerful mobile computer, but that still doesn't justify the requirement for having an account/Internet connection available.

That wrist computer has a lot of compute power, suggesting sleep tracking needs more is a rather extraordinary claim. Not having decent UI far is more credible.

Thats neat. But the device would only pair and should have some sort of functionality out of the box.

DJI stuff, including the totally offline stuff like the Osmo Action, Osmo Pocket, and their handheld gimbals also work this way: you have to provide email/create an account to "activate" them to even use them.

Apple's health data is all stored offline, unless you have iCloud enabled for health data, in which case it's end-to-end encrypted and only used so devices can sync. You can choose to share certain data for their research programs.

The answer as to why other companies store data online should be obvious: There's a business can for having access to that data.

It's the reason I got an Apple watch 3 as a sport watch: all the other options seemed to want to upload everything online.

Fitbit is very much a social network, where you can challenge your friends etc. It is very much a selling point to the device. So in the case of Fitbit the user data being online is vital.

Sounds like they were about to go out of business without an acquisition, so I'm not sure how vital it was: it wasn't working to create a profitable business in the first place.

Over a very long period of time, they might have gone under; but their financials weren't terrible, almost 500M in revenue a year, and turning a gross profit every quarter. They just weren't returning shareholder value. The fact is that the Apple Watch is a cultish item, and people within that ecosystem are going to buy a complimentary device. That effectively leaves the others fighting for scraps. Most people just use their Apple Watch as a fitness device without utilizing the other features, but they are willing to pony up regardless.

Look into Gadgetbridge and the devices it supports. I ended getting a Mi Band 5 for $35 off of amazon. No data sent beyond the phone. The band works without a phone too.

You can use Garmin devices that way. They keep all logs forever and behave like USB storage when connected to a PC.

>Why can't I have an entirely offline driven system?

Because that's less profitable for the corporate data barons.

> if it is ever leaked

or when

I use Suunto fitness tracker and all my data is under the protections of the company which is located in Finland. Since they are a member of the EU, GDPR rules apply to personal data retention as well as other privacy data laws they also have.

It may not be much, but I feel a lot more at ease using their products than what Fitbit is going to be handing over to Google.

You should make it. I'll buy one!