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Comment by Bluestein | Hacker News Reader

Fine. Slippery slope perhaps.-

Make it a "third sector", properly audited NGO (watchdog, thinktank, foundation ...), with ties to some appropriate umbrella (UN, ICJ), that uses some sort of blockchain solution to fine as needed, and then allocate compensation from this to aggrieved parties, or social programs, compensating not only for loss of privacy, but for the other nasty effects (fake news, emotional distress, political polarization ...) that F'book is causing.-

Otherwise, our souls are just another cost of doing business to them.-

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Now it makes more sense. Going a bit further you could perform it within the already existing framework: apply criminal penalties where sufficient threshold of harm have been reached. Perhaps even judicial doctrine a bit to better handle cases of large number of small, or statistical, harms - there are parallels to how we already tackle health hazards and other stochastic, broad harms.

The key consideration is avoiding perverse incentives. A stellar example is how the GDPR disaster is unfolding: the smaller websites are still plastered with "cookie warnings" making them less usable, while the larger platforms - Youtube, Google - already pivoted the warning dialog into nagging for logging in, making anonymous browsing incrementally less practical. The difference in power lets the larger players use as a moat the regulation that's prima facie about privacy.

> there are parallels to how we already tackle health hazards and other stochastic, broad harms.

I like your approach to these damages as stochastic, broad, ergo "actuarially" manageable ...

Thank you. We want to develop morals and jurisprudence around the subject for more reasons. Computerization, in particular networked computerization, has introduced problems like "wormable" devices - were impact of a single device or data item is tiny - however at scale they can quickly rack up considerable damages and losses.

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