> No receipt? Fine paid directly to the individual. Make PII data property.
Er, so anyone can keep your 'property' (data) without your consent by just paying you the statutory fee?
Er, so anyone can keep your 'property' (data) without your consent by just paying you the statutory fee?
Make it easy to file a claim and set the fine at $100 per occurance and things would change rather quickly.
End outcome is the same - peoples privacy already has a price. That price is just currently only represented by FAANG profits.
Feels like an area that could be handled better.
The easiest way to deal with people like this is by putting it in 'the language' they speak. While I'd love, personally, to see some direct regulation, legislation, etc. that doesn't involve turning this into yet another line 'in the books' / in the annual reports etc. of companies ... and feeds, arguably, even more into that sort of thinking ... for multiple reasons there are extensive practical issues with doing that in the US currently. It'd certainly be helpful in the longer term if we could get some people away from viewing everything through the lens of numbers - especially conflating OTHER PEOPLE with "format strings" in Excel (effectively). But, I believe in being practical along with strategic. If such metrics are needed, private-party lawsuits are needed ... if government (outside of perhaps putting some basic accounting in place &/ the justice system and current tort laws) is not an option for sorting out disputes and correcting bad behavior, particularly some forms of traditional government regulation, and the bottom-line is king ... then let's use what is available or might be put in place, ultimately speaking the 'language' necessary to push things in a more reasonable direction.
* Not uniformly distributed, for sure, but increasingly visible on average - in part, thanks MBA programs, but also, somewhat relatedly, decades of work and marketing from people who really want to turn the clock back ... wannabe robber-barons (https://youtu.be/DqgvHUg_vxY) and even those with plantation 'wetdreams'
** Incidentally, this is related to the kind of "mob rule" that outright dangerous politicians like Trump represent. Importantly, dangerous to EVERYONE, even those in the cult, though they almost certainly don't know the true extent of the danger, even remotely. In essence, without any principles / rule of law established in notions like actual justice, truth, fairness, equitable treatment, etc., any forces driving large systems involving people will tend to devolve into forms of mob rule. Whether it's markets for goods and services, the "marketplace of ideas", etc.
What is more and more absent in America, in particular, in public discourse especially, but also in certain business sectors of, in some cases, outsized importance in this entire 'picture', is the kind of principled viewpoints, ideas, thinking, etc. that have repeatedly re-formed this country at those critical moments when it might have broken / not become the exemplar that it often has been. Whether that happens this time as well remains to be seen, I think.
That's a massive topic ... all of this is ... and I am really no expert in much of this, so caveat there, but, I have enough of a sense and of the details of history and the differences in outcomes at different times and in different places to offer the commentary I am right now. More importantly, regardless of some of the background / mechanisms, the actual behaviors are clear enough in recent times / events / data. I.e., what I've written outside of these footnotes.
If you shoplift and get caught, you don't get to keep the stuff.
Moreover, have you seen how some people (generally wealthier, but not always) treat, say, paid parking? They just don't pay at all, because it's not worth the hassle for them. Sometimes even with the occasional enforcement, they come out ahead compared to just paying the original fee. But even if it isn't worth it financially, it's often worth their time, so they do it without really caring one way or the other.
Anyway... the penalty for shoplifting (assuming they bother to go after you) isn't generally a "pay this fine and return what you stole". It's being subject to everything that comes with crimes... dealing with law enforcement, tarnishing your personal record, potentially getting jail time depending on the severity, etc. Any civil case that you might get filed against you for damages, attorneys' fees, etc. is just icing on the cake, and hardly the meat of the punishment.
If they get caught it's $100 and they need to delete it. Caught with the same data its $1000.
Furthermore, if they are caught storing data in a pattern, say 100 people catch them within a year of the first, the fine retroactively becomes $1000 per incident over the time of the pattern.
With a Judge having discretion to raise fines, retroactively and inclusive of new violations, for companies that simply refuse to comply.
I feel like this could work.
In fact, I would think most companies would start designing their systems to ensure they didn't violate by accident. Which is what they are supposed to be doing, but not.
Why though? You need to give a good motivation for avoiding the obvious and direct solutions in the first place before anyone sees any reason to go through the effort of strongmanning an alternative. If I was proposing a $50 fine as the penalty for random people caught squatting in your house would you be interested in strawmanning it just because it makes for fun argumentation? I sure wouldn't.
And anyway, I already commented on the merits of this idea in my earlier comments: you're not at all considering the fact that $100 (or even $1000 or more) might be well worth it for certain people's information. It just might not be the entire population, is all. You're just picking winners and losers with this approach, on both sides, is all.
They wouldn't even have to store that info in their regular systems.
But making it unsustainable for them to make a habit of it, which is something that impacts millions of people, is possible, with escalating fines.
Also, it doesn't make sense to say a business will just take fines as a cost of business, without taking the size of fines into account. Clearly there is a number that they will respond to, because that is what they do. Respond to hard currency numbers in whatever objective way will let them maximize what they keep.