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Comment by pcblues | Hacker News Reader

Personal data cannot be secured. The only way is to not store it. That will (imaginationaly) cost companies in lost revenue for being unable to mine and sell it. Only government can make laws against a company taking your personal information and selling it. Even passwords shouldn't be stored by a company.

The years of lost time argument is disingenuous. Over that number of people, 209 years of lost time from 700 million years of lives is nothing.

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There are lots of companies that take security seriously and don’t lose their customers data. Which is good, because there are companies that need to hold customer data.

Companies that don’t take security seriously and lose peoples data should be punished accordingly.

Companies that sell customers data should be identified.

But if we treat them all the same, then we let the bad companies off the hook, and punish the responsible companies unfairly.

there are companies that have already had their customers' data exfiltrated and will have it exfiltrated in the future, companies that will only have it exfiltrated in the future, and companies that are about to be dissolved. there is no fourth category. computer security is not currently achievable; the best we can hope for is to contain the damage from the inevitable breaches and reduce their frequency

new security holes get introduced faster than old ones get patched, and that will remain true for the foreseeable future

I’d take it a step further. If a technology is impossible to secure it shouldn’t be used. Maybe it’s time to rethink all the parts of our lives we’ve handed over to software.

What current technologies do you believe are possible to secure?

I am sympathetic to the overall sentiment here, but between any web browser + server stack you are looking at hundreds of millions of lines of code written in unsafe languages.

Add on the human factor and there is just no hope of really securing this.

sel4, tweetnacl on an avr, pdf/a, html3, gzip, lwip, etc., running on purpose-built hardware. too bad it's not self-hosting yet

Whether or not it's disingenuous, it's our time that didn't need to be wasted in the first place by them not storing phone records

I agree with that. I just don't like big numbers being used to cause emotional responses without proper context. Probably on a spectrum, but it's my beef :)

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