It is insane to me that I can be notified via physical mail of months old data breaches, some of which contained my Social Security number, and that my only recourse is to set credit freezes from multiple credit bureaus.
So me trying to do the right thing, am now scrambling for work, while the offender pretends nothing happened while potentially violating the entire customer base, and will likely suffer no penalty unless I report it to PCI, which I would get no reward for.
Why is it everywhere I go management is always doing shady stuff. I just want to do linuxy/datacentery things for someone who's honest... /cry
My mega side project isn't close enough to do a premature launch yet. Despite my entire plan being to forgo VC/investors, I'm now considering compromising.
I agree with this statement.
This isn't a judgement, we all have to make choices; the "right" choice (the one that aligns with integrity) is usually the one that will be the least self-serving and even temporarily harmful. They did what was right for them, that's okay, but it was not the choice of integrity.
How it plays out after is another matter entirely. But the choice was what they seemed to think was right, for them, at the time. Thus it was the right choice for them. It doesn't mean it was the right choice in terms of integrity, or the right choice for me, or you or anyone whose data got caught up in it. Nor was it right choice in receiving a paycheck the next week.
But the way it was explained, it doesn't seem like they went out of their way to pick a "wrong" choice, specifically. They picked what they felt was the right one, for them, at that time. There were less ethical options to choose as well, and those were not picked either.
You appear to be talking about the external consequences of choices, while I am talking about them making a choice based on what they believed was the inner rightness of their choice. They did not want to be associated with a company like that, so they made the choice to not be -- because it aligned with their inner knowing of not wanting to be a part of that company. The right or wrongness in terms of external consequences is not what makes the choice, right or wrong -- for them
Again, I am talking about -- them -- not anyone one else or what anyone else thinks of it outside of them. I am not talking about "inner rightness" in general, I am talking "what they believed was the inner rightness of their choice" -- Their inner rightness. You seem to be talking about what -- you and/or others -- may believe from an outside perspective. My outside perspective is they made the choice that did not align with integrity. But that does not mean that was not the right choice for them.
And again, they made the right choice, for them -- at that time. How that plays out after is neither here nor there and in your labeling it a "bad" choice for them is akin to saying that they have no real agency over their choices, and we outside of them are the final say in what is good or bad for that person.
You are trying to focus on what they believed in that moment, but I see no reason to use that in an analysis of whether their actions fit their own morals. Sometimes people make mistakes even by their own rules. If we only care about what someone thought right in the heat of the moment, that category of mistake would be impossible, and it's not impossible. Saying that mistakes are possible is not overriding agency.
The core of it is in this line "the choice was what they seemed to think was right, for them, at the time. Thus it was the right choice for them". I don't agree with that logic at all. Humans are not good enough at following their own motivations and principles. They are impulsive and bad at analysis. You can't assume that their choices will always be consistent with their personal parameters of right and wrong.
Also, saying I think someone made a mistake is not denying agency. Don't be so melodramatic. Nowhere am I claiming to have the final say. I merely have the right to an opinion.
I took the little information they gave and from that the only true logical conclusion was they made the right choice for them at that moment. Full Stop.
You’re the one bringing the extra opinions into the matter and reading into a simple thing far too much. Most of the above I agree with you on outside of this particular thread. It has nothing to do with the very narrow scope of my original comment and attempted clarification.
Neither of us can know 100% what was right or wrong for them in that moment, but based on the information of A. no longer feeling right about being associated with a place for reasons that they deemed important enough to come to this conclusion — and B. aligning actions with that inner knowledge; makes it the right action (choice) for that person. If they changed their mind later, it does not change the immutable facts of that moment. It simply provides a new set of choices and options that is outside the scope of my original comment.
When I say mistake here, I specifically mean "mistake as far as their goal of making the right choice". And I mean that in the moment, using knowledge they have at that time, just like you're defining "right choice". Nothing after the fact nor outside the scope.
> I took the little information they gave and from that the only true logical conclusion was they made the right choice for them at that moment. Full Stop.
I don't see how they gave enough information to be sure, but more importantly you seemed to make a generic statement that anyone making a choice like that would be making the right choice, and that's what I really object to.
> You’re the one bringing the extra opinions
I am not! Please stop misreading me! Why won't you listen to what I'm saying about my own argument?
> Neither of us can know 100% what was right or wrong for them in that moment,
Please explain how "neither of us can know 100%" can be true at the same time as "only true logical conclusion was they made the right choice for them at that moment. Full Stop."
> A, B
Remember that not reporting the company was also part of the choice they made. The basic description of the choice was to report, quit, both, or neither, and they chose to quit.
> If they changed their mind later, it does not change the immutable facts of that moment. It simply provides a new set of choices and options that is outside the scope of my original comment.
I'm not talking about whether someone might change their mind later with new information, per se. I'm making the objectively true claim that people don't always think things through, meaning their choice might fail to represent the knowledge and priorities they had at the time.
https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-division-corporate...
>As described in more detail in the program guidance, the information must relate to one of the following areas: (1) certain crimes involving financial institutions, from traditional banks to cryptocurrency businesses; (2) foreign corruption involving misconduct by companies; (3) domestic corruption involving misconduct by companies; or (4) health care fraud schemes involving private insurance plans.
>If the information a whistleblower submits results in a successful prosecution that includes criminal or civil forfeiture, the whistleblower may be eligible to receive an award of a percentage of the forfeited assets, depending on considerations set out in the program guidance. If you have information to report, please fill out the intake form below and submit your information via CorporateWhistleblower@usdoj.gov. Submissions are confidential to the fullest extent of the law.
Well here's a cynical take on this - management is playing the business game at a higher level than you. "Shady stuff" is the natural outcome of profit motivation. Our society is fundamentally corrupt. It is designed to use the power of coercive force to protect the rights and possessions of the rich against the threat of violence by the poor. The only way to engage with it AND keep your hands clean is to be in a position that lets you blind yourself to the problem. At the end of the day, we are all still complicit in enabling slave labor and are beneficiaries of policies that harm the poor and our environment in order to enrich our lives.
>unless I report it to PCI, which I would get no reward for.
You may be looking at that backwards. Unless you report it to PCI, you are still complicit in the mishandling of the breach, even though you resigned. You might have been better off reporting it over the owner's objections, then claiming whistleblower protections if they tried to terminate you.
This is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, etc.
If the GP's story is true (and I have no reason to suspect otherwise), then there are clearly differences in the degree of "badness" between people. GP chose to resign from his job, while his manager chose to be negligent and dishonest.
So, even if we're all bad people, there are less bad and more bad people, so we might as well call the less bad end of the spectrum "good". Thus, there are good and bad people.
The argument that profit motivation is the origin of shady business practices ignores the existence of those businesses which pursue profit in an ethical manner. The company I work for, for instance, is highly motivated to produce a profit, but the way we go about obtaining that profit is by providing our customers with products that have real value, at fair (and competitive) prices, and by providing consistently excellent customer support. Our customers are *very* satisfied with our products and services, and they show their satisfaction with extreme brand loyalty. The profit we make year over year allows us to increase the quality of life for our employees, and keeps our employees highly motivated towards serving our customers. We pursue the good of our customers alongside our own, and we avoid shady business practices like the plague.
Or is it supposed that hating each other, lying to one another, stealing from one another, murdering one another, failing to fulfill contract, covenant, and commitment to one another are things that should be considered good?
as it is written:
None is righteous, no, not one;
no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/how-to-freeze-cre...
Since moving overseas 15 years ago, I tried numerous times and it simply is not possible. All the forms require a U.S. mailing address to register. Same for online access to your Social Security account.
There are an estimated 10 million Americans living overseas. Taken together, we are the equivalent of the 11th largest state. All of us completely blind to what is happening with our credit record and Social Security account.
At this point I think the only way this gets fixed is massive fraud/exploitation by organized crime, so these organizations finally address the problem.
Curious how you found this number, have a source?
This made me pretty curious, but I couldn't find any official numbers. The closest 'official' numbers that I could find are from the Federal Voting Assistance Program [0] and that lists 4.4 million people, but only 2.8 million of those being adults.
[0] https://www.fvap.gov/info/interactive-data-center/overseas
> Curious how you found this number, have a source?
I don't have the source handy but have seen the estimated 10 million figure cited repeatedly. But maybe it is about a million too high, as the US Department of State estimates nine million in this 2020 publication: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/travel/CA-By-the-Number...
This Wikipedia page has a lot more info for those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emigration_from_the_United_Sta...
Using FVAP stats to me seems problematic, because just like the general population, many US citizens do not bother registering to vote (though they do acknowledge this on the page you linked to and try to control for it).
State likely have a more accurate estimate from knowing how many passport renewals originate from overseas addresses. I am sure some Americans renew or replace their passports while merely travelling overseas, but I cannot imagine this is a routine practice.
As nice as this is on paper, it will never happen, lobbyist exists. Not to be tinfoil hat but why would any lawmaker slap the hand that feeds them.
Until there is an independent governing body which is permitted to regulate over the tech industry as a whole it wont happen. Consider the FDA, they decide which drugs and ingredients are allowed and that's all fine. There could be a regulating body which could determine the risk to people's mental health for example from 'features' of tech companies etc. But getting that body created will require a tragedy. Like why the FDA was created in the first place. [1]
That's just my 2cents.
1 : https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-history/milestones-us-food....
I think ideas like this is why it's not going to happen.
Our understanding of mental health is garbage. Psychiatry used to be full of quackery and very well still might be. Treatment for something like depression boils down to "let's try drug in a random order until one works". It's a field where a coin-flip rivals the accuracy of studies. Therefore any regulating body on that will just be political. It will be all about the regulators "doing something" because somebody wrote enough articles (propaganda).
Problems like this are why people aren't interested in supporting such endeavors.
this argument reduces mental health to medication, which leaves aside everything from the history of mental health (asylums, witch burnings to today), leaps in medicine (from lobotomies, to SNRIs, bipolar meds and more), to simply better diagnoses.
There are certainly tons of people here who have benefited from mental health professionals - overextending the flaws in psych simply to dismiss the idea of a watchdog is several unsupported arguments too far.
There are some non-medication treatments for some psychiatric symptoms such as those caused by trauma (Prominently, EMDR) that some hail as actual cures, and even maybe depression (I am clearly not a doctor.) but in the case of depression I think you'll find its quite medication-heavy.
The reason for this is that psychiatrists are Medical Doctors and Psychiatry is a medical field which is of course bounded by the means of medical science. This is not to say there is some "magic" at work which science could never understand--not at all. It is merely the case that medical doctors are a research paper oriented bunch, and most of the medical research which makes it into practice is either relating to anatomy or pharmaceutical interventions.
Most of the treatments we have are pharmaceutical medications because most of our research dollars have gone into pharmaceutical research.
I decided to edit this comment to add: In my personal opinion, is probable that psychiatrists et all, writ large as it were, have already figured out how to cure depression. Only, we cannot really manage to employ it because it isn't a pill, therapy, device or surgery.
There a whole host of 'sciences' that are kind of 2nd tier like this, Psychiatry being one of them. Once we understand enough Neuroscience, it's likely to me Psychiatry will get consumed by Neuroscience which will splinter into more useful for day to day life categories as it grows (like a psychiatrist)
Super book on the subject and also talks about the rising bar for individual culpability as we understand more about the brain: https://www.amazon.com/Incognito-Secret-Lives-David-Eagleman...
I don't think it would take much to convert real IDs into a national ID, they are as close to as they can get without "freaking people out".
People could even generate their own number (private key), which they never gave out, and appeared differently to each account manager verifying it, and still replace them.
When you choose your own number, it's only the Mark of the Beast if you are the Beast! * **
* 666, 13, 69 and 5318008 expressly prohibited.
** Our offices only provide temporary tattoos.
Most of our population is still living in a headspace where transactions are effectively private and untraceable, from the cash era, and has not considered all the ways that the end of this system makes them potential prey.
The fact is that the market is demanding a way to identify you both publicly and privately, and it will use whatever it needs to, including something fragile like a telephone number 2fa where you have no recourse when something goes wrong. It's already got a covert file on you a mile long, far more detailed than anything the intelligence agencies have bothered putting together. The political manifestation of anti-ID libertarians is wildly off base.
Are you correct in what's going on? Yes. Are we placed in this with no option to resist? For the most part yes.
It’s not just that you or I will be inconvenienced with a bit more fraud or email spam, but rather that large nation state adversaries having huge volumes of data on the whole population can be a significant strategic advantage
And so far we typically see email+password+ssn be the worst data leaked; I expect attackers will put in more effort to get better data where possible. Images, messages, gps locations, etc
— George Washington.
https://www.facebook.com/dwight.crow/media_set?set=a.1010475... “#Weaponry and morale determine outcomes. The 2nd largest city of Iraq (Mosul) fell when 1k ISIS fighters attacked “60k” Iraqi army. 40k soldiers were artifacts of embezzlement, and of 20k real only 1.5k fought - these mostly the AK47 armed local police. An AK47 loses to a 12.7mm machine gun and armored suicide vehicle bombs. Finally, the attack was personal - soldiers received calls mid-fight threatening relatives by name and address. One army captain did not leave quickly enough and had two teenage sons executed.” #violence #Iraq #daesh
of course the americans used this kind of personalized approach extensively in afghanistan, and the israelis are using it today in lebanon and gaza, and while it hasn't been as successful as they hoped in gaza, hamas doesn't exactly seem to be winning either. it's an asymmetric weapon which will cripple "developed" countries with their extensive databases of personal information
why would a politician go to war in the first place if the adversary has the photos and imeis of their spouse, siblings, and children, so they have a good chance of knowing where they are at all times, and the politician can't hope to protect them all from targeted assassination?
the policy changes needed to defend against this kind of attack are far too extreme to be politically viable. they need to be effective at preventing the mere existence of databases like facebook's social graph and 'the work number', even in the hands of the government. many more digital pearl harbors like the one we saw this week in lebanon will therefore ensue; countries with facebook, credit bureaus, and national identity cards are inevitably defenseless
imposing liability on companies whose data is stolen is a completely ineffective measure. first, there's no point in punishing people for things they can't prevent; databases are going to get stolen if they're in a computer. second, the damage done even at a personal level can vastly exceed the recoverable assets of the company that accumulated the database. third, if a company's database leaking got your government overthrown by the zetas or daesh, what court are you going to sue the company in? one operated by the new government?
consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_bombing_of_the_Amsterdam_...:
> The 1943 bombing of the Amsterdam civil registry office was an attempt by members of the Dutch resistance to destroy the Amsterdam civil registry (bevolkingsregister), in order to prevent the German occupiers from identifying Jews and others marked for persecution, arrest or forced labour. The March 1943 assault was only partially successful, and led to the execution of 12 participants. Nevertheless, the action likely saved many Jews from arrest and deportation to Nazi extermination camps.
to avoid partisan debate, imagine a neo-nazi group takes over the us, which presumably we can all agree would be very bad. after they took over, how hard would it be for them to find all the jews? not just make a list of them, but physically find them? (much easier than it was in 01943, i'm sure we can agree.) how hard would it be for them to find all the outspoken anti-fascists? where could those anti-fascists hide?
now, step it up a notch. how hard would it be for them to find all the jews before they take over? it wouldn't be that hard if the databases leak. and if you feel safe because you're not jewish, rest assured that neo-nazis aren't the only groups who are willing to use violence for political ends. someone out there wants you dead simply because of the demographic groups you belong to. the reason you haven't been seeing widespread political violence previously is that it hasn't been a winning strategy
the situation is changing very fast
Do note, that this isn’t just an Americas problem.
Your data is probably on DBs in other nations.
Plus - the playbook is to target weaker nations and then use them for staging grounds to target stronger nations.
The first time would have been a tragedy, from then on it has been farce after farce.
Imagine a world where companies would have to prove the necessity of storing specific factoids. It would only take 1 security researcher to prove it being unnecessary, invalidating that class of "legitimate interests".
Today this value judgement happens in human brains, like the (correct) judgement in your comment. If we want to scale it objectively we would have to switch to formal verification. A whole industry of compliance checking could come to exist where a company wants to get its operations screened for compliance issues, so as not to suffer criminal negligence penalties.
You are not being harmed by the storage or leakage of a few bytes, that's ridiculous. You are being harmed by the financial industry and government's insistence that knowledge of these bytes is sufficient to take your property or hold a debt against you.
googletagmanager.com googleapis.com fontawesome.com addtoany.com
sigh
Lack of liability is screwing up the incentive structure.
Section 230? Is it the platform or the originating user that's liable?
Protection of personal data? Is there a standard of care beyond which liability lapses (e.g. a nation state supply chain attack exfiltrates encrypted data and keys are broken due to novel quantum attack)?
Minors viewing porn? Is it the parents, the ISP, the distributor, or the creator that's liable?
I'm not here to argue specific answers, just saying that everyone will agree liability would fix this, and few will agree on who should be liable for what.
It might be solvable with some kind of ID escrow, where an independent international agency managed ID as a not-for-profit service. Users would have a unique biometrically-tagged ID, ID confirmation would be handled by the agency, ID and user behaviour tracking would be disallowed by default and only allowed under strictly monitored conditions, and law enforcement requests would go through strict vetting.
It's not hard to see why that will never happen in today's world.
Lawnmower manufacturers said the same thing about making safe lawnmowers. Until government regulations forced them to
Specifically, 1970.
One of the reasons it's so expensive to build a house is safety regulations. They exist for a reason, but they nevertheless add a substantial cost to building a house. If you had mandated such a cost to people living in 1870 then a lot fewer people could've afforded a house.
Just about every regulation that exists for every product or thing or way of doing something was written not even after a death, that's usually not enough, it needs to be a substantial number of deaths that can be directly linked to the thing the regulation covers and only then does it become law.
It still adds an enormous amount of cost. Despite that buildings (and even bridges) still collapse. What is often not asked is how many people lack housing because those building codes made it unaffordable for them.
Or... maybe that line of reasoning isn't super strong.
But my point was that you asserted that regulations can overcome claims of impossibility. I was just illustrating that is not always true, and therefore we can't assume it is true here.
There absolutely should be, especially for personal data collected and stored without the express written consent of those being surveilled. They should have to get people to sign off on the risks of having their personal data collected and stored, be legally prevented from collecting and storing the personal data of people who haven't consented and/or be liable for any leaking or unlawful sharing/selling of this data.
It's like if you go to an AirBNB and the owner sneaks in at night and takes photos of you sleeping naked and keeps those photos in a folder on his bookshelf. Would you be okay with that? If you're not directly harmed, what liability would they have?
Personal data should be radioactive. Any company retaining it better have a damn good reason, and if not then their company should be burned to the ground and the owners clapped in irons. And before anyone asks, "personalized advertisements" is not a good reason.
If the answer to them ends up being "Well, it's illegal to take non-consensual nudie pictures.", then my follow-up question is "So, why isn't the failure to protect my personal information also illegal?".
To be perfectly clear, I do believe that the scenario kibwen describes SHOULD be illegal. But I ALSO believe that it should be SUPER illegal for a company to fail to secure data that it has on me. Regardless of whether they are retaining that information because there is literally no way they could provide me with the service I'm paying them for without it, or if they're only retaining that information in the hopes of making a few pennies off of it by selling it to data brokers or whoever, they should have a VERY SERIOUS legal obligation to keep that information safe and secure.
Just want to point out that the company is usually also doing what it can to get other information about you without your consent based on other information it has about you. It's a lot closer to the "taking non-consensual nudie pictures" than "fail to secure data" makes it sound.
Sure. In those cases, there are damages and that creates liability. I'm not sure what damages I've ever faced from any leak of e.g. my SSN.
The problem here is because of all these little data leaks you as an individual now bear a cost ensuring that others out there are not using your identity and if it happens you have to clean up the mess by pleading it wasn't you in the first place.
It's not like there's a "conservation of blame" law.
I think a better example would be You (AirBnB Host) rent a house to Person and Person loses the house key. Later on (perhaps many years later), You are robbed. Does Person have liability for the robbery?
Of course it also gets really muddy because you'll have renting the house out for those years and during that time many people will have lost keys. So does liability get divided? Is it the most recent lost key?
Personally, I think it should just be some statutory damages of probably a very small amount per piece of data.
It's kind of like the idea of robbing a minute from someone's life. It's not every much to an individual, but across large populations it's a massive theft.
Right now they probably get some near free rate to offer you credit monitoring and dgaf.
This is not a direct analogue, a closer analogy would be when the guest creates a copy of the key (why?) without my direct consent (signing a 2138 page "user agreement" doesn't count) and at some later point when I am no longer renting to them, loses the key.
Just the Robber? Or are any of the key-copiers (instead of losers w/e) also?
What I will say is the guy that has copies of 20000 people's keys should get in trouble if he loses his horde.
1. I have no control over what was stored 2. I have no control over where the storage is
The liability in this case is the homeowner/host, as you should have and had full ability to change out the locks.
To make it more similar, I think you'd need one of the guests to have taken some amount of art off the wall, and brought it to a storage unit, and then the art later was stolen from the storage unit, and you don't have access to the storage unit.
It's not as good as the naked pictures example because what's been taken is copies of something sensitive, not the whole thing
this is outrageously incorrect analogy.. you ASSUME property ownership in the first statement. Where are personal legal records analogous to owned property? by whom?
The good reason is growth. Our AI sector is based on, in large part, the fruits of these data. Maybe it's all baloney, I don't know. But those are jobs, investment and taxes that e.g. Europe has skipped out on that America and China are capitalising on.
My point, by the way, isn't pro surveillance. I enjoy my privacy. But blanket labelling personal data as radioactive doesn't seem to have any benefit to it outside emotional comfort. Instead, we need to do a better job of specifying which data are harmful to accumulate and why. SSNs are obviously not an issue. Data that can be used to target e.g. election misinformation are.
No, I'm saying it's a common with a benefit to utilisation. A lot of discussions around data involve zealouts on both sides. (One claiming it's the god-given right to harvest everyone's personal information. The other acting like it's the crime of the century for their email address to be leaked.)
Most people here have thought more about the the topic of privacy in the modern era far more than what some 70 year old politician has.
I think both of those are debatable.
It's better to to think of it in terms of prevention. This fits into a category of things where we know they create a disproportionate risk of harm, and we therefore decide that the behavior just shouldn't be allowed in the first place. This is why there are building codes that don't allow certain ways of doing the plumbing that tend to lead to increased risk of raw sewage flowing into living spaces. The point isn't to punish people for getting poop water all over someone's nice clean carpet; the point is to keep the poop water from soaking the carpet in the first place.
People from less dense areas generally saw this as draconian nanny state absurdity. People who had spent time living in dense urban areas with high rise residential buildings, on the other hand, were more likely to think, "Yeah, duh, this rule makes perfect sense."
Similarly, I've noticed that my fellow data scientists are MUCH less likely to have social media accounts. I'd like to think it's because we are more likely to understand the kinds of harm that are possible with this kind of data collection, and just how irreparable that harm can be.
Perhaps Americans are less likely to support Europe-style privacy rules than Europeans are because Americans are less likely than Europeans to know people who saw first-hand some of what was happening in Europe in the 20th century.
An able bodied person can fully make complaints against any business that fails their Americans with Disabilities Act obligation. In fact these complaints by able bodied well-doers is the de facto enforcement mechanism even though these people can never suffer damage from that failure.
The answer is simply to legislate the liability into existence.