T-Mobile pays $16M fine for three years' worth of data breaches
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
T-Mobile earned $8 billion in 2023. Some division later, that works out to $21,000,000 per day.
They were fined less than one day's income. If I owned that company, increasing IT security would be near the bottom of my list of priorities.
To your point, $16M is surely not a big fine for such a big company though, but I do think it's important not conflate profit and revenue when evaluating fines.
Generally speaking, I would love to see some much harsher penalties for negligence with data. I want companies to start seeing customer data as a liability, not as an asset, and I don't think that will happen until f**k-ups starts really making a dent in the bank account.
Profit, their revenue is almost 80 billion. Fines like this should be certainly based on revenue rather than profit, though (like the EU does it)
Our personal information/data should be given HIPAA-level protection enforced by the government. We as consumers should not have to deal with companies who do not compete on securing their customer's data. They should lose a "data protection" license when mishandling it, like a bar losing its liquor license.
And Tmobile has more lobbyists than you do. But you, an individual, are also “free” to lobby the government as much as you wish.
Thusly, the system is fair and balanced on paper.
If I ran the show I'd bankrupt the company and its management.
Never attribute an unfortunate outcome to incompetence when the possibility exists that it was caused by greed.