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Comment by tacticalturtle | Hacker News Reader

By the letter of the Texas law, neither do the commercial entities that have to verify identity:

https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/pdf/HB01181F....

Edit: Key bit there, the commercial entity or third party verification “may not retain any identifying information of the individual”.

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Are there business destroying fines associated with non compliance? Otherwise it becomes a, “Whoopsie fine” when companies inevitably get caught selling out its user base.

They linked the law right there. Yes.

> $10,000 per instance when the entity retains identifying information in violation of Section 129B.002(b);

$10k per instance. If you have 1M users and retain their info, you're potentially facing a $10B fine.

The sites that were protesting these laws were saying they're concerned about such retention, so no doubt they're glad to know that they and their partners are banned from retaining that info and face extreme fines for doing so.

That seems like it'd be easy to avoid if you're a small operator. Set up some embarrassing porn site, scrape user details and sell them to a separate company (likely controlled by yourself). Then close the porn business as soon as there's any chance that you'll face investigation and instead work on getting individuals to pay you for not publishing their embarrassing kinks.

I'm not sure that criminal extortion is a great strategy to avoid civil fines, but I suppose as an individual you should just avoid giving your information to any business not large enough to have a CCO.

well I’m definitely sure there’s no bad actors or just plain incompetent folks who can fck that up nossir

As we all know, everybody always follows the rules.

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