You do. But you also plan in the case the surrounding infrastructure fails.
But more to the point, in some cases it is better to produce (parto of) your own electricity (where better means cheaper) than buy it on the market. It is not really common but is doable.
Obviously the law must be simple enough to follow so that for Jim’s furniture shop is not a problem nor a too high cost to respect it, but it must be clear that if you break it you can cease to exist as company.
I think this may be the root of our disagreement, I do not believe that there is any law making body today that is capable of an elegantly simple law.
I could be too naive, but I think it is possible.
We also definitely have a difference on opinion when it comes to the severity of the infraction, in my mind, while privacy is important, it should not have the same level of punishments associated with it when compared to something on the level of poisoning water ways; I think that a privacy law should hurt but be able to be learned from while in the poison case it should result in the bankruptcy of a company.
The severity is directly proportional to the number of people affected. If you violate the privacy of 200 million people is the same that you poison the water of 10 people. And while with the poisoning scenario it could be better to jail the responsible people (for a very, very long time) and let the company survive to clean the water, once your privacy is violated there is no way back, a company could not fix it.
The issue we find ourselves with today is that the aggregate of all privacy breaches makes it harmful to the people, but with a sizeable enough fine, I find it hard to believe that there would be major or lasting damage.
So how much money your privacy it’s worth ? 6
For this reason I don’t think it is wise to write laws that will bankrupt a company off of one infraction which was not directly or indirectly harmful to the physical well being of the people: and I am using indirectly a little bit more strict than I would like to since as I said before, the aggregate of all the information is harmful.
The point is that the goal is not to bankrupt companies but to have them behave right. The penalty associated to every law IS the tool that make you respect the law. And it must be so high that you don’t want to break the law.
I would have to look into the laws in question, but on a surface level I think that any company should be subjected to the same baseline privacy laws, so if there isn’t anything screwy within the law that apple, Google, and Facebook are ignoring, I think it should apply to them.
Trust me on this one, direct experience :-) payment processors have a lot more rules to follow to be able to work.
I do not want jail time for the CEO by default but he need to know that he will pay personally if the company break the law, it is the only way to make him run the company being sure that it follow the laws.
For some reason I don’t have my usual cynicism when it comes to this issue. I think that the magnitude of loses that vested interests have in these companies would make it so that companies would police themselves for fear of losing profits. That being said I wouldn’t be opposed to some form of personal accountability on corporate leadership, but I fear that they will just end up finding a way to create a scapegoat everytime.
It is not cynicism. I simply think that a huge fine to a single person (the CEO for example) is useless since it too easy to avoid and if it really huge realistically it would be never paid anyway so nothing usefull since the net worth of this kind of people is only on the paper. So if you slap a 100 billion file to Musk he will never pay because he has not the money to pay even if technically he is worth way more than that.
Jail time instead is something that even Musk can experience.
In general I like laws that are as objective as possible, I think that a privacy law should be written so that it is very objectively overbearing, but that has a smaller fine associated with it. This way the law is very clear on right and wrong, while also giving the businesses time and incentive to change their practices without having to sink large amount of expenses into lawyers to review every minute detail, which is the logical conclusion of the one infraction bankrupt system that you seem to be supporting.
Then you write a law that explicitally state what you can do and what is not allowed is forbidden by default.
I will preface this comment with a change in my opinion when it comes to semantics, I think my 2-5% range is too low after researching a bit more, I would be much more in favor of 5-15%, but the remainder of my point stays the same.
I don’t think so. It’s not that the massive fines committed to Apple and Google make them change the CEO.>
Which fines are you referring to, in my opinion the biggest problem that we currently have is that there are realistically no penalties for breaking the law.
The one’s for GDPR violations.
Just doing a quick Google search, apple made about 400b in revenue last year, and apple just had a 2b fine from an antitrust lawsuit. Applying the 5% fine, that 2b would become 20b which equates to 20% of their annual earnings for that year.
If we applied the 50% penalty that started this thread, that becomes a fine of 200b which means, using the apple example, that the company loses 100b when they get down to their earnings.
Which is the whole point. If the fine is too low to be threatening, it could be write off as just “cost of business” there is no incentive to stay on the right side of the law.
In your example the only thing that would happen is that apple would pay less dividend to the shareholders which, while I admit is something that could be a problem for them, in my opinion is not enough, considering the number of people affected.
I could care less if apple, after a due process, go bankrups because it break the law: if your only way to stay afloat is breaking the law, then you can fail, be you apple or Jim’s little forniture shop. And that because while you break the law and survive you are fucking all your clients and all the other companies that follow the law.
Obviously the law must be simple enough to follow so that for Jim’s furniture shop is not a problem nor a too high cost to respect it, but it must be clear that if you break it you can cease to exist as company.
This is the reason why I feel like 50% is too much, if one privacy court case in one country is enough to bankrupt a company, no company would ever attempt to provide a service that is remotely adjacent to that law: in my mind, some of the services that would cease to exist would include search engines, payment processors, and email newsletters.
No, the companies will simply follow the rules of the country they operated in.
Even now the payment processors are subjected to regulations that if applied to apple, google or facebook would make them close their business, for example.
All in all, I think that the penalty should be a fine, because realistically this is a civil matter, and I am not a big proponent of jail time without a criminal conviction.
I do not want jail time for the CEO by default but he need to know that he will pay personally if the company break the law, it is the only way to make him run the company being sure that it follow the laws.
And that because in the end the CEO is the ultimate decision maker in the company and I don’t really think that he must be able to hide behind the “I don’t know” facade. I don’t belive the situation where something being a big liability for the company is not approved by him.
(I used the CEO, but it could be the board members or any other entity that run the company).
This also means that on the high end bankruptcy will loom over any company that has 2-3 privacy issues in any given year.
The question then is: why a company should have 2-3 privacy issue a year ? I can get the first one, but the second ? Or the third ?
I mean, you get caugth one time, why you as a company think that you can continue that way ?
And I am not speaking about a perfect nobody that cite apple for privacy violation and the judge automatically apply the fine, a due process is required, but big violations of laws like the GDPR or equivalent. And even if it is the perfect nobody, why after the first time you got caught you do not change your way ?
Why a company that break the law should be able to continue the break the law just because if it even caught it is the next fiscal year if not later (at the end of the process and various appeals) ? More specifically, why a company that cannot survive without breaking the law should be able to continue to operate ?
Addendum: if you were wondering, about the numbers for 15%, the earnings in 2024 for apple would be 35b or a 37% decrease, and for Google it is 47.5b or a 48% decrease.
Which is a good start but nothing that cannot considered when doing a budget, so no real danger here.
Which is the whole point of the enormous fine and jail time.
If the penalty could be treated as a simple “cost of doing busineess” there is no incentive to stay in the right because if you ever got caught it is not that big problem.
And I don’t see a problem if a company doing illegal things to survive will bankrupt once they get caught while doing it.
but realistically with 2-5% fines, any ceo will be removed from their company after the first or second offense, and the company will bankrupt if they sustain more than a couple fines in a year.
I don’t think so. It’s not that the massive fines committed to Apple and Google make them change the CEO.
Simple:
Or any other solution where the eventual punishment cannot be considered just business cost.
I know, almost impossible… :-(
Yet some people are able to not buy shit just because they see it on a site, so maybe not everyone is like you say
Technically it is possible to have a system that is not based on Internet but with bluetooth. The problem is that it would be effective only if widely used. And probably would have a many more problems.