With this hire, the FCC could soon get tougher on privacy and security | Hacker News Reader

With this hire, the FCC could soon get tougher on privacy and security

washingtonpost.com

35 pointsbenologist12 comments

"The Federal Communications Commission has hired Jonathan Mayer, a rising star in privacy circles, to serve as its technical lead for investigations into telephone, television and Internet service providers."

#savedyouaclick

I put that saved click towards downvoting you. Here's why: your summary tells me nothing about who Jonathan Mayer is, what his background has been, or why this will be an effective hire. In order to do that and still save me from clicking to read the original article, you or others will need to quote additional parts of that article. If everyone did this, we would end up with a poor, out of order retelling of most of the article in Twitter-length posts that lack sufficient context.

I view the point of #savedyouaclick as a way to fill in the missing noun/verb/adjective in a clickbait title, so that someone can make a more informed opinion on whether to click through.

The point is not to save you a click in all circumstances, but to save a needless click due to frustration/curiosity.

IN particular, if you know who Jonathan Mayer is, you don't have to read the article at all.

I know HN likes to keep the original title if at all possible, but pretty much every clickbait title could be profitably replaced by a clever submitter:

"FCC names Jonathan Mayer new chief technologist for enforcement"

The only other clickbait title I see right now is courtesy the Washington Post:

"This might be the most controversial theory for what’s behind the rise of ISIS"

which would be better as:

"Piketty says inequality drives terrorism"

although that doesn't quite replace reading the article, it's just a lot better than what was there.

The top story right now is far more clickbaity: "The secret message hidden in every HTTP/2 connection".

Before even reading your post I highlighted his name, right clicked, and searched on Google. It took me longer to read your post than it did to do that and get plenty of information.

So it didn't save you a click after all; you still had to do additional research because the snippet doesn't give you all the background information. You've just validated the very point I was making.

The snippet doesn't mention the changing relationship between the FTC and FCC. Or how the senate is getting involved. The article nicely packages up all this related information and more into a narrative that is easy to read, so why not just read it?

Hopefully.

A few days ago my wife received a letter from OPM saying that some of her data was mixed up in their recent snafu. She received three years of free identity fraud monitoring. I believe she now has two of these monitoring services running as a result of data breaches. I also have two from different companies.

I'd love to see more serious penalties/compensation for these sorts of breaches.

You are due compensation if you are damaged as a result of the breach.

Your data being accessible as part of a breach does not entitle you to damages if nothing actually happens to you.

Your data being accessible as part of a breach does not entitle you to damages if nothing actually happens to you.

The trouble with relying on a compensation principle alone is that invasion of privacy is typically one of the harms you cannot entirely make good retrospectively. A lot of personal data is like Pandora's box: once released, it is out there forever and the data subject is forever at risk of adverse consequences.

Not all of those adverse consequences can be quantified in purely economic terms. Financial awards are merely the most pragmatic mechanism we have been able to establish so far to give some form of compensation after the fact. If you've ever been the victim of identity theft, or of a physical crime like burglary, you'll probably understand the sense of violation I am talking about. You'll probably also know that it doesn't go away just because you have a monitoring service on your financials or you changed the locks on your home.

Financial compensation for actual damages can't remove the feeling of being vulnerable that haunts you after you've been the victim of such an incident, and so there is also a need for processes and deterrents to reduce the risk of the incident happening in the first place.

> Your data being accessible as part of a breach does not entitle you to damages if nothing actually happens to you.

Why not? This seems like an incredibly unnecessary and near impossible burden on me if anything actually did happen. Let's say five years down the line my identity is stolen and somehow, magically, we know it is because someone had access to my SSN. If my SSN was exposed in two or three different breaches, how do I prove anything?

Can we get a non-clickbait title?

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