As I said when the Yahoo data breach was uncovered, Verizon was should've reduced the acquisition deal by billions or even scrap it altogether. Instead they only reduced it by $350 million from $4.8 billion. Dumb.

Either way, I'm actually happy with this outcome, because for one Yahoo was destroyed due to its data breach and allowing the NSA to put backdoors on its servers, and second Verizon said it's getting out of the content business.

That can only be a positive for all Verizon customers, because Verizon being involved in the content business only meant more and more spying on its customers' web behavior.

Hopefully we'll see more such cases where the value of companies suffering major data breaches is reduced to almost nothing. Maybe that will change the industry's thinking about data security and data collection a little bit.

I've also long argued that governments as well as corporations should see data collection as a liability. So that when a data breach happens and everyone's data is exposed, they should be fined into near-bankruptcy. However, if they minimize data collection and they encrypt the data they do gather in such a way that even the companies themselves can't access it (end-to-end encryption, fully homomorphic encryption, etc), then they should be immune from such fines. I figure that would swing the pendulum towards companies minimizing the reckless "all they can get" collection of users' data.