Why?
Why is it inherently desirable that society penalize companies that get hacked above and beyond people choosing not to use their services, or selling off their shares, etc?
Why is it inherently desirable that society penalize companies that get hacked above and beyond people choosing not to use their services, or selling off their shares, etc?
It'd be one thing if these were isolated incidents, but they're not.
Furthermore, the methods you mention simply aren't effective. Our economy is now so consolidated that many markets only have a handful of participants offering goods or services, and these players often all have data and computer security issues. As for divestiture, most people don't own shares, and those who do typically don't know they own shares of a specific company. Most shareholders in the US are retirement or pension funds, and they are run by people who would rather make it impossible for the average person to bring real consequences to their holdings for data breaches, than cause the company to spend money on fixing the issues that allow for the breaches to begin with. After all, it's "cheaper".
It's never made sense to me.
I can see that being true in specific instances: many people in the US don't have great mobility for residential ISPs, or utility companies. And there's large network effects for social media platforms. But if any significant plurality of users cared about the impact of service breaches, or bad privacy policies, surely we'd see the impact somewhere in the market? We do in some related areas: Apple puts a ton of money into marketing about keeping people's data and messages private. WhatsApp does the same. But there are so many companies out there, lots of them have garbage security practices, lots of them get compromised, and I'm struggling to remember any example of a consumer company that had a breach and saw any significant impact.
To pick an example: in 2014 Home Depot had a breach of payment data. Basically everywhere that has Home Depots also has Lowes and other options that sell the same stuff. In most places, if you're pissed at Home Depot for losing your card information, you can literally drive across the street to Lowes. But it doesn't seem like that happened.
Is it possible that outside of tech circles where we care about The Principle Of The Thing, the market is actually correct in its assessment of the value for the average consumer business of putting more money into security?
Plenty of my normie friends don't want new cars for example due to all the tracking and subscription garbage, but realistically, what can you do when the old ones slowly get outlawed/impossible to maintain due to part shortages.
> To pick an example: in 2014 Home Depot had a breach of payment data. Basically everywhere that has Home Depots also has Lowes and other options that sell the same stuff. In most places, if you're pissed at Home Depot for losing your card information, you can literally drive across the street to Lowes. But it doesn't seem like that happened.
No one considers these things when they're buying plumbing tape. Really, you shouldn't have to consider that. You should be able to do commerce without having to wonder if some guy on the other side of the transaction is going to get his yearly bonus by cutting the necessary resources to keep you from having to deal with identity theft.
> Is it possible that outside of tech circles where we care about The Principle Of The Thing, the market is actually correct in its assessment of the value for the average consumer business of putting more money into security?
Let's try with a company that has your data and see how correct "the market" is. Principles are the things you build a functioning society upon, not quarterly returns.
What do you mean? Tons of companies with my data have been breached.