Making Companies Liable For Identity Theft

from the it's-about-time dept

It seems like every day there's a story somewhere about some company that didn't properly secure the credit card info of their customers - or some other privacy gaffe. While this would piss off their customers, and cause all sorts of problems, the companies that did so little to protect their customers' privacy would get off with little more than a bunch of angry customers. That might be changing. People are working on laws that will hold companies liable for not doing everything possible to secure private information of their customers. I can certainly see where this would help in forcing companies to protect their customer data in a much more secure manner - but hackers are always going to be able to figure out some way to break in. In those cases who do you blame? If a company has done everything possible, then should they still be held liable? Where will people draw the line. In the end, this might only result in a lot more lawsuits, and make it a lot more difficult for people to sell things online. If this is done properly, it has to be clear on what companies need to do - and then the problem is that companies may only do the minimum amount required by law.

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