I said pretty much this last year. Fining a company doesn’t do anything. Fine the people who are in charge: and then put in place a clause if they get a bonus within 3 years or so take that too and give it back to the people effected.
The protections aren't a joke, they're practically nonexistent. There needs to be a modern standard in place (please correct me if one exists) for any sort of data handling. I don't care how innocuous the vendor makes the data sound. I also understand the reality of the cat-and-mouse game of protecting data and hacking, but there needs to be some serious accountability when these breaches occur. Criminal negligence penalties would be a start. Also, privacy policies and TOS need to be changed. It's ridiculous that I can agree to some minor data collection one year, and terms change the next so now I'm part of forced arbitration when the breach comes around.
If fines started being $100 billion, companies would open their ears a bit more. These pity little fines do nothing.
Negative, seeing as $.05 a month for a year per customer would cost more to implement. The key difference is that TMobile is a service. Every single customer can choose to leave and go to another provider. It will come out of the $14.6B reserve they are sitting on, especially since they just started paying dividends. The fine is .08% of their yearly income they aren't worried and they most likely will appeal the fine, get it cut in half and request a payment timeline over the course of 5-7 years, like almost every other company that has been fined.
We'll get nothing even though we are the ones who were damaged.
I guess it's a given that they'll store our info, that the hacks will continue, our pampered executives will not care one bit, and regulation & law will continue to maintain the interest of the wealthiest scumbags and hang the filthy plebs out to dry. We should expect that, this is the failed 18th century British colony we live in. Fine. That being the case, perhaps an accelerationist approach is worth considering? Economically incentivize them to hoover up and be careless with as much info as possible and relentlessly sue the ever loving hell out of them for every bit of it, to the point of badgering them with lawsuits that cross the line into the frivolous. At some point, legal fees will be the only thing to cost them enough that it'll be cheaper to just not collect & store data on anyone.
Exactly this. People don’t understand that fines and taxes against the corporation are fines and taxes against their customers. Basically they fined T-Mobile customers for T-Mobile losing their data.
But TM will ask me to pay more for the same old thing under a fancy new name and offer bennie’s that ain’t all that much. And what’s this crap with best bennie’s for 2 lines or more. Bite me…. Penalized for choosing to be single.
T-Mobile was fined $60 million by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) for negligence surrounding data breaches, reports Reuters. CFIUS penalized T-Mobile for failing to prevent or disclose unauthorized access to sensitive customer data.
When T-Mobile merged with Sprint, it signed a national security agreement with CFIUS, which is what led to the fine earlier this year. T-Mobile is owned by German company Deutsche Telekom, and T-Mobile agreed to protect consumer data as part of the Sprint acquisition. Back in 2021, T-Mobile suffered a major breach that impacted over 100 million of its users, just a year after it acquired Sprint.
CFIUS does not typically name the companies that it fines, but T-Mobile has been called out in an effort to push companies to comply with national security rules associated with acquisitions.T-Mobile told Reuters that it experienced technical issues when integrating with Sprint, which affected information from "a small number of law enforcement information requests." T-Mobile claims to have swiftly dealt with the issue and reported it "in a timely manner."
CFIUS said that T-Mobile's lack of timely reporting prevented CFIUS from investigating and mitigating potential harm to U.S. national security.
Article Link: United States Fines T-Mobile $60 Million for Failing to Prevent Unauthorized Access to Sensitive Customer Data
That money, regardless of how small, and the money in reserve, came from charging customers. That money did not come from unicorn farts.
A nice start. If that doesn’t work, the government should seize the company and shut it down.
