Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | RevHaze's commentslogin

If it doesn't need to be insured, you could just spin off a smaller entity responsible for holding the data for you, and shut the company down if the data leaks. You can do the same if insurance is required of course, but any brand new 'personal data holding' company would likely have very high insurance premiums to offset the risk.


Its fairly common in the temp employee industry that if a temp worker gets injured the temp agency folds and restarts to avoid the penalties.

It would be nice to require insurance or a bond to hold personal data so a company can't just disappear when data is lost.

[0]: http://projects.thestar.com/temp-employment-agencies/


And people wonder why I am so hostile to the our way of creating and governing corporations, and our way of divorcing business from the lives and reputations of of those who run it.


While simultaneously championing corporate personhood.


Holy shit.

This is exactly what I mean when I say that, if you want to see real corruption, just take a look at regular small businesses around you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15950934


> If it doesn't need to be insured, you could just spin off a smaller entity responsible for holding the data for you, and shut the company down if the data leaks

If this is possible without insurance then it’s possible with, and every insurance company will mandate the structure to limit payouts. Mandating insurance simple entrenches the insurers. Why, for instance, would you want to require Apple purchase insurance against its users’ data?

Side note: beneficial ownership [1] and affiliate definitions [2] are useful for such cases.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/beneficialowner.asp

[2] http://rule144opinion.blogspot.com/2014/02/rule-144-are-you-...


> If this is possible without insurance then it’s possible with, and every insurance company will mandate the structure to limit payouts.

You can't limit insurance payouts this way, because the entity has to carry the insurance. You only limit the exposure of the larger entity after the assets of the liable entity, including any insurance coverage, are exhausted. But the more the mandatory insurance level is, the less likely spinning off to protect the parent is to ever be valuable, and it never protects the insurer, so they won't mandate it.


That doesn't necessarily limit your risk exposure if litigation ensues. Anyone going after you (or the data holding company in particular) is going to attempt to pierce the corporate veil. And while that's not necessarily easy, it's still common enough. In that situation, it's almost inevitable that the separation won't be clear and strong enough to avoid being pierced.

Of course, that's all irrelevant unless there's a significant change in how the law treats data security.


It seems to me that doing so should somehow constitute fraud. It would be better if the law could be changed to make sure it is penalised as such.


Isn't this where "piercing the corporate veil" comes into play?


The rich don't understand barriers to entry? Sure, throw enough money at the barrier and you can climb it, but that's not so much a revolutionary state of mind as it is just having enough money to try something expensive.


From their perspective, the industries are there to support the people. The oil industry was making money while the government didn't have enough money to keep expanding social programs, so they nationalized the oil industry. They didn't know how to run the oil industry though, so yields fell through the floor and they couldn't produce or attract foreign investment back into the country due to concerns that as soon as the infrastructure got back up and running the government would just nationalize again.

Also see Zimbabwe's 2000 plan to redistribute farming wealth.


You say it wouldn't be that hard to have regional guidelines, but that seems like an incredibly difficult thing to do.

Even within a country you can have strongly divided opinions on what's appropriate or inappropriate to be hosted on social media, now not only do you need some way to document these (including refining them as norms change), but you also need to implement a system that can "know it when it sees it" so to speak and filter on the fly. That's either going to be a large number of humans filtering the content more-or-less by hand (already got FB into trouble when the humans filtered stories they didn't agree with) or build an automatic screening process that can make the appropriate decisions on the edge cases, which would be difficult to say the least.

Additionally, you run into the problem that many social groups overlap. How many German users need to be friends with a French user before they're covered in the same filter? What about an American vs Iranian? Ultimately you need some way to decide how to break ties and at the moment they're all breaking on the side of the US because that's where FB is based. Unless that changes, I don't see a shift to fragment what's considered acceptable on the platform.


I've been using some form of tiling manager for 4+ years now (herbstluftwm at the moment, though with stints using i3, awesome, dwm, bspwm and xmonad) and I've never had a problem with lines over 80 characters. I tend to use small font sizes, but I can't recall ever getting into a situation where 100 character lines were an issue. I can't recall any of the mangers I've used having a key combo to open up an 80 character wide terminal, though I could be forgetting.


Do you find herbstluftwm to be better than i3? If so, in which way? I've been using i3 for a few years now, I'm VERY happy with it and I'm curious if/how [0] some other tiling wm can be better.


I've been a huge fan of herbstluft since I started using it. Herbstluft's 'frames' definitely take a little while to adjust to and it took a few days to figure out how to fit hlwm's tools to my normal workflow, but I find the manual partition/automatic tiling within partitions system to be my favorite paradigm by far.


Sharks, in poker at least.


And "banned", in the case of blackjack.


Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: