In the US if a company fails to use adequate security to protect user data, there is little a senior manager has to worry about.
Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a new piece of legislation that would make it easier to criminally charge company executives when Americans’ personal data is breached.
Dubbed the Corporate Executive Accountability Act it is yet another push from Warren who has focused much of her presidential campaign on holding corporations and their leaders responsible for their market dominance and corruption.
If approved the bill would widen criminal liability of “negligent” executives of corporations that make more than $1 billion when they commit crimes, repeatedly break federal laws, or harm a large number of Americans by way of civil rights violations, including their data privacy.
“When a criminal on the street steals money from your wallet, they go to jail. When small-business owners cheat their customers, they go to jail”, Warren wrote in a Washington Post op-ed published on Wednesday morning. “But when corporate executives at big companies oversee huge frauds that hurt tens of thousands of people, they often get to walk away with multimillion-dollar payouts.”
Warren is not a fan of big tech and says that if she ever gets to be president she will break up the companies like Google, Apple and Amazon through antitrust law.
“It’s not equal justice when a kid with an ounce of pot can get thrown in jail while a wealthy executive can walk away with a bonus after his company cheats millions of people”, Warren wrote.
“Personal accountability is the only way to ensure that executives at corporations will think twice before ignoring the law. It’s time to stop making excuses and start making real change.”
If approved, executives could face up to a year in jail for their first violation and up to three years for subsequent violations.
We expect that if the bill ever gets through the House of Representatives, Big Tech will lobby it out of existence in the Senate, or get the President, who is also a bit sensitive to being arrested for anything and runs a company which sits on a lot of customer data, to veto it.
