Of course it has, that's where the expression "the cost of doing business" comes from. Given the volume discount mass offenders get when it comes to privacy, I'm not surprised nothing really changes.
For example: Equifax. They were fined $700M for exposing the details of 150M people, which works out at a charge of less than $5 per victim, whereas your average mon and pop shop will get fined hundreds for a single accident. Until such major offenders face getting fined into oblivion for getting it wrong instead of getting that volume discount, absolutely nothing will change. I would propose at a minimum by law cancelling the right to privacy for the board members so they get to enjoy the same sort of problems as their victims, and this volume discount rubbish should go because the impact on victims does not lessen because of the quantity of people affected.
I am waiting for the day when companies like Equifax finally work out that the fines are so much lower than the gains from selling personal details on the black market that they might as well go ahead. According to reports I read a while back, on the black market such a verified set of personal details as they can offer is easily worth $75 per person, so on that volume and that level of fines they would still have been a shade over a billion USD up in profit. Given how keen these companies are on money and with what they get away with I cannot see them resist that much lucre for long.
Laws only matter if they come with real consequences, and even then only if those consequences get personal for the decision makers instead of just becoming a bookkeeping exercise. I give it at most a few years before someone will do this.
Yes, I am paranoid. Logically, I have to be.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
