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Re:Equifax C.E.O. Richard Smith Retires After Huge Data Breach by dokein on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @01:56PM (#15341039)
There are lawyers that actively search for businesses misbehavior in order to bring forward class action suits. In this scenario, the bigger the misbehavior (financially) the greater the incentive, independent of the magnitude of harm on the individual scale, i.e. you’re not dependent on someone being harmed enough to want to report to authorities. That strikes me as a market behavior that’s fairly well-aligned with the optimal behavior.

As to the question of criminal prosecution or harsher penalties (e.g. dissolving the corporation): to my knowledge, these suits actually draw AG attention to areas of civil misbehavior which often borders criminal misbehavior. They even surface which citizens were harmed and bring forth information gained by discovery, etc. Thus class action lawsuits actually make it easier for the government to act — that they should prosecute but do not is an independent problem.

Re:Equifax C.E.O. Richard Smith Retires After Huge Data Breach by jaggederest on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @02:50PM (#15341499)
> They even surface which citizens were harmed and bring forth information gained by discovery, etc.

I'm not sure, but is civil disclosure readily accessible to prosecutors? I thought normally it was kept confidential, and thus would only be available in the case of an active criminal case. I would expect that prosecutors wouldn't be able to trawl through it searching for evidence of wrongdoing, and there's some procedure around that in parallel construction, but I'm not a lawyer and I can't find any specific discussion of that matter particularly.