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A comment on Chat app fined for plaintext passwords under GDPR. Parent comment

Re:Chat app fined for plaintext passwords under GDPR by andy_ppp on Monday November 26, 2018 @04:50AM (#18532193)
If your business operates outside of the law of course it should be shutdown. I think fines are a good way to cause compliance without causing more harm than necessary.

Are you advocating government not be able to influence businesses to comply with the law at all?

GDPR is actually a very well thought through piece of legislation and I've implemented compliant systems: best rule of thumb I heard - treat peoples personal information as if it is credit card data and you will comply in a fairly straight forward way.

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Re:Chat app fined for plaintext passwords under GDPR by dwild on Monday November 26, 2018 @12:57PM (#18535331)
> treat peoples personal information as if it is credit card data and you will comply in a fairly straight forward way

Yet so many business use third parties to avoid to deal with storing credit card data....

The IP is considered a PII too.

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Re:Chat app fined for plaintext passwords under GDPR by bayesian_horse on Monday November 26, 2018 @05:20AM (#18532320)
One problem is that the law significantly changed right under their noses. I don't think that they have either a significant development team/effort for their platform, nor a very good revenue. It's basically a very old chat platform I used about 15 years ago...
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Re:Chat app fined for plaintext passwords under GDPR by swish_bob on Monday November 26, 2018 @08:56AM (#18533341)
Even setting aside the years they had to become compliant, it still wasn't a good idea to store passwords in plain text before GDPR.
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Re:Chat app fined for plaintext passwords under GDPR by GordonS on Monday November 26, 2018 @10:01AM (#18533761)
Regardless of the law, it's completely irresponsible to store passwords in plaintext, and it's been widely considered so for decades - the company's behavior here is inexcusable, and I really can't understand why anyone would try to defend it.
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Re:Chat app fined for plaintext passwords under GDPR by dmitriid on Monday November 26, 2018 @05:58AM (#18532447)
> law significantly changed right under their noses.

You mean two years to comply before it went into effect. + over 10 years of similar local laws.

"right under their noses" my ass

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Re:Chat app fined for plaintext passwords under GDPR by ahje on Monday November 26, 2018 @07:22AM (#18532790)
Even if it had changed right under their noses, that would still be OK in my book. The Lawmakers are elected by the people (somewhat -- the EU could be more democratic, but that's a different topic), and they should therefore be able to change the laws on the behalf of the people.
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Re:Chat app fined for plaintext passwords under GDPR by TheSpiceIsLife on Monday November 26, 2018 @06:41AM (#18532602)
Ah, the old a-planet-full-of-media-attention variety of right under their noses.
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Re:Chat app fined for plaintext passwords under GDPR by CathyWest on Monday November 26, 2018 @07:28AM (#18532814)
That would have been a reasonable argument if they were found to have been using something like DES-based crypt(3) to hash their passwords. But they didn't, they were just plain text.
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