The very nature of a limited-liability corporation encourages picking up nickels in front of a steamroller. Even holding the companies liable for the damages they do isn't enough, because they'll take risks that they can't ever repay (and jailing their officers might make us feel better but it can't un-steal your identity).

> they'll take risks that they can't ever repay (and jailing their officers might make us feel better but it can't un-steal your identity).

I'm not sure exactly who the officers of a company are (genuinely) but if we're talking about the decision makers - the board and CEOs and whoever - not the employees, then most of them aren't going to take risks that make them genuinely likely to go to jail. Creating that genuine risk is probably the only way of manipulating their behavior, especially when they haven't got any real skin in the game (e.g. a CEO paid a few million and some irrelevant stock holdings in the company that make their net worth high, but which are safe to lose).

The main issue is that such people are often well enough connected that they can spin a story that it's completely unreasonable to hold them responsible for their decisions. Personal responsibility is something for poor people. Someone will find a way to make the law that says legalese for "If personal data from a company is stolen because they chose to interpret the risks in way that unreasonably exaggerated the migitation costs and downplayed the restoration costs, or because they failed to consider the risks to the personal data they ought to have known they were collecting, then the CEO should go to prison for eight to eighteen months" mean "If the CEO personally steals personal data from a company and sells it to foreign agents, then they get twenty days in a luxury resort - but if they just use it to increase the cost of customers' insurance, then they get saddled with new high paying job, poor fellow".

I do wonder if the workplace safety/health and safety approach can be used here to good effect - even if your company's activities are nothing to do with safety, your workplace has to, by law, be safe, and company officers are responsible legally.

The common message I hear about security is "it's not part of our core business". Safety was made (at least in some countries) to be part of your core business, as an unavoidable obligation. Nobody can use lack of information, capability, skill or awareness as a get-out for poor safety practices - you just have to do better. If we had the same with security, it might get the attentino of the board and its members.