It probably would have cost them more than $35 million dollars all together to protect people's data by instituting sweeping corporate policies and paying for the appropriate services to delete "15 million customers" worth of data and for all the branches they closed or moved "dating as far back as 2015"
There's a disturbing trend where it's more profitable for corporations to break laws meant to protect consumers and face punitive damages (and publish cheeky articles about being chastised for it) than it is for the laws to be obeyed
> A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
My comment was not a criticism of businesses for doing what is profitable; of course that's the whole point of a business
It was a criticism of the laws in place. It shouldn't be more convenient to break a law than to abide by it, that's the opposite of the point of laws.
The system in place as a whole doesn't make sense if these laws are not prohibitive or even truly punitive and if it is still profitable to break them after lobbying and then paying the fee for breaking them
This logic was every business management class I took in a nutshell. Even if it seems like a rotten low-down thing to do the objective to make money and reduce cost.
There's a disturbing trend where it's more profitable for corporations to break laws meant to protect consumers and face punitive damages (and publish cheeky articles about being chastised for it) than it is for the laws to be obeyed