Tech needs regulation
Tags: data, regulation, tech, government
Published: 2019-03-23 17:03:14

---
title: Tech needs regulation
published: true
description: There needs to be better regulation to enforce the protection of customers data
tags: data, regulation, tech, government
---

The current state of the tech sphere makes it a threat to the American people. Without regulation we all will suffer. I say this amidst another facebook scandal, another large company mishandling peoples data, the government needs to intervene.

For our country to not be exploited and sold out by tech companies, the government needs to establish laws that prohibit and heavily punish companies that mishandle data amongst other things. The amount of regulation that they have to abide by at this current time is insufficient in stopping insecure data-management practices. Putting peoples data at risk.We need regulation.

To do this can not be done internally. It would be foolish and misguided to repeat what we have done in the past, allowing companies to not have a metric raised to them. Because, as was screamed in the past, it’ll hanker technologic and therefore economic growth. Well here we are, living in the biggest economic boon the world has literally ever seen. its time to put away the hunger for ever expanding growth and start prioritizing the security of the data you manage. Peoples lives and the country itself is being put in jeopardy over loose regulation.

Regulation is a tough thing, I wont say that I think It’ll be any easy thing. As a junior programmer my experience with working with data has been centered around sql and mongoldb. The manner in which I go about transforming data is not extremely rigorous. But then the projects that I’ve built have been solely for myself. Were I to build an application that I wanted to have passwords and logins as a feature of, I’d probably use passport.js.

I think that one form of regulation would be to have a government sanctione body that oversaw all the open source code that was build to help companies encrypt peoples data. A body that could then give the country’s developers a list saying, here are the best libraries to use if you are handling customers data.

I think that there should be percentage based sanctions that penalize companies that mishandle peoples data. It is unwise to have a fine of 4 million dollars for a company that is worth billions of dollars, it is unfair to fine a budding company 4 million when they are only worth one hundred thousand. Percentage based functions would encourage companies to maintain better handing of peoples data while also being fair to smaller businesses.

Government regulation on tech companies isn’t about restricting them in their ability to grow, it’s about protecting the American people. Companies have our emails, our passwords, our phone numbers and addresses, our social security numbers and meta data that can easily be used maliciously and exploitatively when data is not properly handed.

It has to be understood also, that this can not be a one and done action. We will need to continually update out laws so that companies that benefit from doing business in America will keep safe the data they are given, and know they will be proportionally fined if they do otherwise