US: Warren bill would jail execs for consumer data violations

On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) introduced a new piece of legislation that would make it easier to criminally charge company executives when Americans’ personal data is breached.

The Corporate Executive Accountability Act is yet another push from Warren who has focused much of her presidential campaign on holding corporations and their leaders responsible for both their market dominance and perceived corruption. The bill, if approved, would widen criminal liability of “negligent” executives of corporations (that make more than $1 billion) when they commit crimes, repeatedly break federal laws, or harm a large number of Americans by way of civil rights violations, including their data privacy.

“When a criminal on the street steals money from your wallet, they go to jail. When small-business owners cheat their customers, they go to jail,” Warren wrote in a Washington Postop-ed published on Wednesday morning. “But when corporate executives at big companies oversee huge frauds that hurt tens of thousands of people, they often get to walk away with multimillion-dollar payouts.”

One of Warren’s first significant policy proposals focused on the market power of big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple, and she suggested that, if elected president, she would work to break up the companies through antitrust law.