And who are you to decide that that isn't a legitimate decision made by the users? If people cared more about security, they'd move away from Yahoo after something like this, and Yahoo would be more incentivized to keep this from happening.
Your problem is that you disagree with other users - but that's totally legitimate, not everyone has to care about the same things you care about.
> And who are you to decide that that isn't a legitimate decision made by the users? If people cared more about security, they'd move away from Yahoo after something like this, and Yahoo would be more incentivized to keep this from happening.
Who said this wasn't a legitimate decision by users? Certainly I didn't and wouldn't say that. There are a lot of reasons why a rational actor would choose to stick with Yahoo--that doesn't mean Yahoo exposing their private data is okay.
The other thing to realize here is that users aren't rational actors. My grandma is senile--is it okay for Yahoo to expose her private data because she doesn't know they aren't secure?
You've arbitrarily decided that users have to take all the responsibility here, and that the only way we can judge or punish Yahoo is by users leaving. But a) in many cases Yahoo is the only actor with agency to make a decision, and b) there are other ways Yahoo could be punished for using that agency to make decisions that harm users.
> Your problem is that you disagree with other users - but that's totally legitimate, not everyone has to care about the same things you care about.
No, I don't think that I disagree with other users--I think that many people care about their privacy, they simply a) don't know enough to make pragmatic decisions on how to protect their privacy, or b) have other priorities. And this is beside the point--none of this makes it okay for Yahoo to endanger their users' privacy.
Maybe the long-run solution is to make the coupling explicit: publicly post the value the company places on an account not being breached. (Ideally, this would work in tandem with some insurance policy that pays out for that amount, to validate that they really do so value it.)
Then, you can choose the provider with a high enough value to make you feel comfortable, in the understanding that higher-valued accounts will cost more.
This would work in many more contexts: The window sticker on my car can include the value they placed on passengers' lives when making cost-benefit trade offs.
