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Criminalizing bugs would be insane, and would drive up the cost to create software, and probably also drive down the quality (due to pushing us into a smaller ecosystem of proprietary code). It would definitely kill open-source, because who would be stupid enough to release a source-tree that could send them to jail.

That said, statutory civil penalties (fines per occurrence) for the effects of the bug in production _would_ fix the problem. Who is going to keep giant data-lakes around when they are the business equivalent of toxic waste? The developers are still able to write code, but they are incentivized to not collect extraneous user data.




No, developing sub-standard quality software for some use cases can already be a criminal offense, especially when it ends up causing harm.


"Some usecases" is a pretty small set of usecases.




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