Pardon my French but bull-fucking-shit! A CEO _should_ take responsibility for what their subordinates do. It's preposterous to simple throw up our arms and say "oh well, some employees were sloppy so we lost some 100 million user IDs and other sensitive information that we promised not to store but we lied. Oopsie, silly me, pardon my wee incompetence tee-hee". No no no NO NO!

At some level, and certainly at the level where you get paychecks of 10 million a year for the "huge responsibility you are bearing", then incompetence IS malice!

Uhh. I think you misread my comment pretty badly here. I am not making excuses for anyone.

I am saying that it's less likely to be some evil machination that led to the misuse of my data and more likely to be negligence or incompetence.

Both are inexcusable, but one is more common/likely than the other.

You can certainly link them together and yes leaders should be held responsible no matter what, but from my perspective as the user who had his data leaked, it doesn't really matter how/why it happened, does it?

Everything you say should be true on any level playing field. Not in the British public sector where shambolic incompetence is the norm.