Ireland fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees.
And I wonder what would happen if this plaintext stuff was discovered in the US by the federal government. Maybe the agency in charge would send them a strongly worded letter.
There's a mountain of security researchers out there ensuring that the best encryption is theoretically uncrackble, building entire careers around just the math involved, and every major tech company throws it in the trash through disorganization and greed by just giving people raw DB access, keeping copies of passwords for a "demo" that reaches production, or pissing off the most powerful engineer in the deoartment.