As a doctor, one of the biggest expenses you have is malpractice insurance. Doctors don't mean to hurt people, but mistakes happen, and people often turn to litigation when mistakes do occur. IT engineers also make mistakes, mistakes which can lead to user's sensitive information being stolen. This can lead to wide range of problems, from simple frustrations, like having to change a password, to serious financial problems, like a trashed credit score. When an IT professional or programmer makes a mistake that leads to a user's information being compromised, the question arises, should they be financially responsible? Will "malpractice" insurance one day become a necessity if you work in IT?
You have raised an interesting issue. However I do not think that "malpractice" insurance will become a necessity in IT anytime soon. A reckless engineer, though may cause several damages to an individual or a company, I don't think that many people regard this as severe as costing someone's life.
ReplyDeletePerhaps more important reason is that in medical field, generally a doctor (potential culprit) directly serves a patient (potential victim). However in IT field, usually a company serves its customers and IT professionals are behind the curtain. So a victim may sue the company for the recklessness of its developers (in which case the cost usually gets added to the product/services) but not the developers.
Engineers don't seem to work alone as much as doctors. If you did want to hold them liable, it would be harder to find one person to pin the blame on. I want to say it is impossible, but you never know how things might change.
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