No, I am not talking about the joke asking what one calls, “500 lawyers lying on the bottom of the ocean,” but rather the proposal by proposal by Senator Ron Wyden to throw tech execs in jail for violating our privacy.

Fines are just a cost of doing business, but if Zuckerberg or Page, or Brin or Pichai spend 24 (or 240) months behind bars, there will be a deterrent effect:

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has introduced a comprehensive new privacy bill he claims will finally address the lack of meaningful privacy protections for American consumers.
Wyden says his Consumer Data Protection Act is a direct response to the ocean of privacy scandals that have plagued the internet for the better part of the last decade.

The Senator’s proposal would dramatically beef up Federal Trade Commission authority and funding to crack down on privacy violations, let consumers opt out of having their sensitive personal data collected and sold, and impose harsh new penalties on a massive data monetization industry that has for years claimed that self-regulation is all that’s necessary to protect consumer privacy.

Wyden’s bill proposes that companies whose revenue exceeds $1 billion per year—or warehouse data on more than 50 million consumers or consumer devices—submit “annual data protection reports” to the government detailing all steps taken to protect the security and privacy of consumers’ personal information.

The proposed legislation would also levy penalties up to 20 years in prison and $5 million in fines for executives who knowingly mislead the FTC in these reports. The FTC’s authority over such matters is currently limited—one of the reasons telecom giants have been eager to move oversight of their industry from the Federal Communications Commission to the FTC.

It does not have a snow-ball’s chance in hell of passing, but putting prison on the table is the only way to reign these guys in.