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Comment by awakeasleep | Hacker News Reader

Stripe insiders have been leaking sales numbers and fraud numbers of stripe merchants to the press lately. (Without permission from the merchants).

None of those articles have been successful on Hacker News, despite the fact that they are materially important to many of our businesses. (When and why are businesses metrics and Stripe support emails leaked to the press? Was that against company policy? Has the issue that caused it been addressed?)

http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/steal-a-credit-card-...

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(Stripe's CEO here.) It is emphatically against our policy. The employee involved was identified before the article was published and they no longer work at Stripe.

Why do we not know who he is? Is it not a crime in the US to leak/steal data and leak it to third parties?

You've released this scumbag back into the pool to continue his shenanigans elsewhere.

You've covered your ass, and now he's someone else's problem, right?

My guess would be they are covering their bases legally.

I have heard several stories from small business owners who fire an employee who was stealing or committing some other crime, but they don't actively tell anyone who calls for a reference because they don't want to open themselves up to legal issues.

Even if Stripe can prove that the person did this, potential lawsuits could be incredibly distracting and expensive.

Why did an employee feel motivated to leak that data? What processes have you put in place to prevent a repeat of the event?

Those are the sort of questions that should be addressed in public, not in a side discussion on an unrelated comment thread.

But the actual point of my comment was that HN may have a bit of the PH filtering effect going on.

Actually that article made it into our second-chance pool (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926 and earlier posts linked from there), which placed it on the front page, where it stayed for about 90 minutes. Its problem was that it got few upvotes.

It was also penalized by the flamewar detector (because there was a super active discussion relative to the upvotes). Had we seen that we would have taken the penalty off, but it wouldn't have made much difference because that wasn't why it fell off the front page to begin with.

Because it's a BuzzFeed story. BuzzFeed still isn't taken seriously as a real source of news even if that isn't fair any longer.

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