Comment by markpapadakis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by markpapadakis | Hacker News Reader

I imagine Yahoo! Mail engineers being royally pissed about this. Well, I suppose that includes all Yahoo! folks who are still putting real effort into improving Y!'s services. Every odd day something surfaces about Y!'s execs questionable practices and decisions, every even day problems, leaks, bad press. Moral must have hit rock bottom.

Maybe the Yahoo! Board should have surveyed the startups scene, looking for founders who bootstrapped successfully and proven their worth, and recruit the best they could get. I am not very familiar with management of people and aspects of running a business, but I believe there is a lot more to it than being a smart person with computers.

You may have missed the part where Yahoo engineers implemented this scheme, they are to blame as much as management here, possibly more because they could've walked away and gotten a different job without much trouble, but management had a responsibility to the whole organization.

Contrast with the rumors that Apple engineers were prepared to refuse & resign if ordered to share the iPhone's encryption keys.

Why should they lose their job and salary to defend someone else? Yahoo users can go to court themselves if they feel that their rights were violated.

Yahoo users can't go to court if they can't prove their rights were violated. Even with this news story there is no court-admissible evidence of collusion with the government.

Also, from the perspective of a civil suit against Yahoo, this program is likely somewhat legal unless it was specifically against their privacy policy and terms of use.

That doesn't mean the engineers knew they were performing unethical behavior. A better question is: why should anyone hire someone who aided unethical behavior?

Their behaviour might be not very ethical in relation to a customers but they were loyal to the company. This is a good point for an employer. I doubt a company would like to hire a Snowden type person that puts public interest over company's.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com