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Comment by jim_dow_jones | Hacker News Reader

I see no reason to praise the hacker. He destroyed a legitimate company's private data for no purpose other than his flawed moral reasoning. The company provides a way for parents to monitor their children and other legitimate business practices. Obviously, the software can be used for nefarious purposes but so can almost any other software. U.S. representatives and senators try to ban encryption using the same exact flawed reasoning.

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I see a legitimate business opportunity, a phone walking service. You collect the children's phones and take them to the mall, the library or wherever teenagers go these days, and meanwhile the kids can enjoy life without parental surveillance.

You do wonder what the 24-hour panopticon does to adolescents' mental health and to the health of the parent-child relationship.

Don't forget to lend the client a phone to forward calls to.

Charging a monthly flat-rate for x hours / y days might also help deter abuse.

Of course the walkers would have to check the facebook status every 5 minutes and post cupcake pictures to instagram at least once to maintain a credible profile.

How about a USB OTG microphone, GPS and camera that tell a pack of lies, ideally implemented as an app on a second phone.

That's how my friends and I grew up. You left the house --- you were just GONE --- until you came back. Short of hiring a private investigator, your parents really had no precise idea of what you were up to.

Of course, they did tend to find out the important stuff anyway. The parent grapevine was definitely alive and well.

Well, I side with that hacker for this, taken from this article — "I don't want to live in a world where younger generations grow up without privacy."

While parents make a lot of decisions for children in their best interests, this certainly wasn't one of them. The fact that children might later suffer for no fault of theirs and live with something for life because of such a company makes me a lot more angry. It's becoming far too easy to push people into such a situation now.

That's very noble, but I don't want to live in a world where one moral vigilante hacker cowboy dictates what world we live in. It seems much more reasonable to come together as a people and vote on what we can and cannot do. After we vote, we can write down what the majority has decided and then demand individuals adhere to those policies. We could then call those policies "law". Seems much more reasonable to me.

They also store extensive sensitive data and media about/from/with children with piss poor security. Is that not unambiguously bad?

Their security was bad, no doubt. I don't see how that justifies deleting their data, though.

??!? Their 'data' includes all the photos YOUR KIDS take on their phones. Do you not realize how much absolutely idiotic shit kids do with their smartphones these days? Which they store in an an obviously unsafe way, as evidenced by the fact that they've been hacked via a super-super-super obvious software flaw... twice (that was widely reported on, most likely many more times). They deserve, and they should get, no sympathy. They sure as shit don't deserve to make any money off of it.

You know what other services have data that contains photos of your "YOUR KIDS"? Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Photobucket, and pretty much every other tech company with hosting services. If these companies get hacked, do they deserve to have their data deleted? The answer is no.

No, they would deserve a hefty, HEFTY fine and regulation barring them from providing services to anyone under 18 years of age, and then they deserve to delete all the relevant data themselves (with oversight). However Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Photobucket are not in the business of selling shady ass spyware whose sole reason for existing is for stalkers, creeps, jealous ex-lovers and helicopter parents to invade people's privacy and personal security, so they have at least a little bit going for them over this sleazeball company. _Very_ little, but a little still.

So that actual bad guys don't get it and use it for what could be incredibly sophisticated and damaging things.

Like handling nuclear material, if a company is going to collect intelligence on consumers, they have a social obligation to secure that intelligence. Encrypt it, tokenize/anonymize it, or delete it after use. Anything less and you're simply positioning yourself as a facilitator of doxxing or stalking when data leakage or exfiltration inevitably happens.

If it was this easy to break in and access the data, the hacker did consumers a kind mercy by deleting it before someone else got in and did something more nefarious.

Ok. Then what does that justify in your mind?

Companies that practice bad security and potentially expose sensitive data to bad actors should be fined or shutdown via the proper legal channels. In the more extreme cases, I think short jail terms should be considered for those responsible depending on the extent of the damage caused.

As TFA describes it, the first deletion last year by the heroic hacker actually interrupted another hacker's access to the data. Why hadn't that other hacker deleted it? Maybe he enjoyed having access to private pictures and communications of children, teens, and adults... Does that sound like a good situation?

No, that doesn't sound like a good situation. You want to know some other big companies that have been hacked? - LinkedIn, MySpace, Adobe, Dropbox, DailyMotion, Sony, Kickstarter, Equifax... ad infinitum. Do these companies also deserve to have their data deleted?

None of those firms collected private pictures without consent. All of them actually made some attempt to fix their vulnerabilities when notified. Any one of them that allowed random strangers to delete their data "deserved" to have that done. No firm has a right to success in business.

> legitimate business practices

Whenever I read this phrase, it always has a sense something like legal, therefore ethical or legal, therefore OK, and.. (this is not an easy sentence to finish) I wonder where people learn to think like that. OK, apart from the pressure of the entire commercial/corporate/advertising apparatus.. Maybe it's surprising it isn't more common. I guess it's the norm, in some circles. I'm naive I guess, but I'd rather die than think like that. A friend of mine used the phrase once, and..that felt like the end of the friendship.

The reason to think and speak in such a manner (with regard to law) is because we live in a society where we have a social contract with all of the other people and businesses in it. It is frowned upon for individuals to go around and commit illegal acts that they deem ethical because of that social contract. It would be chaos if we did not adhere to the laws that society has agreed upon. This is why we come together and vote on what we deem to be unethical and make it illegal.

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