You are what you leak (2018) | Hacker News Reader

You are what you leak (2018)

caseysoftware.com

25 pointswallflower27 comments

Two thoughts on this:

1. This seems like a bizarrely disproportionate and unpleasant response to being accidentally included on an email thread. It's one of those stories somebody tells you thinking it makes them look cool but only serves to let you know that you should avoid this person at all costs.

2. It also sounds like a revenge fantasy written by a fourteen year old; the only thing it's missing is "and then they all stood up and applauded me".

So he found out a kid whose girlfriend was very close to his family, inmediately assumed the dad was a pedophile, without any proof, and proceed to accuse the dad to the other parents so they can apply mob justice and destroy the family.

Very classy. A real hero. /s

Yeah, basically this. There’s other solutions to the issue, like forwarding mail from the sender’s address to the trash, that achieve the goal of stopping the intrusion of email into an inbox. It also achieves it politely, without causing people distress, wasting your own time, cyberstalking people, nor does it involve being a dick. There was a day when folks seemed to try to have Netiquette, they would find friendly ways to behave towards each other, and interactions with people of the Internet did not not feel like a race to the bottom of common courtesy. HN still maintains some of that vibe, else I wouldn’t even waste my digital breath writing this.

Quite creepy that part. Actually by doing that he annihilated any sympathy I had for him doing this in the first place.

He didn't make a accusation, he pointed out a set of data everyone else on the list had access to.

The people actually involved (and with more information to assess the reality of the situation) can make the judgement call.

See something, say something?

> I found one father who was interacting with his son’s girlfriend a lot. Not just “I hope you enjoyed the game!” but Liking many pictures, commenting on numerous posts, etc.

Do you feel like that's a problem?

I'd say that an adult over engaged with a child on social media is a potentially concerning data point.

Side note, are you down voting my comments because you feel like they don't add any value to the conversation or because you disagree with my viewpoint?

I'm not voting.

I find what is described as typical socialization observed by someone who knows nothing of these people as something to be concerned about to be fairly absurd.

The author spent a non-trivial amount of time researching the social media profiles and interactions in this group, and noted a pattern of interaction that was atypical between an adult and a minor.

If it was typical socialization within that community, then I find it unlikely he would have only found a single instance.

*edit to fix autocorrect typos

I think it is just sexual paranoia.

I mean here we are and someone somewhere happened upon a mailing list they didn't want to be on... looked folks up on facebook. Wrote a couple sentances on a blog and we're at "see something say something" and "The author spent a non-trivial amount of time researching the social media profiles and interactions in this group".

That all seems like a huge stretch that could create a situation where all sorts of normal behavior is scrutinized / fingers pointed, etc.

So poor choices and poor behavior by the author aside.

I'm not really sure how much of the information gathered would surprise that many people. The suggestions seem like something that some local TV "security expert" would give along with the always useless "don't download apps you don't trust" kind of advice.

Can this asshole be sued? I mean the author of the blogpost, obviously.

I remember a ways back there was a spate of burglaries timed to social media information stating that the owners would be out of the house/town/state/country at a particular time.

Seems like we haven't been inoculated in a while. If there's no new incident, or they don't hear about it, people become complacent.

When I was a kid we were raised to not talk too publicly about when you were going to be away from home, for this exact reason. You'd ask a trusted neighbour to collect your mail so your mailbox wasn't suspiciously full. You could even buy power point timers that would let you schedule lights / TV / whatever to turn on and off at preset times, plus some random jitter to make it not obviously scheduled, so it looked like you were home.

It seems bizarre that in the face of all our perceptions of how cynical we've become, we've forgotten so much basic common-sense security.

(Of course you can still buy the timers and they still even have the jitter feature, but they're marketed as power-saving devices, not as security devices.)

Agreeing with the general tone below. The post gives the impression people should conceal even innocuous interactions. The basis is, of course, to have several email addresses and give the impersonal one, which receives most of the spam, to forum/club mailing lists.

I'm a bit surprised by the general tone of the comments on this.

Not using BCC on group threads like the one mentioned is essentially a PII breach. The fact that this was an organization responsible for the care of minors, which refused to remove someone who was erroneously given access to that data, definitely warrants concern.

If the author had found a security vulnerability in a school website, responsibly disclosed it, and deleted all information gathered, I doubt they would be getting the same level of side eye.

>definitely warrants concern.

Concern about being removed from an email list in a timely fashion?

Concern about the private information of students and families being improperly disclosed.

Their email addresses?

It's indicative of poor data privacy practices, as is the failure to remove someone who shouldn't have a access to the information being sent in the emails.

https://www.dol.gov/general/ppii

"PII is defined as information: (i) that directly identifies an individual (e.g., name, address, social security number or other identifying number or code, telephone number, email address"

Are you sure that's always the case?

School groups for my kids actually share that information as a way for parents to contact each other.

I'm not certain that we can say that any given email list is required to be private.

It's not always the case to be sure, but I'd argue that there's a large difference between making the intentional choice to share information and accidentally disclosing it to unintended parties.

He was able to obtain a lot of personal information from those email addresses wasn't he?

> responsibly disclosed it,

That's the problem here. The disclosure as represented by the author themself is decidedly not responsible.

Sharing the dataset with the full email list instead of individually sharing his results with each person on the list definitely toes the boundary, but given that the parents are going to be the drivers of change in this situation I'd say it's reasonable.

If you were in the same position as the author, how would you handle disclosure?

> given that the parents are going to be the drivers of change in this situation I'd say it's reasonable.

(Note: I shortened your quote, and the shortened bit does not give your intent. But it's the part I want to respond to. Other readers should read OPs full text.) The drivers of change with regards to the Equifax leak was the voting populous of the United States- I image if the Equifax hacker sent the credit reports of everyone compromised by the leak to everyone compromised by the leak and claimed to be an honest security researcher, it wouldn't have gone well.

> If you were in the same position as the author, how would you handle disclosure?

The author mentioned having the contact information of the legal council of the school. Send an email to them saying that email addresses are PII and they shouldn't be widely distributed. Escalate from there. If they ignore it, send a spreadsheet of names, email addresses, and facebook accounts to the lawyer. If they ignore that, start digging, send more - anyway, the point is, start at DEFCON 4 and work your way up, don't immediately step to DEFCON 2. In this case, where the solution is to paste into the BCC box instead of the TO or CC box, a 30 day window ought to be sufficient, but a zero day window is completely unacceptable.

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