Send me your privacy abuse tipoffs | Hacker News Reader

Send me your privacy abuse tipoffs

robertheaton.com

98 pointsdomrdy12 comments

Whistleblower payoffs in the US can be up to 30% of collected money https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower

> The Commission is authorized by Congress to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to a Commission enforcement action in which over $1,000,000 in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected.

If the government started paying off employees who report data violations, there would be a lot of retired engineers on Hacker News!

That could create a conflict of interest though. Imagine I'm an engineer that can profit by adding some malware on a (e.g.) printer. Ka-ching! I add the malware, count til 10 (weeks), report to regulator, cash out, adios amigos!!! And then HP (for example) is left with the penalty. Not fair for the company. This is one of the reasons we need independent reviews & assessment.

Conflict of interest, maker-checker matter in this line of work. A whistleblower is always a whistleblower, but one can open the gates and then cry wolf.

Presumably HP could sue the engineer for willful sabotage? Especially if that engineer whistle-blew the problem that the bug causes (on the code s/he wrote) instead of submitting a bugfix..

I think the plan would be to add the malware in such a way as to not get caught/attributed, I.e. hack the build server, impersonate another user account, or similar.

That scenario is about as sensible as a person committing a crime and attempting to collect the police reward for information by turning themselves in.

(Depressingly, a bit of Googling shows that people have actually tried this. Needless to say, they did not get the reward.)

Robert deserves a huge pat on the back for doing this. I can only imagine how many tipoffs he will need to sift through and I look forward to seeing the results. I disagree with his thought that this won't make companies learn to respect privacy. We're at a cusp and it's actions like this that are the baby steps that can take us towards a better, privacy respecting future.

This is actually a huge source of potential litigation. Lawsuits that easily end in settlement given CCPA, GDPR etc. He’s likely not just doing this for his blog.

It’s akin to “Injured at work?” billboards.

I don’t really mind him profiting off this if it means nasty companies stop stalking me. As far as I’m concerned it’s a win-win situation.

Website suggestion. Forward slashes indicate breadcrumbs and hierarchy, like a file system in the terminal. However, you're using them for link separators all over your website which if very confusing. Traditionally the pipe `|` symbol or potentially borders would make better separators.

Seconded. This is a basic usability heuristic breach.

His web site. His style.

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Yes, it's possible to increase frictions. But mostly, that just reads as annoying.

As here.

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