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Comment by tmpz22 | Hacker News Reader

Even the greatest of apologies is not a time machine that will completely undue what happened. A C-level/director-level team pushed out a massively privacy violating policy with zero feedback in an effort to compete against an incumbent company (LinkedIn) on a Friday afternoon.

It reeks of they-raised-too-much-money-and-now-have-to-do-BIG-things syndrome and would seriously discourage me as either a user or enterprise customer, as if the AI/machine-learning BULLSHIT didn't already do that. They're a recruiting company that took a sucker punch with CV-19 and effectively tried to sell their user data as a get out of jail free card.

The saving grace is that LI Recruiter is a trash product (for years...) and they could probably eek out a consumer net-good by bringing more competition to the market, if only they went about it the right way.

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People screw up. It happens. I accept the apology.

You are right, and the apology sounds genuine, yet my feeling as someone working in IT myself is that their culture cannot be one that values privacy. If your users entrust you with their information deciding about what to throw away, what to keep, what needs to be anomyized, what private and what public is literally why people would trust you.

It can happen, but if it does maybe you are the wrong person for the job.

The question really is: in what kind of mode would you have to operate in order to forget that you users might want to have a say in the publication of their data? That is like a restaurant waiter forgetting to ask people what they want and bringing them a single random things instead.

For myself, I don't expect corporations to be paragons of virtue. I just try support the ones that are less screwed up. Everything is flawed. If you don't accept that, honestly ask yourself if you could build something bigger than just yourself that didn't have to make compromises you'd rather not make.

Every company that can help me find work is flawed, and I don't wanna start my own company any time soon. Heck, I am flawed. The best I can do is better than nothing and worse than perfect.

Really even if it’s a bank or a financial entity. Here it is privacy

Sure, Triplebyte made a dumb move here. But “massively privacy violating” is hyperbole.

It seems as if everything is considered “private” now. No, not everything is private. You interviewing for a job isn’t private unless both parties make it private with a legally binding contract. It is a mistake to wishfully label public information as private simply because we don’t want it to be public. It also makes it harder to talk about true violations of privacy and distracts from understanding the real issues at stake.

What people ought to say, and have often said here, is that it is a violation of trust. People trusted Triplebyte to find them a new job, not lose their current job. That trust was violated not by an invasion of privacy — it is their data as much as it is ours — but a violation of using that data in a harmful way.

Privacy isn’t the problem here. The problem is with whatever broken processes led to this bad product and poor decision.

> You interviewing for a job isn’t private unless both parties make it private with a legally binding contract.

I would gently suggest that you look into the idea of "reasonable expectation of privacy" which has a long history in the courts.

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