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Comment by mola | Hacker News Reader

When the mantra of a huge swathe of business is "disruption" "move fast and break things" etc, well, we end up with a broken disrupted system. Innovation is good, but stability is also good. Instead of optimizing only for dynamism we need to optimize for both.

The reason you'll get yourself in trouble and these people won't is because you are operating in different moral systems. Where they operate, the moral thing to do is whatever it takes to succeed, it's entirely moral to "fake it until you make it" to buy media articles promoting your product, to sell media space your readers believe is actually curated, to the highest bidder.

You operate in the "ivory tower" they hate, because it's slow and puts up boundaries that limit people from succeeding at all cost, that makes you think about the consequences of your actions. They call it slow and inefficient, I call efficient in the long run.

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Universities can be punished by NIH in addition to the feds if they violate privacy rules in clinical studies. Columbia was threatened with losing all their research funding if they didn't get their act together after a big breach a few years ago.

But I know plenty academic researchers with a "move fast and break things" and "ignore all rules" attitude. In any highly-competitive system there will be those that gain an advantage by being amoral while everyone else follows the rules. Healthcare is probably especially vulnerable to this as the rules (and legitimate companies following them) has resulted in healthcare lagging far behind other industries in terms of new technologies.

"The principle with which we are now dealing is that one which is called Expediency. The usage of this word has been corrupted and perverted and has gradually come to the point where, separating moral rectitude from expediency, it is accepted that a thing may be morally right without being expedient, and expedient without being morally right. No more pernicious doctrine than this could be introduced into human life."

-M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. Book II.

I'm not sure that framing makes a lot of sense here. This was a SaaS product for process automation which seems like a perfectly reasonable product. I would argue in fact that having tech companies (meaning companies which have specific expertise in building software products as opposed to companies that have a expertise in something else and also have an "IT department" bolted on) manage sensitive data is likely to make it more secure rather than less. Companies and other institutions which don't have any particular expertise in software engineering and security aren't likely to do a good job. Of course when those companies do screw up they should be held liable though, up to an including criminal liability is the leak is bad enough and the exploited vulnerability is egregious enough.

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