Sounds like they got a sudden spike in interest, realized that their customers were angry, admitted the error, bought keybase, and provided what their customers asked them for.
There's an ashtonishing lack of ethics in our industry. A marketing error here, a software bug there [1], a misleading opt-out here [2], a preinstalled malware there [3][4][5], a little violation of privacy of here [6][7], a little lack of respect there [8][9]... It's all happening all at once. We shouldn't be lapping it up.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24514433
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22531087
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9072424
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17145204
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298205
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19031055
[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929044
"Always make sure your malicious act can be adequately explained by stupidity if you get caught"
I don't actually care whether the board at Symantec were deliberately turning a blind eye to forbidden practices and then get caught or they were too incompetent to exercise effective oversight and had no idea there was a problem, we can't trust them in either case.
So, no. This perfectly above-board version is not what happened.
I missed that one, thanks for the heads up (found sources @ [1]). Between that and Keybase going into cryptcurrency, that means I uninstalled Keybase and quit using it.