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Comment by revorad | Hacker News Reader

I never understood what the point of linking to such leaked data is. Surely, you're not helping the situation?

If it's out there, it's out there. People with bad intentions know how to find it anyway. Meanwhile, the rest of us would like to check if any of our data has been compromised. Hiding this stuff helps no one.

Well, not "no one" but I do see your point somewhat. When it's out, it's out and you can't make it private again but you can contain the exposure as much as possible to keep the information in a minimum number of unauthorized hands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

Trying to contain the exposure may actually make it worse.

Trying to contain is not the same as not helping to spread.

Right, I'm not suggesting it's a good idea to try and hide all signs of leaked details as I think that would be a futile effort, just arguing that re-sharing leaked information isn't harmless.

The linked site had the url in a image and I was curious what would be at the actual source so I manually typed it from the image. I knew others would be doing the same so I simply shared it. Simple as that. ;-)

In a perfect world good journalism would mean linking to ones sources anyways.

The data's already been leaked. The URL of the leak was included in the article, except for reasons best known to the author, the URL was only shown as a jpeg. This just makes it clickable.

I generally assume it is so people can check if their usernames are present in said lists.

Once the cat is out of the bag, obscurity is more harmful than beneficial.

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