Hacker News Reader

... so I connected to that ads database (I assure you, random engineers can no longer do this!)

Interesting. I guess protecting the infrastructure of a billion dollar business is worth the cost of there being no chance of another billion dollar business being discovered in this way by a random engineer.

View on HN

It's not really the infrastructure they're worried about, it's their users' trust. Can you imagine the hell there would be if some disgruntled Google employee ran off with the business strategy, clickthrough data, and credit card numbers of every Adwords customer?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com