Hacker News Reader

Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if this was, say, at a bar. A person holds up a sheet of paper on a clipboard and says anyone can write about anyone else in the bar. Would the police be called? Would legal threats be made? People freaking out like this is not consistent with social norms. It's magical thinking about the internet somehow being different or unique.

Good luck dealing with these small minded administrators.

View on HN

Any bar worth going to would kick out the asshole with the sign and ban them from returning.

Okay. Now imagine he's doing it out on the public sidewalk and not using bar property. Would it be justified to use physical force and steal the clipboard owner's property?

What about this imaginary scenario has anything to do with OP scraping their college’s student directory to populate their rumor mill website?

Where did stealing property come from?

Also the guy with a clipboard is only showing those notes to a couple people at a time after they journey to his location, which makes a pretty big difference for the amount of disruption. There's no magical thinking about the internet being special. The social norms are different because the situation is so different.

They stole his phone using physical violence. It's in the article. I'll quote it for you.

>So i was like chill out bro, ill just delete the video, but the dean said, "no confiscate his phone". so one of the guards just snatched the phone from my hand the dean said wipe everything, and dont give him his phone back. I was like wtf is happening? bro I have my private photos on there dont do this. like you cannot do this. I tried reaching for my phone but one of the security guys just held me. and started being rough with me. like pushing me around and shit.

That wasn't really because of the website though. The meeting could have been about basically anything and grabbing the phone for recording could have happened. It was bad but let's not mix up the two situations.

But it didn't work on him; his parents are in the army.

> I knew the police can't really tell me to do anyhting, and my parents are in the army too so intimidation obv wont work.

So what are you complaining about?

Tell me you never been to a bar without telling me you never been to a bar. Bars are usually a huge hot or not (well, parties in general). People are talking and gossiping about each other the whole time. At worst you only be talked about as well.

Bars probably don't have a directory of everyone that attends the bar, that you scraped and published without permission.

The fact that a person is a student at the school can be very sensitive information. The classic example is someone who leaves an abusive spouse/family and does not want to be found. Now their name and picture is out there, and their timetable and therefore whereabouts could be partially inferred from the school calendar by someone who knows their interests.

> The fact that a person is a student at the school can be very sensitive information.

But they were already in the directory? That's much more "out there" than the gossip site.

I'm really skeptical of this line of logic. It feels like motivated reasoning based on not liking the site, because a privacy issue like that is easier to attack (if it's real). I think the meaningful criticisms are based on the actual functionality, the commenting.

I understand that opinion, but the opposite view is now conventional. Corporate/college directories are usually not available in public, but only with a local auth. Even if the scraping site restricted signups to local email addresses, the college is responsible for the distribution of its directory PII so could not allow this.

Leaking PII like this would be illegal in Canada for example.

I don't understand how the word "leaking" would apply here. Unless there was an unmentioned login wall for the directory he scraped, the site is mirroring the names and faces off of a much larger and already public site that nobody has said a single word in complaint of.

It's not public, it's just accessible to the student body. The directory has restrictions on how it is to be used.

Those restrictions are presumably not going to permit a user script that adds a "harass this student" button to the directory page, either.

The data was public btw.

Yeah, but he also took students' PII and put it on his website. If someone did that in a bar, there's a good chance they'd get their face punched by others in the bar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com