Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

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Is it okay for any owner of a website to go through their userbase's private data, simply because they own that website?

I don't mean "okay" in a legal sense, but rather a moral sense.

It reminds me quite a lot of http://i.imgur.com/5quY1Iq.png except that the difference is that Maciej is a researcher and isn't disclosing the data to people. However, he's still going through people's private stuff. Notifying them that you're planning to go through their private stuff is the most basic common courtesy; it's why landlords can't simply walk in to a tenant's house whenever they feel like it, even though they own the property.

Let's put it another way: I didn't know Maciej was the type of person to trawl through people's private information that they trusted him with. If I did, I would've investigated other options for a bookmarking site a couple years ago, or would've written my own, and I wouldn't have breathlessly recommended Pinboard to whoever would listen. The recommendation would be more like "Pinboard is great, but the owner likes to look at your stuff, even if it's marked 'private,' so keep that in mind."

I like the image of myself sitting at the computer with a box of bon-bons, lazily hitting 'next' on the special admin page that selects only the juiciest private bookmarks for my delectation.

The reality is less fun. I have to look at (potentially) private bookmarks when:

- someone's import file fails to parse, or has an encoding problem

- there are garbled or missing results for a search query

- I need to answer questions like 'how much disk space does a typical bookmark use', so I can provision what I need

- there's a bug in the fulltext parser

- the twitter API client misses some tweets or mutilates a URL

- the pinboard API is misbehaving in one of a thousand ways

- I need to verify that backups I make actually contain everything they're supposed to

- I want to find and fix privacy bugs!

Along with a thousand other scenarios that will be familiar to anyone who has ever had the misfortune to import, format and store user-provided data.

Anywhere bookmarks come into or leave the site, or are displayed on the site, there will be bugs. If I tried to enforce some kind of viewing restrictions on myself, it would just introduce an additional layer of bugs while making my job completely intractable.

I'm not a landlord walking into a tenant's house without permission. I'm a hotel manager, doing my best to be discreet, but ultimately requiring full access to everything in order to do my job. I'm going in to check the sprinklers and fire alarm even if you've left the 'do not disturb' sign on.

This will be the case on any outside site you use, even one that makes sweeter promises to you than I ever did. Please think twice, and then three times, before uploading your data anywhere if you have these kinds of expectations.

I'm scratching my head wondering if I'm being unclear. Let me try again:

You created a program whose sole purpose was to analyze private user data and report on the results. (In fact, not merely "private user data," but "data which users explicitly marked as 'private.'")

What you did was equivalent to a hotel manager sending employees to peep into 1,000 random rooms and compile a detailed report of what those rooms contained and what its occupants were doing, and then claiming it was for the betterment of all hotels. Yes, that may be true, and the data may be quite helpful, but people still expected their rooms to be private.

Intentions matter. You weren't accessing the private bookmarks in order to fix a bug or test a new feature.

If you want to run with this metaphor, I sent employees to look into random rooms and tell me what proportion of occupants were dead.

Not quite. The bookmark is someone's "stuff." The fact that they were interested in a certain site is something they trusted you with.

It looks like you and I won't see eye to eye on this, and it also looks like I'm apparently the only person in the world to be naive enough to trust that you'd refrain from going through other people's private belongings that they entrusted you with.

You seem to have a weird understanding of web services.

All of pinboard's servers belong to pinboard. All of pinboards hard drives belong to pinboard. All of the bits on those hard drives belong to pinboard.

Your private data on pinboard's server belongs to pinboard. This is how web services work. If the web service couldn't access its own data, it wouldn't be able to operate.

You can only assume that some bits are yours (to use your terms: your private belongings) when it runs on your own service/when your programs are the only ones with access to it.

Pinboard is not a hosting company (a la DigitalOcean), it's a web service, i.e. it's not a hotel, it's not a bank giving you a safe.

If the web service couldn't access its own data, it wouldn't be able to operate.

He intentionally created a program to trawl through data which was explicitly marked by users as private. He didn't do that for operational reasons.

No, once again, what you just wrote is a lie. You can be cavalier with logic, consistency, tone, thoughtfulness, thoroughness, and even basic correctness. You cannot be cavalier with immediately evident facts. No amount of squirreling back to how Pinboard actually touches private links in this experiment will ever make what you wrote here truthful.

It is much better to lose an argument, even one you're right about, than to be a liar.

This is the most hurtful comment I've ever received on HN, and it's the only one that's ever made me want to leave the site altogether.

You didn't even explain how, precisely, I'm a liar.

You know what a liar is? It's someone who deliberately goes out of their way to distort the truth in order to gain some kind of advantage, even when they know they're not being truthful.

Do you think I'm sitting here trying to win this debate merely because I have a problem with being wrong? If that's the case, then I had no idea you thought so lowly of me. This isn't about even about me.

Fact: When a user submits a bookmark to Pinboard and flags the bookmark as 'private,' they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. That includes privacy from the admin: it's acceptable for them to use the data for debugging or to test new features, but not to write a script whose purpose is to delve through data marked as private.

Fact: The owner deliberately wrote a script whose purpose was to go through private data. You can read the original blogpost on the topic. It doesn't matter that it was for an experiment for the betterment of all of the web. The fact is, he didn't seek consent, and users had no idea their data that they flagged as 'private' were being examined by his script.

Now, you can call me a charlatan, a dilettante, or whatever other harmful thing you wish to call me, but I have no idea how this case warrants me being called a liar. Normally, I'd let this drop, but you have publicly targeted my character and reputation. I'd like an explanation, please.

Yes. I'm saying you've gone out of the way to distort the truth. Exhibit A: your second "fact": not a fact. What the site is actually doing is right there in the link the guy who runs the site showed you.

You have options available to you besides seething about this and leaving the site.

Curiosity: what's your Pinboard account name? Mine's the same as my HN name.

From the blogpost: "The data we will examine will include private bookmarks, which make up about half of all Pinboard bookmarks."

It's not a direct quote since I'm on mobile, because I had to get out of the house and go for a walk after one of my heroes called me a liar. But it's factually accurate. What part isn't?

I'd like an answer to this question: Would you hire a liar? Someone you believe would go out of their way to be deliberately untruthful? Rather than even try to figure out if there was some sort of misunderstanding, you went straight for calling me a liar. You, of all people.

I am not seething. I'm quite hurt.

Also, the fact that half of all Pinboard links are marked 'private' should give some indication that people commonly use Pinboard as a repository for links they don't want to associate with themselves publicly. That's what we're paying for.

EDIT: Here's the full quote, from https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/08/researching_link_rot/

To run the experiment, I am going to be drawing a few thousand links at random from the entire pool of Pinboard bookmarks. This will include private bookmarks, which make up about half the Pinboard collection.

And here is what you wrote:

He intentionally created a program to trawl through data which was explicitly marked by users as private.

And here's what you wrote earlier:

you'd specifically and intentionally create a program whose sole purpose was to analyze private user data and report on the results.

He did no such thing.

Perhaps, instead of directing all your energy into maximizing the feels you generate from being called on something, you could instead introspect and re-evaluate and consider that maybe you said something very wrong. People do that all the time. They do not ritually kill their accounts when that happens. The older, wiser ones are likely to just acknowledge it and apologize. Some of the somewhat younger, dumber ones, like me, have done that too.

We are both crudding the thread up now, so I'm going to stop posting about this.

I could have worded this more carefully. I apologize.

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