Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

Let me give a list of people who actually should be named and shamed here:

Everyone who had seen the stuff going on but didn't blow the whistle.

I understand the people who did the deed - according to the description "A team headed by Whisper's editor-in-chief, Neetzan Zimmerman" - they had some rather obvious profit motivation. I understand the people at The Guardian - they simply did the right thing. But everybody else at Whisper and their guests and passersby who had seen this happen - you suck. If you see your employer do slimy stuff, and put your "loyalty" as a reason to let it be, then you're as slimy and deserve to be associated with the slime and blamed for it, and I hope they're paying an appropriate price for selling your conscience.

If you see your acquaintance (or a company you're visiting or investing in) doing bad stuff, and simply do nothing, then that's not calling being a passive bystander - it's called being an accomplice, and you deserve to be treated as co-guilty.

Agreed. Yet another example of The Banality of Systemic Evil: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality...

I know this is an oversimplification of what you're really saying and this is more to do with general attitudes I see towards this sort of thing rather than your comment specifically, but it is personally sad to me that having a profit motivation makes such a breach in user's trust understandable.

As I've gotten older I've grown increasingly disgusted by how easily we as humans can rationalize being involved in quite a lot of obviously scammy behavior as long as:

  A && (B || C)

  A) we are gaining from it, monetarily 

  B) we can pseudo-rationalize it by saying "well, what these other people are doing or did is worse..."

  C) We can shift responsibility to the people who are being scammed for not "knowing better" or making better decisions

Was it really profit motive that had them giving data to the DOD? Seems like it was more likely to do with legal pressures. I certainly don't know for sure but that would be my guess as evidenced by all that has come out over the last year with U.S. Govt. trying to force companies to give over their data.

There was no legal pressure or profit motive. My understanding is they were helping research on suicide rates by tracking some aggregate count of mentions of certain keywords in public feeds based on opt-in geolocation. I think anyone could have publicly scraped even more disaggregated data than the aggregate numbers that Whisper was providing to the suicide researchers.

Kind of a weird moral code here (paraphrasing) - "it's ok to do terrible things if you have a profit motive. But, if you are in any way associated with the people doing said terrible things, even as a 'passerby,' then you are slime."

Wouldn't all of the Whisper employees be covered by the monetary motive clause (i.e. they are getting a paycheck)?

Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Pretty sure, as always, the people who deserve the most shame are the ones who are directly responsible.

> I understand the people who did the deed

Maybe this was intended to mean that their behavior was logical, not that it was excusable.

Things are never that simple. There are often complicated situations that may prevent people from blowing the whistle (for example, people with families that rely on their income). It's never as black-and-white as you make it seem, and automatically lumping everyone into the "guilty" or "evil" camp is unjustified (unless you know the specifics of the people you're condemning?).

Of course, doing the right thing very often has a cost and self protecting behavior is very natural.

I can very much understand why they likely chose to do a bad thing and I can't claim that given their specific circumstances I woudn't do the same in their shoes - but yes, it is still justified to claim that they did do a bad thing.

Knowing the specifics of the people I'm condemning clarifies the justification and reasons for behaving the way they did but it cannot make their conscience clean. Having good personal reasons for behavior that hurts others is an understandable mitigating circumstance, but the actions should still be condemned by the wider society.

So we should excuse terrible actions because people may not be able to live at the standard which they enjoy without continuing to perpetrate them? That generally excuses larceny, burglary, robbery and fraud altogether, and excuses murder in special cases (for-profit or to protect profits.)

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