"Please put a valid address in the email field, or we won't be able to send you a new password if you forget yours. Your address is only visible to you and us. Crawlers and other users can't see it."
Welp, I'm taking my email out.
Welp, I'm taking my email out.
(Edit)
In all seriousness though, we're really bummed this happened and wish it hadn't. We do code reviews and try our best to prevent this kind of thing from happening. That said, if you truly want your account here to be anonymous, you're right to remove all personally identifiable information. I'd also recommend using tor (and using it correctly).
Out of curiosity, how many people are familiar with HN's codebase as I thought it was developed in PG's personal flavor of Lisp?
Also, there was no mention they were handing the info over to a 3rd party. If you explicitly state something like that, you should follow it and/or change it when the situation changes.
I don't have that issue with git repos.
I'm kinda amused a yc employee went through the effort of downvoting it after pointing out this situation is caused by y'all not following what you actually have in your notices for things.
Seriously what is it with HN/Reddit where everyone assumes that any downvotes are from people with an agenda?
The only data we knowingly send to Firebase is already public and visible to anyone that can speak HTTP.
Sorry if I'm still talking past you.
I don't think it's fair to criticize the admins for that. For pretty much any web application you want to use, "only visible to you and us" should automatically be understood to include "and our hosting provider too, if they go digging or screw up."
The API design has always been to publish only information that is already public, that anyone could get by scraping the website.