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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

> If you were a high school senior and your schoolmates were handing you transcripts of all their juicy gossip on a silver, digital platter, what would you do?

If I was actually handed that info on a silver platter, willingly, then who knows.

But that's not your situation. In your situation, I'd be violating the trust of my entire school. That's neither a good idea ethically nor socially.

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I think you are slightly misrepresenting the author. His sarcastic comment about "bulletproof moral guidelines" seems to indicate that he isn't proud of this particular moral transgression. And while I don't think he was right to read the messages, you have to consider that the people using the service literally had no idea who they were sending messages to. I think that makes it a bit different from reading messages that were intended for one person that the speaker knew well. Not that that excuses the behavior, but I do think it explains some of the rationale. Also, who didn't make stupid immoral decisions in high school?

This is pretty accurate. tl;dr: What I did wasn't great but it could have been a lot worse (see all the things I made it a point of not doing), and that gives you something to think about when it comes to data and privacy.

Wow, that's a pretty unimpressive response. It's bad enough you did it, but I seriously doubt you realize how wrong what you have done really is when you discount that wrong doing so easily.

To make it clear: You advertised an anonymous service to a community you're a direct member of and didn't disclose your involvement in it. You not only willingly broke a moral code that you knew about, but you actually misrepresented the service in your advertisement and broke any trust you had with everyone who participated. That's a pretty serious wrong doing that warrants a little more self reflection and much more empathy towards the people you screwed over.

> who didn't make stupid immoral decisions in high school?

People running automated social networks, because there were none.

Great power comes cheaper and cheaper, no?

Back in my day, the immoral decisions were where to download your MP3's from.

Back in my day, the immoral decisions were copying commodore 64 games!

Back in my day, the immoral decisions were taking IBM cards from work vs. buying them at the school bookstore.

Scan everyone's school accounts for mp3s, copy to one big folder without noting down source..

You say you're not trying to make excuses, but you literally are making excuses for him. As is he for himself. No matter how curious, it's just not acceptable to run a service to snoop on people. It's a serious ethical transgression, particularly considering you know the people.

Now, if he'd implemented a mechanism to give users keys they could send him should they consent to him reading the log for moderation purposes, he would have been able to do the moderation job and not violate people's privacy. Or made structured data fields that users could consent to make public and also be used for data analysis purposes (like interests, societies, year, etc). But no. He just read their messages. He didn't even have a commercial incentive to analyse data, he just did it out of sheer voyeurism.

17 years old have no ethics.

For one thing, he and I do not mean the same thing when we say anonymous chat :-) - but for a 18 year old it's impressive.

I believe we might be running into cross-cultural issues WRT the linked articles sarcastic description of "transcripts of all their juicy gossip"

When I'm sitting in a bathroom stall I don't ponder the moral and ethical dilemmas of reading or not reading what someone scribbled on the wall. He was not running a cryptographically secure anonymous remailer service here. He was running a virtual bathroom wall to scribble gossip upon.

I wonder if this wouldn't also be illegal? I know the US has terrible regulation of privacy for private entities - but AFAIK plain text email is covered by the assumption of privacy, so listening in/reading it would be considered wire-tapping. I'm also not sure how much of that (if any) someone below 18 is able to legally sign away?

At any rate, an interesting article. It might have been interesting to set up something similar, just bundling an XMPP client and OTR, and having an XMPP-server per school/"cicrle" for pairing (could probably even require school logins for registering on sign-up -- just make sure to throw that information away (beyond possibly keeping age/gender tag).

With the caveat that secure, anonymous communication and "web browser" doesn't really mix -- it could probably be set up as web page/service too (Not sure if eg: Matrix has a web/js-client that does/tries to do client side OTR or equivalent?).

We had IRC, with chat-rooms per town -- as not everyone had Internet in the 90s in Norway. But that did afford some people pseudonymity.

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