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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how site scraping is a "data release".

Because a lot of this information was previously only available to logged in users of a particular service. Would you be okay with someone placing recording devices under the tables of restaurants and then putting the recordings and transcriptions online? Any conversations they pick up happened in a public place where anyone could have overheard them.

Another bad analogy. 1) In public places I usually speak at the volume level at which others can't hear me; if I start yelling in a public place I should expect things that I yell to appear on youtube, in the local newspaper, in the police log 2) I come to the restaurant to eat. If after eating I fill out a survey which includes lots of personal possibly identifying questions, would I have the right to be surprised if next day I find my answers on the website of the restaurant? Have I read the fine print on that survey?

How do you feel about sites which build "shadow profiles"?

I dislike them as I dislike all human activity which doesn't produce useful good or services; probably more so as these are probably harmful and parasitic. But I'm not sure how this is related to the subject at hand.

Just pointing out that there are more ways to get data about you into a service than you giving that service the data. Would you still accept it as a "painful lesson" if it happened to you?

Let me explain the analogy to you. In both scenarios you're in a public place communicating information to an intended audience. There is a good chance that some people outside of your intended audience will also get this information. You're accepting the risk that your coworkers may be on the site/at the next table and receive this information but if they aren't then they shouldn't have access to it.

In your first point you mention adjusting volume to restrict communication to your desired audience. OKCupid has privacy settings. Users adjusting their privacy settings would be analogous with adjusting volume in the restaurant. The people collecting data in this story created a fake account and used it to bypass the privacy settings. For your second point, it would be more like if you filled out a restaurant survey and saw your answers on an unrelated website like Reddit the next day.

Because the data went from something you have to dig around and scrounge to find to a downloadable database. And that is a very big distinction when it comes to who will seek it out and why.

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