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Comment by meshko | Hacker News Reader

OK can someone ELI5 what is the fallacy of the "it's already public so it's ok" argument? I definitely understand that legal != ethical; but i suspect this is not clear cut at all in this case. I think it is similar to the responsible disclosure vs immediate disclosure. Sure, people get hurt by this and it is real and is a problem, but on the other hand could the educational benefits outweigh that impact? People need to learn that they are being watched and understand how stuff works, and m.b. that lesson needs to be painful. Is it perhaps better if the data is just accessible to everyone and everyone knows about it then if it is only accessible to the highest bidder and you don't even know about it.

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It's unlikely that I'll convince someone who feels a "lesson needs to be painful," but here goes.

This is all about what tools enable.

This issue is critically important to people who have a much higher privacy need than the average person. Consider an abusive ex tracking down their victim in an unknown new city.

If the profile is indexable, the abuser is trying to either use OKCupid's search (which returns results with a high degree of randomness), or using things like "site:okcupid.com $interest1 $interest2", which is noisy, to say the least. This task looks hopeless quickly.

But if someone provides a database of profiles, the job gets much more tractable. Suddenly, you've enabled the attacker to filter by people who have 1,2,n interests of their ex, search with photographs of their ex, hell, even use facial recognition. Some of these things were kind of possible before, but with a database they are likely. If someone builds a "find your ex" web frontend on this database that uses facial recognition technology, it becomes accessible to everyone, and maybe even popular.

Saying that this lesson should be educational is theoretically nice, but doesn't match how users interact with products in the real world. Anyone who has worked on a product with millions of users knows that the average user (a) doesn't know that there are settings (b) they don't know which things are controlled by settings (c) they don't know how to find the settings, and (d) they don't know how to change them. This is so common that I no longer believe that users are responsible for the implications of default settings (and OKCupid's defaults are, inconveniently enough, Public).

Tools usually are capable of both good and bad things, but a database of profiles has limited upside, and a huge downside. Like, this thing had better be curing a minor fatal disease for the amount of trouble that it will cause.

So i read your response and everything you say reinforces my feeling that it is better to publish this than not to. At least this was done not for profit. If the data is collected and the data is for sale (and it is, because i understand it was purchased legally), there _will_ be someone who builds the service for aggregation and searching like you describe. And it might be very expensive, but that crazy ex will pay that $1000 to find the person she is after. In other words, saying "it's unethical to make access to public info easy" is useless; if information is public, someone will access it and someone will make it easy to access. It's better if this is done in a public way and for free, than if someone sells it quietly.

The problem still comes down to your "lessons should be painful" approach, and how disproportionate it is relative to the perceived error here.

To take an analogy: if a child plays with matches, you teach the child not to do that, explain how fire is dangerous, etc. You don't light a fire and hold the child's face down on it to burn them and make the lesson "painful". Yet when it comes to deliberately making sensitive/intimate data about people public that basically is what you're advocating for: the potential emotional harm that can be done to the people involved is off the charts.

Frankly I don't understand what are these terrible secrets that people are comfortable sharing on a public web site for everyone to see, but not comfortable with everyone seeing them. I just fail to see the pain. Discomfort, sure, but pain and suffering?

One useful thing to note is that a gigantic amount of information is publicly accessible, but in one or more of the following states:

* Requires effort to access

* Is in out-of-the-way places many people don't know about

* Is in a form that's difficult to consume

Even though it's "public", in many ways it behaves as if it isn't, since until one of those conditions is removed people don't really bother to access it, pay attention to it, or try to consume it.

In other words, it's one of those "if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around to hear it" situations.

So information which is only available to someone with an account, but on a system which grants accounts for free to anyone who wants one, typically is thus seen as "private" or at least in a "not really public" state until such time as someone massively aggregates it and makes it available to people without accounts, as happened with OKCupid.

The real problem here is that a) OKCupid doesn't have reasonable default settings and opts people in by default to have their information available for sale b) that they don't sufficiently deidentify information they sell. People who release the information are leveling the playing field. I don't think this can be called unethical _easily_.

Although I've seen reports that OKCupid does sell some information and they're almost certainly using demographic information for advertising I haven't heard of them selling insufficiently anonymized information. Do you have a citation for this?

Part of the issue is the term public. OKCupid does not allow everyone to see everything. Many people have their profiles set so that only logged in users can see any of their information. Is this information public because anyone could create a free account? OKCupid works by asking you question and trying to find matches based on how you answered them. Other users can see your answers to questions that they have also answered. Is this information public? Choosing to share your information with a group that could contain anyone is not the same as choosing to share your information with everyone.

Another issue has to do with the expected lifetime of the information. Users on OKCupid expect that when they remove their accounts the information is no longer available to anyone.

If I make a profile that's viewable explicitly only to other logged in members, then it's pretty clear what my intentions are. Violating that makes you an asshole. If you shared a private email I asked you not to, it would be the same kind of disregard to my intentions. That's where the ethics belong, not in whether it's public or private.

Making something viewable by a group of selected people is one thing; making something viewable by millions of users of a website with a free and simple account creation mechanism should be equivalent to making it public in people's heads.

Feasibility and morality are two totally separate things. Just because two things are equally feasible does not make them equivalent.

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