Note that the tool didn't actually hurt anyone.

One can easily imagine a similar tool used for, say, annotating affiliations of authors or people in the news with companies.

EDIT: Aaaand down votes. Time was HN could think critically about the news and tech. Good work folks.

EDIT2:

So, note that this was removed for the following reason:

  Google's Terms and Conditions for apps explicitly prohibit "promotions of hate or incitement of violence."

If merely highlighting names according to some criteria counts as a promotion of hate or incitement of violence, it would seem our standards have slipped.

Also note that this was something being used purely to "enhance" the browsing experience of users. It wasn't being forced on anybody, there wasn't a button "right-lick to lynch", or anything like that.

Again, this is the moral equivalent of any of those plugins one uses in Gmail to view a correspondent's business information. Don't lose sight of that.

It's not obvious that this was either a) a bad thing or b) hurting anybody.