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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

Can you please send me a copy of your last 3 tax returns? My email address is in my HN profile.

I don't know you have don't particularly care about your financial situation, so I'm not gonna read them or share them with anyone else. I'll just keep them on my hard drive.

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> Can you please send me a copy of your last 3 tax returns?

Options:

A) Sure, here you go. Oh wait! I didn't mean to send you those. You tricked me and stole my information. I'm going to send 15 police officers round to arrest you and then you're going to prison for years.

B) No, that's confidential.

^^ Which option do you think is more reasonable?

A) is not comparable to the current situation because you are the one initiating the action. I can't stop you from sending me an email so it can't be a crime on my part if you do so.

No, you are initiating the action by requesting the file from me. You did request the file didn't you? Even though you should have known it wasn't public information?

That's not a correct counter argument, the information he got was understood to be public and there was no reason to expect or think there was any private information on there. If the site had said "This site provides tax returns" then there would be reason to expect the files would contain private information. The site in question gave no indication there would be private information in those files. Also, technical nitpick, there are some countries where tax information is public so probably not the best thing to go with.

So you think this teen was sending the data he downloaded to all his Facebook friends, or what? Do you have any evidence at all to support this?

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