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Comment by rpearl | Hacker News Reader

What? His donation (of public record) specifically against same sex marriage--indicated that he was not a good culture fit. People (inside and outside the organization) chose to point that out when he was promoted.

This really doesn't have anything to do with user privacy in any way whatsoever--nothing about user privacy was surfaced or breached in any way. Nor is there any indication, in mozilla's extremely open source code, that Mozilla would be collecting any information like this.

So, uh, what do you mean by "in a similar way"?

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The act was definitely "doxing" any way you slice it. Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic, and expose it to cause the "bad culture fit" argument.

I'm not here to start conspiracies, I'm simply stating that the entire event left me feeling that there are some big players at Mozilla that will use ethically gray areas to achieve their goals, and the people who indulged in that gray area won and are still part of the organization.

Due to that, I am out. I should state that, politically speaking, I was not in solidarity with Eich's position. I am opposed to what people at Mozilla did.

> Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic

That's a strange way of referring to having someone run an organization who actively works to curtail the human rights of some of his employees. And said employees and their supporters speaking out against that.

Doxing is publishing PII. Political donations are NOT PII and are in fact supposed to be public. It is completely legitimate for a CEO's political donations to be scrutinized.

Eich's donation became widely known in 2012, when he was still CTO. Nothing came of it until he was promoted to CEO in 2014.

>The act was definitely "doxing" any way you slice it.

How exactly is taking publicly available information about a (comparatively) high profile individual and sharing it doxing?

Political donations are public information[1]. As far as I can tell, (and according to Mozilla), the group that made public the information about Eich was The LA Times, in 2012. Two years before he was made CEO[2][3].

In what way is retweeting a two year old newspaper headline about the recently promoted CEO of your company remotely doxxing?

[1]: http://projects.latimes.com/prop8/results/

[2]: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

[3]: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/04/business/la-fi-tn-br...

It's not doxing by any definition I'm familiar with. Also, this sentence...

> Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic, and expose it to cause the "bad culture fit" argument.

You are insinuating that folks at Mozilla exploited his position on same sex marriage towards a hidden agenda of some kind.

Another interpretation is that folks at Mozilla simply took issue with his position on same sex marriage.

I'm absolutely insinuating that, and the agenda was not hidden. They did not want Brendan Eich to be CEO. It was a hit job. https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-under-fire-inside-the-9-da...

I don't know why you keep missing the mental leap here: Yeah, people at the company--and outside it--did not want a CEO willing to spend money to actively remove the rights of a group of people. That is the thing they did not want.

They didn't go digging to find something to hurt him: he took action, public and on the record, specifically taking away the rights of others.

It is true, people did not want that, and they did not hide that fact.

Signed, a gay, now married, 2011 Mozilla intern who did not pick up a full time offer in part because some 2012 news of Eich's donation surfaced around the time I was considering pursuing it.

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