Anyone know what product she's referring to?
This post goes out of its way to avoid naming the site in question.
If you know the answer to the above question, think carefully before providing that name here or anywhere. Ask yourself how invoking their name specifically contributes value to this story. Ask yourself why you consider it right to shame them by name, when OP did not consider it right to do so.
If you can’t think of a reason that positively improves the world for us all, and all that you’ve got is “we should hold them up as an example for others to avoid”, this post already does so and without doxxing them.
If you truly feel that it’s necessary, proceed, but I think honoring the author’s clear intention to avoid naming them is the appropriate decision here as well.
ps. Happily, I haven’t a clue who they are, not have I tried to look.
eg "You said free, and now you're telling me I can't store 20TB of videos on your service! Un-fucking-believable". Cue all the statements (from free customers) that they'll never pay :rolleyes:
See also the threads on here when a company has increased prices.
Very disinclined in actuality, since this is a company providing a service to people who have handed over custody of their personal data (It sounds like very high-value data! Cooking videos aren't easy to make!) under the assumption that they will get something out of the deal, i.e., the videos would be hosted and they would be warned if they were going to be deleted (or at least apologized to if they were deleted by accident and not lied to).
>>> If you can’t think of a reason that positively improves the world for us all, and all that you’ve got is “we should hold them up as an example for others to avoid”, this post already does so and without doxxing them.
Hmm, how about "we should hold them up as an example for users to avoid".
Doxxing doesn't exist for corporations, it only exists for individual people. The proper term of art here is whistleblowing or journalism. And the reason the author avoided mentioning the company name is probably to cover someone's ass who signed an NDA.
To prevent people from getting ripped off.
Doxxing is the wrong metaphor here because it implies someone being put in a vulnerable position because of their private activity. It isn't "doxxing" to name the restaurant in town which persistently fails health department inspections, or the contractor who can't install shingles competently. Why? Because that's business, and business is in the public sphere. Providing bad reviews prevents those bad actors from harming other members of the public.
The framing of your reply hinges on an unstated assertion:
“It is always ‘right’ to name and shame a corporation.”
I contradict that assertion in my plea, which results instead in this assumption:
“Consider the ethics of the situation before naming and shaming a corporation.”
Having laid out that, I will next address the literal question asked: “doxxed”, as you correctly identified when forming your reply, is used here as a shorthand for “digging up information about an entity that was intentionally withheld from you, with intent to shun and/or shame that entity once you discover who they are”. The definition you are using more restrictively says “person” rather than “entity”, which is certainly understandable.
I hope this helps you comprehend my position better.
Therefore I don't see how there's any issue in naming a corporation for their role in a situation that affected customers/users in an adverse way. Particularly since no users are bring identified either.
In short, no real people are being doxxed and while a corporation might have some legal entitlements (none which apply here), it has no expectation of privacy.
Let's stop treating corporations as if they were somehow people. If Rachel doesn't want to share the company that's fine, I'm sure she has her reasons, but that doesn't mean it's unethical for us to know.
If a car blew up because of a faulty gas tank, is it “respectful” to not name the car company?
If a vet killed your poodle because of negligence, is it “repectful” to not name the vet?
Free markets depend on the free flow of information. “Protecting” a company that did something wrong isn’t “respectful,” it’s unethical. Knowing a company (or a person) that messed up when delivering a product or service to the public is important.
Trusting one person enough to go find which company they’re trying not to name only proves that you were able to find which company they were trying to keep you from naming.
It doesn’t in any way provide veracity to their story, but if they’ve shorted that company’s stock, it’ll certainly provide them a profit.
The issue here is that you don’t “know” anything if you _only_ dig up the company, because you don’t know anything more truthful than you did before someone told you a possibly-untrue thing.
Unfortunately, people are prone to hearing “I found a likely suspect company” and respond with “therefore the story is true, burn them to the ground”.
Feeding them a name to riot around by naming a probable suspect _without any proof_ does nothing to improve the story, and materially harms suspect companies, their founders, and their employees. I don’t mind if you share a company name when you’ve proven they did this, but if you can’t prove it, don’t just post a random company name on the Internet and say “I think it’s them”. That’s inciting a riot without cause, and why I encouraged otherwise here.
The other possibility that you didn't seem to consider is that the author (Rachel Kroll) is withholding the website's name to protect herself and not the company. If she only heard about the company's video deletion via second hand information, she'd understandably be hesitant to name the company in her blog. The person telling her the story may have not gotten the facts exactly right.
>and without doxxing them.
If a user can factually state that <RealName> cooking website deleted videos, that's not "doxxing" the company. That's a very peculiar word to use and it doesn't apply to this situation. If someone factually states that the MS Windows 10 upgrade deletes users' files, that's not "doxxing Microsoft".
Discussion like this that try to "name names" can result in people making assumptions about others (be they people or companies) that could very well be unjustified.