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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

Really shocked by the allegations. Has any unethical behavior like this ever happened in a Silicon Valley startup before? Would there have been any way to see this coming?

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You're more than welcome to express an opinion about patterns of unethical behavior, but you'll have to do it much more substantively and thoughtfully than this. We've asked you many times to please increase the information in your posts—could you please try?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Uber and their "God Mode"/"God View" comes to mind. E.g.: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/10/03/god-view...

Stronger audit controls are the way to go for deterring this kind of abuse. Having an audit log of all privileged access, and having a different department review it (employee X accessed user Y's data, which LE request was this for?) isn't necessarily a huge burden: LE requests aren't frequent enough to justify not doing this.

This post really needs a /s on it for full effect.

I think without an /s it acts as a great sieve, sorting between the idealists and the cynics. Personally, I got the satire right away (cynic).

Wasn't the ability to access Facebook users' profiles one of the (unofficial?) perks of working there in the early days?

Also, the CEO of Reddit was caught editing user comments. https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...

Certain subreddits have changed their "edit" button to "spez" to remind people of this abuse.

They should have deleted their subreddits and move else where after that...

There's no other site with the large community that reddit has

I think the other comments under you are evidence of something like Poe's Law at work.

"Would there have been any way to see this coming?"

Stuff like this is pretty much guaranteed to happen in places that sit on a lot of data. The only question is whether it get noticed and then published.

Not sure why you're surprised. Startups often don't have much in the way of insider controls for data in their database at launch. Debugging production issues when you don't have root can be pretty inconvenient. Employees are trusted and insider threats tend not to be part of the threat model until they have more employees and more to lose.

But Snapchat has been around a while and clearly does have some internal controls over this. Not good enough, apparently.

Luckily Snapchat isn't in SV so the record of zero unethical behavior in SV remains in tact.

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