Hacker News Reader

Comment by keenmaster | Hacker News Reader

The vast majority of users do not expect that their digital identity could be stitched together so easily. We can either imply that they deserve this for imagining they had any privacy, or we could take a normative stance and make it difficult to reveal someone’s private information. We have a choice. We can pass laws and ban this nonsense.

View on HN

If they use the same username on a public site they should expect it. This is common sense. Then again, this is the same world where people voluntarily upload their entire lives to social networks, then complain about "privacy."

I bet most of them use the same password with that same username too.

The scale makes the difference. Similarly, you don’t expect your appearances in public spaces to be private, but you would likely object if someone could arbitrarily pull video recordings of you and trace your movement through the day.

What private information? This links to public profiles.

I would never register an account on Twitter, put information in my public profile, then consider that to be private information that people should not know about. And if I did do that, I did that, this tool did not do that. And the "privacy" is already breached regardless of whether this tool exists or not. That definition of "privacy" is incoherent. Something deliberately shared in a public profile is not private information by definition.

Sorry, but what people expect doesn't matter. What is true is that digital identities are intrinsically linked between sites where the same username is used.

You can't hide behind, "but no one expected that" and expect to live a happy, unsurprising life. There is no law you can pass that will fix this, no matter how much you complain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com