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Comment by warpspin | Hacker News Reader

I think what angered people was actually that a company saying to hold privacy high was simply refusing to change something after a mistake was pointed out and instead kept on defending it with a technical argument, which makes no sense at all.

The reaction would have been actually a lot different if someone from the company admitted the mistake and promised it will be changed.

Update: Gabriel Weinberg has promised to change it, linking it here so it does not get buried in the pile of comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23711597

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Read your comment again.

You are faulting someone for defending thier own argument. You suggest that people who do not cow and apologize to the mob deserve the anger and retribution the mob has to offer.

People have a right to think differently and express themselves without threats, bullying, or shaming.

The mob does not deserve apologies. The comment above is spot on - we've lost all sense of proportionality.

It is an indication of the modern online mob sickness that they always demand others beg for forgiveness.

What emotional void are mob participants trying to fill with the apologies of others?

i cant fully agree.

you obviously should be allowed to make a mistake and be forgiven for it. that does not mean that i personally would ever forgive any `company` that markets itself as pro-privacy after its been caught gathering data on its users.

i could forgive the people working at the company and would definitely expect future employers not to hold that against them, however.

but if a `company` does something while claiming to stand morally opposed to exactly that.... proves that it doesn't actually care about the topic. it just wants the publicity for marketability, discrediting them entirely for all future communication.

in this particular case, i wouldn't go that far however. they weren't gathering any data on their users if i understood it correctly. it was just a badly implemented feature, which will get changed

This is a really strange take.

Once people have gone down the avenue of earnestly reporting private information leakage, the correct answer is to investigate. DDG decided not to do this and instead dismissed the problem completely out of hand and ignored it for almost a year without taking any action.

No one asked for an apology, they asked DDG to admit fault and then to fix the problem. ie "we shouldn't have done that" not "we're sorry we did that."

You keep saying "mob" but these people didn't collect to harass, if you actually read all of the comments the vast majority are people who are (rightly!) concerned about their data privacy advocate built software leaking every visited URL.

You’re absolutely ignoring the possibility of an argument where there is no fault and this is being blown out of proportion. You just assume your opinion is correct and they owe you to fix it. That is in itself the problem OP was exposing.

Great! Can you provide that argument or am I supposed to think it up myself?

>defending it with a technical argument, which makes no sense at all.

Well hold on now. If there's a valid technical argument, and it's not a violation of privacy, why doesn't that make sense?

If people are so distrustful of DDG that they don't believe that argument, why use their browser under any circumstance?

A performance optimization around a trivial thing like a favicon is no reason to destroy everyone's security.

Let's assume DDG is a great and honest company and will collect all the info, but never use it for anything bad. Guess what, they can get still hacked and all the info leaks out.

This is a horrendous breach of trust that they WERE collecting it however, and I'm glad they got caught. It will not be tolerated. They'll have to change this or face a revolt.

Yeah people burnt witches in the past ...

If they are confident that this feature has no privacy implications they are right to defend the point, despite what people say or think

People don't run DDG, the company

People can use another search engine if they want

I'll keep using DDG anyway

DDG can do what they want and people can as a result publicly state their opinions on it. Freedom goes both ways.

You’ve described the race to the bottom we live in. Can we please try and break the cycle?

Those witches have a right to be on fire.

Where's my pitchfork?

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