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Comment by karzeem | Hacker News Reader

I don't know enough to have an opinion about whether it's illegal, but even assuming it is, that doesn't mean it's immoral.

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Immoral: not conforming to the patterns of conduct usually accepted or established as consistent with principles of personal and social ethics.

Typically, what is ethical is respecting the user wishes. If I say, "Don't contact me for commercial interest" (the checkbox when you post something on Craigslist) and you do so, I would say that doesn't conform to business ethics.

I'm not saying this was a good thing for AirBNB to do, but is violating the sanctity of the craigslist commercial checkbox the worst AirBNB has done? Sure, that's not a respectable way to do business, but we're not exactly talking about Enron or Bernie Madoff here.

The only reason anyone posts anything on Craigslist is to get emails for commercial interests. That's what classified ads are for. Because everyone posting apartments for rent is by definition looking to rent their apartment, I think it's well targeted enough that AirBnB would get a pass on cold emailing people if they were doing it in an ethical and upstanding way. It sounds like they weren't, but if they were then the 'one bite at the apple' law would be the governing ethical principle. (Of course the design of Craigslist makes following this rule impossible, but that's a separate issue.)

And just because something is legal, doesn't make it immoral. The law doesn't touch anything but the worst of the worst of spam.

To address your other post, I would assume that you're getting down-voted because you're playing devil's advocate by presenting that argument in a discussion of something that almost all of us would agree is immoral, regardless of legality.

Surprising downvotes. I wouldn't have thought that the HN hivemind feels that something illegal is ipso facto immoral.

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