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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

Court proceedings are public.

If Vincent Fratta is alleged to have urinated in a public park and gets arrested for it that's public information, and those kind of things often end up in police blotters, even if the charges are later dropped. If Vincent Fratta is overwhelmed by medical debt and files for bankruptcy that's in the public record as well.

But we should concern ourselves with Vincent Fratta's privacy when he botches a financial transaction in a way that has hundreds of millions of dollars in consequences for public companies and involves an interesting and newsworthy legal precedent?

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The information is already public - why distribute it widely when there are potential negative consequences for the named in doing so?

Are you the judge to rule whether the individual has lost his right of privacy?

Yet you comment here under a pseudonym. What if you made a mistake, would you want to be named?

> Are you the judge to rule whether the individual has lost his right of privacy?

I mean, there is an actual judge. This is a major legal case, and they've placed the info in the public record. The judge has in fact made a ruling.

I'm not saying it's always a perfect system, but it's definitely a very well established system in the U.S. that all court proceedings are very public. It's one of the core founding principles of the judicial branch, and it's also been a staple of American journalism for hundreds of years.

I personally think the European approach is much better on this specific issue, and that right to be forgotten laws and similar are justified.

But the reason I mentioned it in this context is that the idea that journalists naming people who are clearly notable in the context of reporting news only seems to generate a critical response when it's someone that the average HN reader identifies with.

(Your last sentence is a fine point, but they aren't pseudonymous. Their bio contains personally identifiable information.)

I don’t think those first two examples should be done either. In many countries in central and Northern Europe, it’s common journalistic practice not to print the names of those accused of crimes. Innocent until proven guilty, right? I think we’ll look back at the NYT et al publishing mugshots and full names of the accused as downright barbaric.

nobody except the person who approved GUI botched anything here.

And just because you can name the persons, doesn't mean you should.

It's different, if person is caught doing something illegal, that his name does add to the story.

But this was just big oopsie, and individuals did nothing wrong. (or you can bet, Citibank would try do divert blame on them)

Undoubtedly this mistake and the media coverage has ruined this employee’s life, for something that’s surely a very poorly run operation. Anyone who has ever worked in operations knows this type of error happens daily and repeatedly.

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