Comment by q1w2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by q1w2 | Hacker News Reader

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The point is that protecting your own privacy should never been used as an indication of guilt.

"If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" is the lie of the authoritarian. It is naive to think that a bad actor cannot construct a falsehood with a collection of truths.

I have worked on court cases for both individuals and (small) businesses that were innocent, but pissed off the wrong government agency, and got pushed/intimidated into pleading guilty.

Judges are flawed human beings who rule against innocent people and companies ALL THE TIME because court cases are a flurry of biased witness accounts and misleading/incomplete/subjective evidence. Folks in HN should appreciate this most because as I work in IT forensics, the judges appreciation for the technology details of cases is usually very low and they make mistakes. Defense attorneys know that and so they encourage innocent people to strike plead (guilty) deal, even when they have good evidence of their innocence because literally anything can happen in a court room. Prosecutions also know this, and so they throw absolutely everything they can think of in front of the judge, from hearsay to irrelevant data points to try to influence the judge's overall impression of the defendant so the judge will get frustrated with the complex details and rule on other subjective evidence. It's really an eye-opening experience to see people getting railroaded in court.

Few appreciate it until it happens to them, and they are presented with a subset of facts and hearsay that the prosecution has architected to paint a misleading picture in front of the court.

That is just the unfortunate reality of the world. Protecting your own or your company's privacy is the prudent way to behave even when you are completely innocent.

No one things FB is evil because they aren't transparent. It is because of the observable harm on society and their perceived reluctance to mitigate that harm. Internally, they also suffer with retention because employees don't want to work at an evil or perceived to be evil place.

Thus, FB decides to have more transparency, gets a little credit that they want to fix the problem. All good.

Now, FB then revokes that after it leads to criticism (which is the point of being transparent...), so they revert to the previous state, only now there is even more evidence and the problem is worse.

It's the height of irony that a company that profits from selling information about you would ever try to defend itself with a right to privacy. Not only is that not the issue at hand but it speaks to the lack of self-awareness that I can only hope will doom FB to irrelevance or legal destruction.

I am not arguing Facebook's goodness or evilness.

> It's the height of irony that a company that profits from selling information about you would ever try to defend itself with a right to privacy.

Everyone deserves a robust defense - even the guilty. It is not for their justice - it is to protect the integrity of the system.

Everyone also deserves the right to privacy because bad actors (competitors, disgruntled employees, political activists, etc...) are always happy to twist facts leaked to make a biased case. This happens all the time - there is no shortage of talking heads on spin alley.

You're right in that FB should have probably never tried to be more transparent - and doing so was naive and destined for failure. In the court of public opinion / social media (and eventually probably ACTUAL court someday), you simply cannot successfully voice your innocence. Even apologizing when you're wrong makes things worse.

My advice to clients is always...

#1. Shut up. Do not make public statements. Do not engage anyone publicly. Anything you say can and will be used against you - both in and out of court.

#2. See point above.

In my opinion, the correct strategy for a social media company these days is to be as ethical as possible, and to say as little as possible publicly about ethics or internal policies.

Your lecture on jurisprudence and standards of evidence is misplaced. This isn't a courtroom. We are not judges presiding over a case. These are matters of politics and profession as much as law and here we are free to interpret behavior, state our views and consider our associations as our knowledge and experience inform us. Further, unlike Facebook which has long since squandered whatever good faith one might imagine they were owed, we are owed the assumption of good faith while doing it.

It applies even more outside of a courtroom. Most people get information via very agenda-driven news articles, and not having "making sense of weird situations" as their day job, they're even more likely to be misled than judges.

At least a court has lots of rules built in to try and provide some amount of fairness to both sides in a debate. The political and public sphere has no such rules, making it even more vulnerable to such railroading.

"It applies even more outside of a courtroom."

Perhaps inside the heads of some. In the actual external world people make decisions based on incomplete information, first impression, secondhand observation, self serving bias and other imperfect influences. Neither you nor I will live to see this reality 'corrected.'

Yes, that's why corporations, even the most perfectly good ones in the world, still value their ability to keep things private.

That is also why, when one witnesses a corporation hide that which was previously observable, we may suspect malice.

Transparency and privacy aren't antonyms.

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