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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I very much want the blame to be on the person who broke into my house regardless of whether my door was locked or my window was open.

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Which works great when there's some kind of access restriction in place.

If you wind up putting your tax returns in the 'little free library' you set up on your front yard, you can't blame others for reading them, then handing them back to you and not telling anyone else.

That's the proper analogy for what happened in the original article.

This doesn’t track at all. This is me telling you that your forms are on my desk and throwing you the keys to my office. And then after getting your papers you go rummaging around other stuff.

Like sure I’m accepting a risk that you could do that but you’re still a dick if you actually do.

Content you're serving on a public URL is content you have published. It's not your house and you didn't extend anyone any trust or limited access. You put it in The New York Times. Maybe you hoped no one would find it because it's on page B30 and most people only read A1. But people are allowed to read page B30 if they want to.

The point is that there's no keys involved, nothing in your private office. No rummaging either.

Publishing to a public web server is analogous to that little free library, out in the yard. No keys, anyone can look in it at any time. If you accidentally put something sensitive in there, where anyone can see it without any access control, you can't blame them for doing so.

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