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Comment by lol768 | Hacker News Reader

> I always think it’s strange when people make the argument that it’s good for harmful tools to be out in the open because people can/will change their behavior because of them.

> 99.999999% of people will never see this repo, never know things like this exist, and don’t visit sites like HN but can, and probably will be, affected by it in some way.

Yup, I do think you're right. And honestly, the folks who'd probably most benefit from being able to run one of these tools to empower themselves with data that can help them change their behaviour/privacy settings - they're probably actually the folks least likely to be able to install and run the tool.

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I disagree entirely. As someone with a moderately public persona who is also in the LGBTQ+ community, having tools like this is extremely helpful, both to help me keep a grasp on information about myself and for helping less technically inclined people in my community protect themselves. It's all information that a motivated attacker could find easily with or without the tool, and there are a sufficient number of motivated attackers that any moderately public queer person will, at some point, be doxed and subjected to some level of internet harassment.

Yeah but this tool just lowered the barrier-to-entry for any motivated attacker. What before was an, oh, 20 hour slog through a bunch of sites looking for the same username, is now a 15 minute run of a script.

For an analogy, consider another tool, an app you can side-load and use to unlock any Prius made between 2010 and 2013. Is this beneficial? Certainly some affected Prius owners will be helped by its release. But affected Prius owners will be (probabilistically) harmed. Even if you're one of the group that was helped (probably arguing the exploit was already well known prior to the tool's release, perhaps?) I think it is dishonest to assert that the release of the tool is "good" from a utilitarian sense.

I wish it weren't so.

I definitely see your point, but when there are, at minimum, dozens of people who are willing to undergo that 20 hour slog, I'm glad there's a tool that makes it take mere minutes to find OSINT leaks myself.

I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong in general. It's possible this is bad for the world. But I maintain that for myself and the people I care about, it's more useful than it is damaging.

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