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Comment by kevinpet | Hacker News Reader

I was with him right up until this:

"Lawyers I spoke with said that my address book — which contains my reporting sources at companies and in government — is protected under the First Amendment."

What does this even mean? Does he mean the fourth amendment? If so, lawyers would have told him "not once it leaves your phone". What do you mean by "protected"? That you can't be compelled to divulge it at all? That police need a warrant to get at it? That you can sue if someone else exposes it?

So I flipped the bozo bit. If the author plunks a meaningless but frightening sounding paragraph in the middle of an article, I just don't really put a high value on anything he has to say.

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Actually, the issue of whether or not a reporter should have a special right to preserve the anonymity of sources has been a question of First Amendment law since at least the nineteen-seventies:

http://www.rcfp.org/first-amendment-handbook/introduction-le...

And, as others have suggested, you might want to flip the "bozo bit" on the entire notion of a "bozo bit", because it's a funny metaphor but a lousy rule for real life. Everybody is a bozo some of the time.

Well if he's flipping the bozo bit instead of setting it, that means you need only be a bozo an even number of times and he won't consider you a bozo. I set the bozo bit of anyone who flips the bozo bit.

Okay, thanks for giving me the connection to the first amendment, but it still means nothing, because Path is not the government. The legal "protection" is about whether the government can force a reporter to divulge his sources. It is not magic fairy dust that imposes storage requirements on third parties.

I don't think disregarding someone's opinion because you've found a significant fault in some of their opinions. I'm not an expert on everything, but then I don't post articles on things I'm not an expert on. If the parts of an article I can can evaluate turn out to be incorrect, then I can reasonably infer that the rest of the article is of similar accuracy, even if I can't personally evaluate it.

> I just don't really put a high value on anything he has to say

Isaac Newton wasted the last decade of his life trying to turn stuff into gold, but his physical model of the universe was still quite correct, at least as a first approximation at the meso-scale (the best you could do at the time). You may find that one statement to be crazy, but I think the author still makes some important points about the flippant attitude toward privacy in the tech industry, which is supported by a thousand data points across dozens, perhaps hundreds of companies.

I'm guessing that he means a reporter's sources are protected under the freedom of the press granted by the first amendment. For a reporter, having his address book exposed could be quite a bit more damaging than for the average user.

Exactly. It's an issue because, if someone asks him for his sources, he can say no: if someone asks Path for his sources (via subpoena), they might not be able to say no. So this upload means he can no longer guarantee sources their name will never come out.

Even given the reporters' privilege, the First Amendment has nothing to do with whether it's legal (or stupid) for Path to be uploading his address book to their servers. Path is not the government.

That means he's not only a sloppy journalist for not explaining his First Amendment point, but he's doubly sloppy for implying that he talked to any lawyers while writing this article. Because if he did, they'd have said "Go check out jaylevitt's excellent comment on HN explaining why that's irrelevant."

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