Comment by beaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beaker | Hacker News Reader

I probably should keep my mouth shut, but after seeing so many posts about how great Path is for giving such a genuine and heartfelt "mea culpa", I can't help it. A friend of mine did some work for an older version of Path.com which included an installable desktop client. One of the key features in the spec was the ability to grab the users entire address book without ever letting them know what was happening (e.g. no alerts or confirmation). This behavior wasn't a mistake or an oversight, it was completely intentional from the beginning. Of course my friend thought this was a bit shady, but the truth is that shady tactics are used all the time in the software industry for one reason - because they make money.

When Path states they didn't realize users would feel deceived and that they only intended to use the information to make better suggestions for the user's contact list, well, I don't want to sound cynical, but I think anyone who blindly believes these kinds of statements (from Path, Facebook, or any other company) is either personally/financially interested or extremely naive.

It's very clear it has all been with the intention of deception.

Gawker's Ryan Tate reports that he specifically confronted the CEO Dave Morin about the address stealing behavior last year and he officially denied that they were doing it.

http://gawker.com/5883549/dont-forgive-path-the-creepy-iphon...

The update section in that link makes it even worse. Mr. Morin is stating that technically he was right because Path.com wasn't collecting data at the time he was interviewed. Which means this was a calculated move to add this "feature" at the behest of a something (a VC or an itch to increase the feature-set maybe?). A facing saving gesture at that point might have been a blog post detailing the change in privacy policy/ToS. An apology now means little to me.

You attribute malice to where there probably is none.

I reckon the more likely truth is that the Path folk genuinely saw nothing wrong with what they were doing. There are a group of people (call them the Facebook crowd, if you want) who think that excessive privacy is unnecessary, extending that thought to sharing people's address books.

There is no ill goodwill in his assessment. There is no way around it. Path is just like anything other company. They are in business to make money. No different than Google. No different than Facebook. No different than Apple. How they go about making money and the moral choices they make vary greatly. Whether they genuinely thought what they did was wrong or not doesn't make it right. They perfectly well knew what they were doing. Just like management at Sanlu knew what they were doing when they added melamine to the baby milk formula. The decisions were made with the bottom line in mind.

> You attribute malice to where there probably is none.

No one ever says "I'll be evil". Instead, they come up with ways to justify the evil that they do.

The only reason for giving someone who "meant well" a pass is if it's likely that the bad outcome was fairly unexpected. If, as is usually the case, the bad outcome was likely, they should be held accountable for intending it, just as we do with drunk drivers. No, "meaning well" isn't an excuse for ignoring reality.

Remember, most of the world's horrors are caused by folks who claim that they're trying to do good.

>the more likely truth is that the Path folk genuinely saw nothing wrong with what they were doing

A child would know that this was wrong. It's that simple.

The previous replies do a good job of addressing your post, so I won't repeat what's already been said. The only thing I want to point out is that the in the specification I mentioned in my original post, the requirement was to circumvent the operating system's built-in warning to the user when their contacts were being accessed. Why go through the trouble to do this except to consciously deprive the user of the ability to say no? iOS doesn't have such a warning (and therefore I don't think the current issue is equally as egregious as this), but I think a lot of people are starting to wish it did.

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