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Comment by cfield | Hacker News Reader

"[W]e are ready to cooperate fully [and are] ready to shutdown any form they request and provide any information we have about the user."

Does anyone else see the irony in Jotform making this statement to the Secret Service? Isn't this exactly what GoDaddy did to Jotform that is prompting the outrage?

Due process has its place in a commercial context, and it seems that both Go Daddy and Jotform might be well served to think about how to handle alleged misbehavior by their users when they receive a request from a government official.

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I see it, but I also see one man's answer to that ages old philosophy question, "Would you kill one child to save the majority?"

In his eyes, his entire business was marooned with little hope of recovery due to the limited amount of information he was working with. He was fully in bargaining mode at that point, and if they could just identify to him what the problem was, he would resolve it -- by any means necessary -- for the sake of the rest of his users and revenue.

I'm not saying that makes it different, or if it's wrong or right. I am saying I understand.

  Does anyone else see the irony in Jotform making this 
  statement to the Secret Service?

There's a difference in making this statement in a specific case and making a blanket statement saying "we will do this anytime the SS contacts us, without asking for, or verifying, the evidence".

Everyone cracks under torture and for a business owner that has spent years building something this comes fairly close.

It depends on their terms of service. Jotforms can pull any form that didn't adhere to their ToS. I suspect GoDaddy thought they were doing the same. Unfortunately, GoDaddy is horrible at dealing with things like this and likes to take a shoot first, ask questions later approach. However, the difference between the two is that GoDaddy will carpet bomb the entire site with huge. Ollateral damage while Jotforms can use a sniper rifle to take out the offending form with minimal collateral damage.

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