Always wise to remember Hanlon's razor: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence"
Occam's razor also applies here.
Occam's razor also applies here.
I now use Hanlon's Shaving Brush. Its a broad brush that I use to paint every sketchy move businesses make. "Is it malice? Or is it incompetence that merely looks like malice?". I don't care! I'll assume malice unless otherwise shown.
It's not my job to try and find out how evil shit was done accidentally. It doesn't matter if they "oopsied" into selling a firehose of my data to a "trusted partner" to analyze to death. Nobody actually gives a shit at these companies, so I need to treat them all as if they're malicious. If the underlying cause was a bit of incompetence a few years ago, that does nothing for me when I'm discovering the fuckery.
But, really, does it matter whether the bad thing is caused by incompetence or malice outside of a court of law? The bad thing happens either way.
I think attributing everything to incompetence vastly underrepresents intent. Maybe not all bad acts are malice, but too many are attributed to incompetence. Maybe it is not malice, but it can still be intentional actions against or indifferent to your interests.
Maybe it's both: malice to kick off the effort and incompetence because they got found out.
The word adequately, and the fact it was made when presuming good faith was more reasonable.
These days it's better to assume everything is theft, fraud, or marketing.
There is however research (that aligns with a lot of people's experience) to suggest psychopaths and sociopaths are very over represented in leadership:
The HN commenters tend to assume #1 when it comes to big companies, while more likely it's #2. The razors capture this situation well.