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Comment by _hgt1 | Hacker News Reader

Unlike Eich, Rice went far beyond simply holding beliefs and making donations. She held real power and used it in unconscionable ways.

Given the current climate, I find it incredible that a cloud storage company would be involved with someone who actually wiretapped members of the UN Security Council. It's almost like they're saying "thanks for all the data, oh and f* you".

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I just deleted my Dropbox account.

Dropbox provides a space to explain why you're leaving. I said Rice's actions resulted in the unnecessary death and injury of many thousands of innocent people, and I will not entrust my data or my money to a company with such a person on the board.

I'm sure my small action won't make any difference, but maybe by making this visible we achieve collectively what we can't achieve individually.

I am going to wait a week to see if Dropbox rescinds the offer to Rice. I like Dropbox as a product but Google Drive is reasonably competitive on features and less expensive.

This is the key point. The things she is being called out on are things that actually relate to her trustworthiness in the position she has entered, and as a cloud service provider trust should be very important to Dropbox.

Although I agree Rice's actions were much more direct, extensive, and much worse than Eich's by any measure, I don't agree that equal rights are necessarily less relevant to the leadership of Mozilla than neocon government overreach shenanigans is relevant to data privacy at Dropbox.

Yeah, Eich donated $1,000 to a campaign. Rice ran the campaign.

Touché...

Would there have been a campaign to run without donors?

And one campaign was to deny a group the legal right to marry, while the other was to kill thousands of people. Neither is particularly wholesome, but I think there is a difference in scale.

If you don't believe every country in the world doesn't try to bug any country they have an investment in, rather it be ally or enemy, you're naive. I can't believe it even came as surprise that US bugged its allies, you don't believe our allies do the same thing, or at least try to, to us?

"Everyone else does it so it's ok". Well we know where your moral compass points at least.

That's how it is in the spying world. You spy on everyone, including your allies. The caveat is that if you get caught, your ally gets to raise a public stink.

This being said, having a spymaster that previously worked towards questionable goals (on a scale rarely before seen) as your new director of a data storage company? Not a good idea.

Who spends 10% as much as the NSA to do it?

> Wiretapping members of the UN Security Council

You realize that is part of the reason we have the NSA, right? Only in a fantasy world do the other members not attempt to spy on the US. The reason why the NSA spying issue is wrong is because they were violating the consitutional rights of US Citizens. The German Chancellor is not a US Citizen and we have every reason to spy on her, the same goes for every other country in the world.

> The German Chancellor is not a US Citizen and we have every reason to spy on her, the same goes for every other country in the world.

This is so wrong.

It's only right if you believe there's no cost to your spying being uncovered.

If you don't think there's any cost to being caught spying, I welcome you to try spying on someone, anyone. Then you can answer the question of "Is it worth it?" which leads directly into "Is it a good idea?"

But it's reality.

So is murder, rape, starvation, racism, and lots of stuff I think is bad. I'm not sure I understand your point.

TIL only US citizens are people

No, today you learned it's only illegal for the US gov't to spy on US citizens. Spying isn't rape or murder. It's a thing that gov't does to know what's going on behind their backs. Do we have a problem with spying on Russia or China? No. Just France and Germany. Why?

What you're saying doesn't change the point that someone who promoted mass surveillance is now a director of a data storage and security company. These are directly opposite ideals.

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