Hacker News Reader

Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Not the OP, and it's not about AT&T, but I once knew a HR person who worked for a big and world-renowned telecom company in my (East-European) country. At some point she started to suspect her then-boyfriend of cheating on her, and to convince herself she "nicely asked" one of her IT colleagues at her job to look through the SMS messages of her boyfriend stored in the company's systems (because, presumably, she couldn't lay her hands on her boyfriend's phone directly). Said IT guy did just that, i.e. informed my former acquaintance of the SMS messages on her boyfriend's phone.

View on HN

I used to work for a large midwestern wireless company and since it was "family owned" there were a ton of lax rules about stuff.

People would go through users telephone logs, listen to their voicemails and read their SMS messages. If you had the right access, it was a wide open system with little or no safeguards on it. I think back on it now and am appalled, but at the time it was a kind of running joke to the guys in tech support.

I...I would have thought that this would be an obviously unethical request to comply with.

Some years ago I was working contract for a large employer. Among other systems I had access to was the LDAP database (effectively: the full company directory).

My contract agency requested that I provide them with a company directory. I found the least helpful way to comply with that I could, with minimal information. Though thinking back on this, I 1) probably shouldn't even have done that, 2) should have refused the request, and 3) should have reported the request to the client.

And that's one of the, generally, more upstanding contract shops I've dealt with (still have occasional relations though no further gigs to date).

Dealing with ethics in the heat of it, especially where an engineering mindset tends to "this is a problem I should figure out how to solve" can be ... interesting.

Ethics obviously don't apply when a friend asks nicely...

In this case I took "nicely asked" to mean she offered him some sort of sexual favor (since paganel put it in quotes).

I suppose the problem is that there is no canonical standard of ethics to which we can point. We should write one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com