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Comment by SamAtt | Hacker News Reader

This probably (definitely?) makes me a jerk but I have to say it: They deserved it.

I'm sorry but in this day and age anyone trusting their data to a device that stores it exclusively on the server deserves what they get.

Some will say "the type of person who uses these devices isn't the type of person to understand where their data is located" but I say that's BS. We're in a data centric world now and I don't think it's asking that much for people to be aware of where their data is kept and to make sure they have some kind of "backup" guarantee.

To Anyone Downvoting This: Let me ask you one question. If someone without a seatbelt gets hit by a drunk driver does the fact that the accident's the drunk driver's fault mean it was ok for them not to wear a seatbelt? Or can someone be responsible for their own irresponsibility even though the damage was caused by a party that was more to blame?

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If you use Gmail, Facebook, or any kind of SaaS, you are very much from "this day and age" and using the latest from the greatest and is trusting your data exclusively to a server!

Heck, you trust your money to a bank! You trust your bus driver not to crash the bus, your doctor to properly heal you, and your lawyer to put you out of trouble, you also trust your cook to make the meal you like.

Everyday, you give trust to many individuals and entities to whom you delegate tasks that you may or may not know how to do.

Sidekick screwed up, but I would never blame the ones who trusted them what they(the clients) did is completely normal!

I'm sorry but if you are content to leave the only copy of priceless things such as contacts, treasured photos, etc... in the hands of companies with no contractual obligation to you than yes, you're a fool.

The bank legally owes me my money. The bus driver is guilty of a crime if he crashes the bus. The Doctor is guilty of malpractice. If gmail deletes your account you have absolutely not recourse what so ever. None, Zip. Zilch. Zero.

Sidekick did screw up but it doesn't make the people who lost their data innocent either. You have to take responsibility for that which you value.

Uh, what?

Every day there are posts here about how great the Cloud is, and how we should just dump our data there and not have worry about data centers ourselves. Isn't that exactly what was done here - individual handheld users put their personal data into "the Cloud" (in this case, Microsoft's cloud) and then got hosed when the Cloud busted, as happens in traditional Cloud-computing applications. Should we now say that everyone who loses data when EC2 crashes deserves what they get as well?

As for your second point about where users knowing where their data is located, I call BS on that. The majority of people out there over the age of 40 have no concept of the abstract notion of "data", or that it has a location. For them, data is located where they physically access it. Technology is (should be?) about making life simpler and abstracting away bits that people don't need to know about or have the knowledge to make decisions about - for 95% of people, this includes where the contacts on their mobile phone are stored.

If you think people should know where their individual bits of data are, try explaining to my mom how her contacts could live on her SIM card, in her device's memory, and on her desktop computer, and then ask her what the best place is for them.

1. I'm sorry but any admin who trusts their data solely to the cloud is foolish. It's just that simple. You really think an admin in a company is going to keep their job if they trust all their data to the cloud and then the cloud company screws up and loses it. No, because they were the one responsible for the data and they should have made backups.

Same here. Sidekick screwed up. No question. But that doesn't make it ok for the users not to have this data backed up.

2. How about you read my post before commenting on it. I didn't say they did know where their data is I said they had a responsibility to and if they weren't they were being irresponsible.

> To Anyone Downvoting This: Let me ask you one question. If someone without a seatbelt gets hit by a drunk driver does the fact that the accident's the drunk driver's fault mean it was ok for them not to wear a seatbelt?

Is a lack of a seatbelt the cause of the accident? Would having a seatbelt on prevent the accident? Is the drunk driver not the 'most guilty' party here?

No offense, but this is the type of situation where the company (Microsoft/Danger) needs to really get smacked back into the Stone Age. It's a case of huge neglect if they just lost all of their customers' data. I mean what will probably happen is just an apology with a, 'sorry this won't happen again folks' is wholly inadequate for what they caused.

Reaching into your other comment, while the bus driver and doctor have laws stating that they have legal responsibilities, there seriously needs to be one here. Regardless of consumers' ability to backup their own data, this sort of incompetence is unacceptable from any company operating on this sort of scale.

It really enrages me that the likely outcome of this whole thing will probably be less than a slap on the wrist, if that. While I'm not really a proponent of 'cloud services,' the fact that companies feel that they can offer these services and try to weasel out of any sort of damages they might cause through their incompetence by trying to add things like, "we are no liable for any damages" in some contract pisses me off. This is the same sort of legal nonsense as the 'arbitration' clauses in EULAs where the company is the one that gets to choose the person that will decide who is right and wrong in disputes... and someone somewhere in the company actually believes that this is fair.

Totally agree with you here. However, most of the large companies have TOS that explicitly say they are not responsible for your data. That is where I think there needs to be a Bill of Rights for data. If you pay for a service, there should be some level of guarantee that they will at least try... and remove those clauses in their TOS.

I'd agree with you if you said that they deserved an outage of a few hours; that's the risk you run when someone else controls your data. Once in a while, things fail; when it happens to you and you control the data, you spend those few hours fixing whatever's wrong. When your data are in someone else's hands, you sit around writing angry tweets about it until it's fixed.

In the worst case, maybe you'll lose up to 24 hours of changes in case a backup needs to be restored.

For the data to be lost entirely, with no backup whatsoever, simply beggars belief.

But what you're missing is they had no guarantee that the data would be backed up. No one told them the data would be backed up.

If you hand priceless data over to someone who openly tells you they won't back it up they might be the idiot but you're still irresponsible.

Are you storing your Hacker News comments client-side? To use the Internet is to trust servers.

If my comments disappear tomorrow it's not going to have a huge negative impact on me. Not like losing my entire address book would.

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