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Ah interesting! The hack itself does not worry me at all - I fully expect it and many subsequent hacks on most or all privately held data. A data breach require

by RyanZAG 11y ago

Ah interesting! The hack itself does not worry me at all - I fully expect it and many subsequent hacks on most or all privately held data. A data breach requires a single slipup by any one of thousands of people - it's inevitable in my opinion and does not really worry me. That people will give information that will cause them harm does worry me though. So we're worried by the opposite things here! Also a good lesson in how the values we have change everything. Your approach would be to try and prevent hacks to private companies in the future (futile?). My approach would be to try stop people from giving over this kind of data (futile?). I think both of our approaches are probably futile.. even more worrying!

mikeash 11y ago
Here's my thinking. The fact that people can get killed for their sexuality is the worst bit, and also the one most amenable to change. There are many societies where being outed like this wouldn't be a life-threatening situation, so it can be done. Of course, turning a place like Saudi Arabia into one of those societies is somewhat difficult, but it's a worthy goal. Hacking a company's computers and exposing people's private data is also bad, but much harder to change. I'm not sure we'll ever achieve decent computer security. Stopping attacks on the other side, by convincing people not to try, is probably also not feasible. So stuff like this will probably keep happening. Then we come to the other end of the private info, where people give it away. I'm skeptical about ever changing this too, but I think the particular case of homosexuals in places like Saudi Arabia isn't very instructive. That a person will risk their life by giving their potentially life-threatening private info to a company in order to gratify their sexuality is predictable, and doesn't really say anything about the possibility of convincing people to be more careful with their info in general.

by RyanZAG 11y ago

mikeash 11y ago

Here's my thinking. The fact that people can get killed for their sexuality is the worst bit, and also the one most amenable to change. There are many societies where being outed like this wouldn't be a life-threatening situation, so it can be done. Of course, turning a place like Saudi Arabia into one of those societies is somewhat difficult, but it's a worthy goal. Hacking a company's computers and exposing people's private data is also bad, but much harder to change. I'm not sure we'll ever achieve decent computer security. Stopping attacks on the other side, by convincing people not to try, is probably also not feasible. So stuff like this will probably keep happening. Then we come to the other end of the private info, where people give it away. I'm skeptical about ever changing this too, but I think the particular case of homosexuals in places like Saudi Arabia isn't very instructive. That a person will risk their life by giving their potentially life-threatening private info to a company in order to gratify their sexuality is predictable, and doesn't really say anything about the possibility of convincing people to be more careful with their info in general.