It is not hard to find proprietary software developers who routinely query user data for debugging and product analytics. I’ll posit that almost none of them fi

It is not hard to find proprietary software developers who routinely query user data for debugging and product analytics. I’ll posit that almost none of them find this inherently unethical, though they probably understand that Stallman does. There are of course some bright lines, like looking up people you personally know, which norms and security auditing heavily deter. But the general concept? Not at all. The HN consensus is not the industry consensus. I mean look at the Hadoop community. What do you think is in those warehouses? The weather? No. Records of user interactions.