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Genuinely hope somebody goes to prison for this, but not gonna hold my breath.
by badrequest 7y ago
Genuinely hope somebody goes to prison for this, but not gonna hold my breath.
- roywiggins 7y agoThis data is accessible at small scales just by registering for a free api key at People Data Labs and making a GET request, and if you want more robust access you could just pay PDL for it.
- badrequest 7y agoSorry, I should have been clearer, I'm talking about whoever is responsible for leaving it completely open to the public internet.
- roywiggins 7y agoThe only person harmed directly seems to be PDL since they may find it harder to charge subscriptions for bulk access to the data. I am not sure why this stuff being online in bulk is so much worse than being online behind a paywall that someone should actually go to jail for it.
- cortesoft 7y agoI mean it is INTENTIONALLY exposed to the public... the only mistake is they are giving it away instead of charging for it. If you don't like it when they give out all the information for free, it doesn't make it better if they charge money.
- shadowgovt 7y agoDepending on the countries the data is hosted in and the attacker lives in, it's unclear any law has been broken that would land a person in jail. If PDL had a flaw in their implementation that allowed someone to scrape them (or they didn't and someone did the hard work of creating 1.2 million fake accounts to register for 1,000 free API calls), it might be an uphill battle to prove even "unauthorized access."