7 ms·

Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors.

by q1w2 5y ago

0des 5y ago
Is there an example you have in mind?
- aerosmile 5y ago
  Yep: https://www.amazon.com/Google-Leaks-Whistleblowers-Expos%C3%A9-Censorship/dp/1510767363 https://www.amazon.com/Google-Leaks-Whistleblowers-Expos%C3%... I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences). Here's the fun part: Google considered suing, but recognized that this would trigger the Streisand Effect and let him off the hook. Obviously, this was a calculated risk this dude took and that paid off (at least from the legal perspective). Did Google act ethically 100% of the time? God no! But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha. So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it. EDIT: replaced "filtered out" with "identified"
  - xyzzy21 5y ago
    Honestly this doesn't happen if you have a good corporate culture to begin with (which Google has not had for quite a while). I always go back to my experience at HP when Bill and Dave were still alive: the leadership decision to trust employees was pretty much reciprocated so openness worked just fine. So lack of leadership skill (especially an inability to "lead by example") is usually what causes this type of situation.
    - amznthrwaway 5y ago
      A good rule of thumb as a leader, is that if you have more than 1,000 employees, at least 1 person is actively working to hurt the company. Lots of possible drivers from mental illness, to being paid by an unethical competitor, to just twisted ethics in response to some random situation…. But if you’ve got 1,000 employees, somebody is secretly trying to f* you.
    - q1w2 5y ago
      This is folly because it only takes ONE person to leak documents, and there are always disgruntled employees somewhere in a company at the scale we are talking about. You cannot assume good behavior of literally tens of thousands of employees because you have an overall "good" company culture. That's just impossible.
  - vincentmarle 5y ago
    > Here's the fun part: Google considered suing, but recognized that this would trigger the Streisand Effect and let him off the hook. Well, their strategy worked because I’ve never heard about this book.
  - scohesc 5y ago
    Interesting! I'm going to have to get a hard-copy of this book.
    - rhcom2 5y ago
      If it's the same stuff on his website it is incredibly underwhelming https://www.zachvorhies.com/google_leaks/ https://www.zachvorhies.com/google_leaks/
  - mh- 5y ago
    This book is only ~200 pages long. What am I missing?
    - Noumenon72 5y ago
      When the GP says "filtered out" the offensive ones, I think he means he filtered out the inoffensive ones and kept the offensive ones, which makes for a much shorter book.
      - aerosmile 5y ago
        Yep, sorry for the logic brain fart. Updated the parent comment accordingly.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    >>> Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors. > I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences). You also have to keep in mind that a "company-wide available internal wiki" is going to be almost entirely full of boring crap that people literally have to be paid to read. I mean, the internal wiki pages for nearly every system I've worked on in my company don't even describe what that system is supposed to do in terms someone from outside the team would understand. > So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it. It's not a "bad actor" thing to leak things like that. "Shit" that happens at low levels is still shit, even if it's not company policy coming from the top.
    - jimbob45 5y ago
      >"Shit" that happens at low levels is still shit, even if it's not company policy coming from the top. In some cases, it can be worse. If something happens at a low level that is unambiguously bad and no one at the top does anything about it despite knowing about it, then to the public, it's as if upper-management is condoning the behavior. Case in point: the Redskins practicing human trafficking with no strong public denouncement from the team's front office.
    - nostrademons 5y ago
      Google a decade ago wasn't like that. I learned so much about software development from reading internal wiki pages for things like MapReduce, GFS, Colossus, their search serving system, search algorithms in general, their authentication/ID system, GMail storage, Google Reader feed ingestion, Google Moderator voting algorithms, etc. Not to mention snooping on code reviews from folks like Jeff Dean, Rob Pike, and Guido van Rossum. It's not like that now - things are so much more locked down. The first time I was there I could basically treat it like a Ph.D that I got paid for, in terms of learning new things. This time, it's a job where I do my tasks and receive lots of money in return. I think this is kind of a shame - I liked the environment much more when most people were there to learn and invent rather than collect a paycheck - but perhaps this is the inevitable result of a company growing past 100K employees.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - refurb 5y ago
    Is your argument that the world would be a better place if those wiki pages weren’t public?
    - aerosmile 5y ago
      Not at all. Most companies are not in the business of making the world a better place, and therefore they are not going to be optimizing their info access policies against that target, but instead they will be optimizing for shareholder value or what have you. Don't confuse this statement with an endorsement - I wish it all worked differently, but this is the reality.
      - oceanplexian 5y ago
        Most companies put a lot of money and reputation on the line advertising and taking stances on current events in such a way to imply that they are "in the business of making the world a better place". Either they need to step up and practice what they preach, or a regulatory agency like the FTC should step in when they make false claims about corporate governance.
    - geofft 5y ago
      I think this comment is giving an (interesting, IMO) example of the claim "Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors" and not making a value judgment on whether it is worth the tradeoff to limit internal transparency just to have stopped this one bad actor.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    "Paid media appearances" - how would you know he got paid? I'm not on his level, but I have a book and I've done "media appearances" (BBC stations in Berkshire & Bristol). You don't get paid for promoting your book. Maybe on a TV show, the union forces them to pay you the minimum, which I believe is not very much.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha. Good. Google should not be able to hide anything from anyone, especially the public whose privacy they invade. The more leaks, the better off we are. Especially the kind of leaks that hurt them. Those are the ones we want most. If they didn't want us to find out, maybe they shouldn't have been doing it, right?
    - q1w2 5y ago
      So they should make all their code open source? Have no intellectual property rights? You are suggesting they just go bankrupt.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        > You are suggesting they just go bankrupt. I'm suggesting they stop surveilling the world's entire population. Until they stop violating our privacy, I won't feel sorry for them when others violate theirs. Total lack of privacy is exactly what these big tech companies deserve.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    > But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha. I hear this often and find it a bit puzzling. Perhaps it's part of believing that speech is violence - thinking that critical speech or angry feelings are really hurting Google. So how do you think it hurt them? Did they lose customers, and if so, how many? Did they miss a quarter? Have to lay people off? Cancel product initiatives?
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      If any of these calamities eventually happen, we'll have to blame GP post.
  - jareklupinski 5y ago
    Best Sellers Rank: #48,190 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #2 in Tribology Mechanical Engineering #4 in Content Management #10 in Online Internet Searching what the hell
- AzzieElbab 5y ago
  That FB whistleblower with PR and legal team
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Being that Whistleblower not having legal and PR teams would have been rather stupid.
    - AzzieElbab 5y ago
      She is not whistleblower, she is a front
      - thatguy0900 5y ago
        Even if this was true, should I care? If the leaked documents are real then it doesn't matter.
      - cguess 5y ago
        For who?
        themaninthedark 5y ago
        Limited Hangout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout Not necessarily saying that is the case but if you wanted to steer regulation in a direction....
        jessaustin 5y ago
        FB saying "please oh please don't regulate social networks!" sure would seem like Br'er Rabbit. Most prospective regulations in this area would have a bigger impact on e.g. a completely open community-driven network, for example.
        AzzieElbab 5y ago
        Interesting. I was thinking more in line of ppl simply siphoning money and power from fb. I don’t see a grand scheme here, just some blood in the water.
- joshstrange 5y ago
  Not sure if this applies but the Obama administration has spoken previously about how releasing/publishing their visitor list was something they regretted. They got mild accolades at the time of doing it (in a move to be more transparent that other administrations) and then the right wing (mainly) used the visitor log to make hay for 8 years. Then the Trump admin stopped releasing the info and no one made a big deal about it (relative to the number of stories written about who showed up on the lists the Obama admin released).
- nostrademons 5y ago
  Google used to (c. 2005-2008) let you freely download your contacts & email from GMail, either as a file or an API. Facebook used this to seed Facebook. When you signed up with an @gmail.com account for Facebook, it'd prompt you to import all your contacts, and then send them all an e-mail inviting them to sign up for Facebook. Google's requests for some reciprocity from Facebook, where users would own their own social graph through technologies like OpenSocial, naturally fell on deaf ears. Google walled off their own platform and decided to abandon open standards for proprietary systems a couple years later, and this is a large reason why we can't have nice things. I believe GDPR enforces the ability to download all your data and both Google and Facebook offer it, but it's practically useless now. GDPR also makes the regulatory burden of starting a new social network impractical, so it's not like we could get an ecosystem of interoperable competitors.
  - HolidayguyNOR 5y ago
    > I believe GDPR enforces the ability to download all your data Only data you have provided, both directly (entered name) and indirectly (e.g. page views). Analyses generated by the company based on that data aren't included in the insight right. I would presume both facebook and google have a lot of data that fall in the exempt category.
JadeNB 5y ago
Pretending that transparency always has only good effects is clearly nonsense; but I think that pretending that the lack of transparency ever has good effects is suspect at best.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  Well said.
- jstanley 5y ago
  Since transparency is the opposite of lack of transparency, I don't understand how transparency can have bad effects without the opposite (lack of transparency) having the opposite (good) effect. It can't both be the case that transparency ever has bad effects and lack of transparency never has good effects: pick one of the bad effects of transparency and introduce "lack of transparency" in its place. Isn't that bad effect now gone? Isn't that a good effect of the lack of transparency?
  - watwut 5y ago
    The whole point of 1:1 is that some privacy allows people to say things they would not otherwise. So yes, lack of transparency can have good effect.
    - taeric 5y ago
      I want to believe this. I also believe that 1:1s is a bit of an aggressive tactic to force someone to talk when they may not want to. :(
      - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
        It's a hard problem. Some people don't want to talk for good, well-founded reasons; others (and I'm often guilty of this myself) don't want to talk because they just instinctively flinch away from hard but necessary discussions.
      - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
topspin 5y ago
No one owes Facebook the benefit of that doubt.
- q1w2 5y ago
  The point is that protecting your own privacy should never been used as an indication of guilt. "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" is the lie of the authoritarian. It is naive to think that a bad actor cannot construct a falsehood with a collection of truths. I have worked on court cases for both individuals and (small) businesses that were innocent, but pissed off the wrong government agency, and got pushed/intimidated into pleading guilty. Judges are flawed human beings who rule against innocent people and companies ALL THE TIME because court cases are a flurry of biased witness accounts and misleading/incomplete/subjective evidence. Folks in HN should appreciate this most because as I work in IT forensics, the judges appreciation for the technology details of cases is usually very low and they make mistakes. Defense attorneys know that and so they encourage innocent people to strike plead (guilty) deal, even when they have good evidence of their innocence because literally anything can happen in a court room. Prosecutions also know this, and so they throw absolutely everything they can think of in front of the judge, from hearsay to irrelevant data points to try to influence the judge's overall impression of the defendant so the judge will get frustrated with the complex details and rule on other subjective evidence. It's really an eye-opening experience to see people getting railroaded in court. Few appreciate it until it happens to them, and they are presented with a subset of facts and hearsay that the prosecution has architected to paint a misleading picture in front of the court. That is just the unfortunate reality of the world. Protecting your own or your company's privacy is the prudent way to behave even when you are completely innocent.
  - JAlexoid 5y ago
    Transparency and privacy aren't antonyms.
  - topspin 5y ago
    Your lecture on jurisprudence and standards of evidence is misplaced. This isn't a courtroom. We are not judges presiding over a case. These are matters of politics and profession as much as law and here we are free to interpret behavior, state our views and consider our associations as our knowledge and experience inform us. Further, unlike Facebook which has long since squandered whatever good faith one might imagine they were owed, we are owed the assumption of good faith while doing it.
varelse 5y ago
Are you suggesting in a roundabout way that we should get rid of all the things that can encourage bad actors?
na85 5y ago
Facebook's existence encourages bad actors.

Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors.

by q1w2 5y ago

Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors.

0des 5y ago

Is there an example you have in mind?

aerosmile 5y ago
Yep: https://www.amazon.com/Google-Leaks-Whistleblowers-Expos%C3%A9-Censorship/dp/1510767363 https://www.amazon.com/Google-Leaks-Whistleblowers-Expos%C3%... I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences). Here's the fun part: Google considered suing, but recognized that this would trigger the Streisand Effect and let him off the hook. Obviously, this was a calculated risk this dude took and that paid off (at least from the legal perspective). Did Google act ethically 100% of the time? God no! But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha. So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it. EDIT: replaced "filtered out" with "identified"
- xyzzy21 5y ago
  Honestly this doesn't happen if you have a good corporate culture to begin with (which Google has not had for quite a while). I always go back to my experience at HP when Bill and Dave were still alive: the leadership decision to trust employees was pretty much reciprocated so openness worked just fine. So lack of leadership skill (especially an inability to "lead by example") is usually what causes this type of situation.
  - amznthrwaway 5y ago
    A good rule of thumb as a leader, is that if you have more than 1,000 employees, at least 1 person is actively working to hurt the company. Lots of possible drivers from mental illness, to being paid by an unethical competitor, to just twisted ethics in response to some random situation…. But if you’ve got 1,000 employees, somebody is secretly trying to f* you.
  - q1w2 5y ago
    This is folly because it only takes ONE person to leak documents, and there are always disgruntled employees somewhere in a company at the scale we are talking about. You cannot assume good behavior of literally tens of thousands of employees because you have an overall "good" company culture. That's just impossible.
- vincentmarle 5y ago
  > Here's the fun part: Google considered suing, but recognized that this would trigger the Streisand Effect and let him off the hook. Well, their strategy worked because I’ve never heard about this book.
- scohesc 5y ago
  Interesting! I'm going to have to get a hard-copy of this book.
  - rhcom2 5y ago
    If it's the same stuff on his website it is incredibly underwhelming https://www.zachvorhies.com/google_leaks/ https://www.zachvorhies.com/google_leaks/
- mh- 5y ago
  This book is only ~200 pages long. What am I missing?
  - Noumenon72 5y ago
    When the GP says "filtered out" the offensive ones, I think he means he filtered out the inoffensive ones and kept the offensive ones, which makes for a much shorter book.
    - aerosmile 5y ago
      Yep, sorry for the logic brain fart. Updated the parent comment accordingly.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  >>> Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors. > I'll save you the read. A Google employee downloaded 100k documents from the company-wide available internal wiki, identified all the ones that seemed anywhere from highly-to-mildly offensive to anyone in the world, and then published it all as a book on Amazon. The book has been out for about a year and continues to sell well (not to mention the hundreds of paid media appearances for the author to speak in front of like-minded audiences). You also have to keep in mind that a "company-wide available internal wiki" is going to be almost entirely full of boring crap that people literally have to be paid to read. I mean, the internal wiki pages for nearly every system I've worked on in my company don't even describe what that system is supposed to do in terms someone from outside the team would understand. > So clearly there's a market out there for juicy internal documents. I would still say the first step is not to do anything wrong, ever. But once you have enough people working for you and you can't be in every meeting at all times, shit is going to happen, and people are going to want to pay to find out about it. It's not a "bad actor" thing to leak things like that. "Shit" that happens at low levels is still shit, even if it's not company policy coming from the top.
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    >"Shit" that happens at low levels is still shit, even if it's not company policy coming from the top. In some cases, it can be worse. If something happens at a low level that is unambiguously bad and no one at the top does anything about it despite knowing about it, then to the public, it's as if upper-management is condoning the behavior. Case in point: the Redskins practicing human trafficking with no strong public denouncement from the team's front office.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    Google a decade ago wasn't like that. I learned so much about software development from reading internal wiki pages for things like MapReduce, GFS, Colossus, their search serving system, search algorithms in general, their authentication/ID system, GMail storage, Google Reader feed ingestion, Google Moderator voting algorithms, etc. Not to mention snooping on code reviews from folks like Jeff Dean, Rob Pike, and Guido van Rossum. It's not like that now - things are so much more locked down. The first time I was there I could basically treat it like a Ph.D that I got paid for, in terms of learning new things. This time, it's a job where I do my tasks and receive lots of money in return. I think this is kind of a shame - I liked the environment much more when most people were there to learn and invent rather than collect a paycheck - but perhaps this is the inevitable result of a company growing past 100K employees.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- refurb 5y ago
  Is your argument that the world would be a better place if those wiki pages weren’t public?
  - aerosmile 5y ago
    Not at all. Most companies are not in the business of making the world a better place, and therefore they are not going to be optimizing their info access policies against that target, but instead they will be optimizing for shareholder value or what have you. Don't confuse this statement with an endorsement - I wish it all worked differently, but this is the reality.
    - oceanplexian 5y ago
      Most companies put a lot of money and reputation on the line advertising and taking stances on current events in such a way to imply that they are "in the business of making the world a better place". Either they need to step up and practice what they preach, or a regulatory agency like the FTC should step in when they make false claims about corporate governance.
  - geofft 5y ago
    I think this comment is giving an (interesting, IMO) example of the claim "Sometimes transparency encourages bad actors" and not making a value judgment on whether it is worth the tradeoff to limit internal transparency just to have stopped this one bad actor.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  "Paid media appearances" - how would you know he got paid? I'm not on his level, but I have a book and I've done "media appearances" (BBC stations in Berkshire & Bristol). You don't get paid for promoting your book. Maybe on a TV show, the union forces them to pay you the minimum, which I believe is not very much.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha. Good. Google should not be able to hide anything from anyone, especially the public whose privacy they invade. The more leaks, the better off we are. Especially the kind of leaks that hurt them. Those are the ones we want most. If they didn't want us to find out, maybe they shouldn't have been doing it, right?
  - q1w2 5y ago
    So they should make all their code open source? Have no intellectual property rights? You are suggesting they just go bankrupt.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      > You are suggesting they just go bankrupt. I'm suggesting they stop surveilling the world's entire population. Until they stop violating our privacy, I won't feel sorry for them when others violate theirs. Total lack of privacy is exactly what these big tech companies deserve.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > But did it hurt them to have everything out in the open? You betcha. I hear this often and find it a bit puzzling. Perhaps it's part of believing that speech is violence - thinking that critical speech or angry feelings are really hurting Google. So how do you think it hurt them? Did they lose customers, and if so, how many? Did they miss a quarter? Have to lay people off? Cancel product initiatives?
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    If any of these calamities eventually happen, we'll have to blame GP post.
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  Best Sellers Rank: #48,190 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #2 in Tribology Mechanical Engineering #4 in Content Management #10 in Online Internet Searching what the hell
AzzieElbab 5y ago
That FB whistleblower with PR and legal team
- hef19898 5y ago
  Being that Whistleblower not having legal and PR teams would have been rather stupid.
  - AzzieElbab 5y ago
    She is not whistleblower, she is a front
    - thatguy0900 5y ago
      Even if this was true, should I care? If the leaked documents are real then it doesn't matter.
    - cguess 5y ago
      For who?
      - themaninthedark 5y ago
        Limited Hangout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout Not necessarily saying that is the case but if you wanted to steer regulation in a direction....
        jessaustin 5y ago
        FB saying "please oh please don't regulate social networks!" sure would seem like Br'er Rabbit. Most prospective regulations in this area would have a bigger impact on e.g. a completely open community-driven network, for example.
        AzzieElbab 5y ago
        Interesting. I was thinking more in line of ppl simply siphoning money and power from fb. I don’t see a grand scheme here, just some blood in the water.
joshstrange 5y ago
Not sure if this applies but the Obama administration has spoken previously about how releasing/publishing their visitor list was something they regretted. They got mild accolades at the time of doing it (in a move to be more transparent that other administrations) and then the right wing (mainly) used the visitor log to make hay for 8 years. Then the Trump admin stopped releasing the info and no one made a big deal about it (relative to the number of stories written about who showed up on the lists the Obama admin released).
nostrademons 5y ago
Google used to (c. 2005-2008) let you freely download your contacts & email from GMail, either as a file or an API. Facebook used this to seed Facebook. When you signed up with an @gmail.com account for Facebook, it'd prompt you to import all your contacts, and then send them all an e-mail inviting them to sign up for Facebook. Google's requests for some reciprocity from Facebook, where users would own their own social graph through technologies like OpenSocial, naturally fell on deaf ears. Google walled off their own platform and decided to abandon open standards for proprietary systems a couple years later, and this is a large reason why we can't have nice things. I believe GDPR enforces the ability to download all your data and both Google and Facebook offer it, but it's practically useless now. GDPR also makes the regulatory burden of starting a new social network impractical, so it's not like we could get an ecosystem of interoperable competitors.
- HolidayguyNOR 5y ago
  > I believe GDPR enforces the ability to download all your data Only data you have provided, both directly (entered name) and indirectly (e.g. page views). Analyses generated by the company based on that data aren't included in the insight right. I would presume both facebook and google have a lot of data that fall in the exempt category.

JadeNB 5y ago

Pretending that transparency always has only good effects is clearly nonsense; but I think that pretending that the lack of transparency ever has good effects is suspect at best.

aerosmile 5y ago
Well said.
jstanley 5y ago
Since transparency is the opposite of lack of transparency, I don't understand how transparency can have bad effects without the opposite (lack of transparency) having the opposite (good) effect. It can't both be the case that transparency ever has bad effects and lack of transparency never has good effects: pick one of the bad effects of transparency and introduce "lack of transparency" in its place. Isn't that bad effect now gone? Isn't that a good effect of the lack of transparency?
- watwut 5y ago
  The whole point of 1:1 is that some privacy allows people to say things they would not otherwise. So yes, lack of transparency can have good effect.
  - taeric 5y ago
    I want to believe this. I also believe that 1:1s is a bit of an aggressive tactic to force someone to talk when they may not want to. :(
    - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      It's a hard problem. Some people don't want to talk for good, well-founded reasons; others (and I'm often guilty of this myself) don't want to talk because they just instinctively flinch away from hard but necessary discussions.
    - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

topspin 5y ago

No one owes Facebook the benefit of that doubt.

q1w2 5y ago
The point is that protecting your own privacy should never been used as an indication of guilt. "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" is the lie of the authoritarian. It is naive to think that a bad actor cannot construct a falsehood with a collection of truths. I have worked on court cases for both individuals and (small) businesses that were innocent, but pissed off the wrong government agency, and got pushed/intimidated into pleading guilty. Judges are flawed human beings who rule against innocent people and companies ALL THE TIME because court cases are a flurry of biased witness accounts and misleading/incomplete/subjective evidence. Folks in HN should appreciate this most because as I work in IT forensics, the judges appreciation for the technology details of cases is usually very low and they make mistakes. Defense attorneys know that and so they encourage innocent people to strike plead (guilty) deal, even when they have good evidence of their innocence because literally anything can happen in a court room. Prosecutions also know this, and so they throw absolutely everything they can think of in front of the judge, from hearsay to irrelevant data points to try to influence the judge's overall impression of the defendant so the judge will get frustrated with the complex details and rule on other subjective evidence. It's really an eye-opening experience to see people getting railroaded in court. Few appreciate it until it happens to them, and they are presented with a subset of facts and hearsay that the prosecution has architected to paint a misleading picture in front of the court. That is just the unfortunate reality of the world. Protecting your own or your company's privacy is the prudent way to behave even when you are completely innocent.
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  Transparency and privacy aren't antonyms.
- topspin 5y ago
  Your lecture on jurisprudence and standards of evidence is misplaced. This isn't a courtroom. We are not judges presiding over a case. These are matters of politics and profession as much as law and here we are free to interpret behavior, state our views and consider our associations as our knowledge and experience inform us. Further, unlike Facebook which has long since squandered whatever good faith one might imagine they were owed, we are owed the assumption of good faith while doing it.

varelse 5y ago

Are you suggesting in a roundabout way that we should get rid of all the things that can encourage bad actors?

na85 5y ago

Facebook's existence encourages bad actors.