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Only problem is: It was not a mistake. They did this only to cover their asses and that has been the only concern they've ever had. That they already tried to

• jxcole 15y ago
  You seem to define a mistake as 'an error in the code'. However, their use of the term mistake to be 'an error in judgement' or 'an error in the value of user's privacy', is also valid. When someone does something immoral, saying that it was a mistake because they didn't think it was immoral at the time (but now they realise it is) can, in many situations, be a good response. Of course, there are some things for which no amount of apology could ever bring about true forgiveness (think godaddy). I personally don't feel this is one of those times, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. EDIT: Switching "amoral" to "immoral"
  • Kuiper 15y ago
    Sorry to pick on semantics, but wanted to clarify this because I initially was confused when reading your post: you meant "immoral," correct? "Amoral" does not mean "morally wrong," but rather refers to things which are morally agnostic. It actually seems to me that Path believed their actions were amoral, that is, not registering anywhere on the moral spectrum (neither right nor wrong).
    • Tossrock 15y ago
      Well, as long as we're picking on semantics, that's not what amoral means. Amoral means lacking _regard for_ morality. You use it to describe a person or other entity that is unconcerned with the morality of their actions. Which fits Path pretty well.
      • Kuiper 15y ago
        Both uses of "amoral" are correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoral http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoral "Amorality, the absence of morality; for example, a stone, a chair, or the sky may be considered amoral", http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/amoral http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/amoral "not involving questions of right or wrong; without moral quality; neither moral nor immoral."
        • Tossrock 15y ago
          I think Wikipedia is in the wrong here. In fact, if you read the article linked from the disambiguation page, it strongly supports the definition shown in all dictionaries, and makes no mention of rocks or chairs being 'amoral'. Regardless, none of this bears out the idea of 'amoral' meaning morally agnostic, ie actions having no moral component, and your initial semantic nitpick was itself incorrect.
          • astine 15y ago
            If by "all dictionaries" you mean no dictionary I've ever read, nor the one quoted for you right here. You're wrong.
• smackfu 15y ago
  You are using a very fine definition of "mistake", more like a synonym for "bug" or "defect". But it's also possible for management to make a mistaken decision, and that's what Path is meaning here.
• orblivion 15y ago
  > if they honestly didn't understand that what they did was wrong they don't deserve to be trusted again, not never. And if they did understand that it was unethical, which they undoubtedly did, it is even worse. This is precisely my reaction to Facebook's Beacon. I decided that they were either completely inept or amoral. In either case I don't trust them.
• batista 15y ago
  Only problem is: It was not a mistake. They did this only to cover their asses and that has been the only concern they've ever had. Well, you can make a mistake intentionally. As in: "I intentionally opted for course A, and I realize it was a mistake".
  • tjoff 15y ago
    True. What I meant was that they try to make it sound (at least to me) like the action of stealing the contacts of its users was a mistake. They do this by saying: We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. etc. etc. It makes it sound that it somehow was a mistake for those believes to be violated. It wasn't. And if you ask me, that breach of their users trust is not something that you can just turn around. If they didn't understand that their users might get upset that only makes it worse (when it comes to trusting them).
    • aufreak3 15y ago
      The action that path says they've taken - which is to delete all the contacts they have so far collected - serves to move me to forgiving them, 'cos that action is the only thing they have going for the contact collection being a "mistake". "Privacy empathy" (no .. pun not intended I swear) seems hard to come by these days.
  • llch 15y ago
    I see it as "We made a wrong decision"
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• baby 15y ago
  > Only problem is: It was not a mistake. I don't think the developers behind the product were thinking about it in a bad way when they did it that way. It was probably more practical to do it that way at that moment and they didn't give it more thoughts, like they would never have considered selling those informations. I get that now it's a big deal since it became a huge product. I wouldn't call that a mistake though, the problem with personal information on internet is pretty recent (facebook, google+...) and developers don't really know how to deal with it yet. I guess the more we see problems like that, the more developers will educate themselves on the matter.
• csallen 15y ago
  The fact is, there are innumerable factors that affect people's decision-making in situations like this. The ability to decide whether or not a course of action is ethical is greatly affected by what your competitors are doing, groupthink, incentives, time pressures, etc. I could keep going. And yes, your ability to "get away with it" is also a factor. Now you may say, "Who cares what the factors are? A wrong decision is a wrong decision." And you're right. However, as a practical person who wants to see real change come about, I cannot be satisfied with the run-of-the-mill, "They did it because they're evil and untrustworthy" response. People are rarely inherently evil. I find it hard to believe that this group of engineers is really so different from you and I. It's likely that all of us grew up in similar environments, have gone through similar experiences, and possess similar moral beliefs. So aren't you the least bit curious why they're capable of making a decision you could never imagine yourself making? I think simply dismissing them as untrustworthy people is an irresponsible and short-sighted reaction. Human beings are more complex than that. A lot of teachers believed that the only students who cheat are the dishonest ones. Well, some clever psychologists came along and -- lo and behold -- they showed that under the right circumstances, you can convince almost any student to cheat. That's the nature of humans. Like it or not, we react to situations much more than to our personal moral codes. No amount of shaming greedy bankers, book-padding executives, dishonest politicians, privacy-invading programmers, etc is going to work. If we want to effect real change, we need to change the systems that allow for and incentivize this type of behavior. I highly recommend reading up on basic human psychology. Influence (by Robert Cialdini) is a good place to start. Charlie Munger's writings, although unorthodox, are also great.
  • yeggeyeggeyegge 15y ago
    >The ability to decide whether or not a course of action is ethical is greatly affected by what your competitors are doing, groupthink, incentives, time pressures, etc. No, its not. You do not kill a person over any of these. You do not kill someones trust in you over any of these. >I cannot be satisfied with the run-of-the-mill, "They did it because they're evil and untrustworthy" response. Then how about that they are shitty crappy company who are unconcerned about ethical matters of things and more concerned about what they can get away with. You know that they must have spent considerable time and effort to enable their app and service to steal all Contact data in the first place, right? >I think simply dismissing them as untrustworthy people is an irresponsible and short-sighted reaction. Human beings are more complex than that. irresponsible, irresponsible? What shit are you smoking chief? I have zero responsibility for their actions, or the pubic outrage against it, or my own reaction to crap. Let them rot in hell for all I care. >convince almost any student to cheat. That's the nature of humans. I am alarmed, you are now equating cheating under the right circumstances, to planned and intentional thieving under business as usual. >I highly recommend reading up on basic human psychology and I highly recommend some common sense.
• yeggeyeggeyegge 15y ago
  You are right. And I am not touching Path with a ten foot pole. Not in hell. What annoys me is that Apple has caused a few hours of my life to be wasted on this shit. And has me deeply worried about what other crap is uploading all my contacts information into their hush hush secure database. And also that they allowed this piece of free advertisement seeking shit company to get through their fabled review system. Heck, I want an apology from Tim Cook, and maybe one from the heavens where a visionary soul probably rests forever now. If the going is so bad, I will soon end up using a clam shell that I put up with all these years before an eventful day that I fell in love with an "are you getting it?" product. Makes one wonder what all those jerks making the rounds on SOPA and PIPA are doing to protect us from these Path like shit makers.
  • yabai 15y ago
    Doesn't this illustrate once again that community policing always works better than corporate policing?
    • ekianjo 15y ago
      This illustrates rather than you should think twice before using a service you do not know much about. You can always make rules and there will always be ways to go around them. Personal responsibility and awareness is what makes the difference in the end. Would you eat just anything given to you if you ignore where it comes from and how it's made?
  • ghshephard 15y ago
    You do know, that many other social apps do the same thing as Path, right?
• ghshephard 15y ago
  I suspect, if you probe more deeply, that some of the Path developers where familiar with how this problem is normally solved and just copied a common design pattern. A large number of IOS applications supposedly upload the contact list to make it easier to find friends server side - I further suspect that many, many of the popular social apps do this. Hopefully at least Five good things will come out of this: 1) Social Apps immediately remove the "upload contact list code from their apps" 2) Social Apps come up with a more privacy clueful way of searching for your friends. 3) Social Apps (all apps, ideally) focus more on user privacy. 4) Apple requires permission to be granted before allowing an app to read your contact list. 5) Apple is more explicit about what app developers are _not_ allowed to do when transmitting information off the IOS Device 6) The App review process adds a check to see if certain user private fields are accessed, (Contact, Photos) - and ensures (through audit, or confirming with the developers) that private information is not being uploaded without opt-in. If some or more of these things happen, then I'm actually happy what Path did was publicized. They've deleted 100% of the contact information off their servers - people now have to opt-in to add it back in.
  • nixj86 15y ago
    It seems to me to be more a case of developers taking the easiest option, rather than spending some time considering a more secure, less creepy way of doing what they wanted to do.
  • granitepail 15y ago
    I could not agree more. I think they've set a reasonable precedent for dealing with such oversights.
• alvarosm 15y ago
  Yeah this is like BP making excuses for the oil spill. Anyway, it's every iPhone owner's fault that they give away their privacy that easily without even caring. On the other hand it's Path's fault that they seem to have done this without a real plan (what are we keeping the data for? what are we going to do in case of "PR nightmare"?).
• kahawe 15y ago
  Ironically, this was exactly the kind of apologetic but side-stepping rhetorics used by still German president Christian Wulff so I call shenanigans and nothing but modern rhetorics and modern PR-management. This is very alike to catching someone red-handed, with the hand still on the murder weapon stuck in the body... and then they make a public apology along the lines of "Through the feedback I’ve received from all of you, I now understand that the way I handled this dispute over $20 million, which are clearly mine by the way, was wrong. But I deeply care about ethics, human life and I honestly believe that body should be allowed to live and as a clear signal to my commitment to human rights, I will immediately retreat my serrated blade from their chest." > They did it deliberately, there was not a mistake anywhere when implementing this Exactly - so that's why those "oh I realize that now and really want you all to understand my deeeep commitment to the exact opposite moral values of what I actually did" apologies make me so sick. It completely side-steps the fact that it was done deliberately, 100% on purpose and they basically cover that up by trying their hardest to scrape it under the rug as an "oopsy-daisy!" now and let users feel as if thousands of phonebooks beamed themselves totally magically into their servers and they really had no idea that was happening! You can simply not be so detached from reality that you do not worry about reading people's phone books like that. Want to apologize and really speak through actions? Dave Morin, Co-Founder and CEO, step down immediately because you have deliberately violated human rights and now you are just trying to get away with it, IMHO. And as CEO, you are ultimately responsible.
  • granitepail 15y ago
    Human rights? If I'm correctly understanding the issue, their software monitored your contact list so they could notify you when one of your contacts joined the service. You seem ready to throw him before the International Court. That they've wiped their user data and are giving people the opportunity to use their product in a setting with opt-in sharing seems to demonstrate to me, at least, that they still believe that hosting your contact information would add value to their product, but they now realize that concerns regarding privacy are significant enough to warrant using the product without this feature. To reference a parallel thread, I don't think this is a reflection of morality/amorality/immorality, but rather that this never registered in their engineering oriented brains.
• granitepail 15y ago
  I, like many others in this thread, think this is a fairly gross over-reaction. As engineers, we're trained to dig up problems and create solutions -- and a big part of this process is understanding what data can be made available to you and how you can use it to make your product better. I sincerely believe that they saw the immense potential of having this information available to them and ran with it under the excitement-induced delusion to the effect of, "who could be unhappy with this when it brings so much value to the table?" I think their flaw was either in not polling their user base before hand or making it opt in to begin with, but I also think that this oversight happened because they truly believed in the usefulness of what they were doing. Then again, I still believe that Google isn't trying to be evil (nor do I really think they ARE particularly evil for the time being), so take my opinion with a grain of salt.