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.
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.
IMHO privacy should become a human right in these surveillance-ridden times but that was ahead of time - replace with "privacy", if you ask me it was a huge intrusion into the privacy of the users.
Sure, privacy should become a human right. I personally am a very private person. What you need to understand is we live in a world where there is no such thing as privacy. We need to clearly define what is right and what is wrong. What needs to be opt-in and what needs to be opt-out. What we, as a community, need to do is set a standard. We need to establish boundaries so that we can regain our privacy.
Outside of establishing boundaries there needs to be a way to deal with those who break the rules. Sending CEOs straight to the slaughter house doesn't accomplish anything. Companies need an opportunity to react and do the right thing. Especially when intentions were good, and the reaction from the Company is as responsible as Path's.
+1 Paths Owned their mistake
+1 Deleted all the data
+1 Fixed the mistake by publishing an opt-in feature.
They did everything they could to right their wrong.
You also need to realize they didn't commit murder. They weren't 'caught red handed with the murder weapon'. They had some digital data, and then deleted it. It's not like they raped and murdered your wife and family. They didn't commit genocide. They made a minor mistake and fixed it.
> 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.