This reads like the beginning of The Hacker Crackdown.. As a Canadian, reading this article made me angry. If the information is not supposed to be public, it should not be reachable without authorization or authentication. Never mind a curious 19-year-old, there are tons of crawlers and indexers out there that attempt to enumerate URLs where they think there might be other content. Shame on them for building a poorl…
They are, in essence, trying to redesign the nature of the Internet by fiat.
Historically, accessible resources are accessible. Public by their very nature. If you don't want them publicly accessible, implement (effective) authentication.
But this is far too much "trouble" for self-important, "do it my way" lawyers and executives.
So, they "define", or redefine -- in a pure fiction of language -- what is "public" and "private".
Aside from all else, these... "errors in the system" should be routed around. Denied use of the system.
Unfortunately, in this regard, tech has ended up in the position of working for them, rather than vise versa.
Personally, I won't work for them, anymore. Every thing I do for them, is against my own interests and, I've come to believe, the common good.