141–150 of 220 posts
The fact that you have to email Path to "revoke access" is still unacceptable. This information should never be stored on Path's servers. Best case scenario they should be storing hashes of information and before people say there can be collisions so what? The number of people who would be presented with a friend that they don't know will so minuscule versus the number of people whose personal information is stored i…
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 push the opt-in was of course only in fear of what just happened. I'm sorry, I'm all for public apologies and I truly believe that it is in times like these companies have a chance to really prove themselves and really make a mishap something positive (and come…
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.
Key paragraph: "We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path." Great save for…
Still leaves me with a shitty feeling. Basically this boils down to "sorry we got caught", they knew what they were doing.
Not to single out Path, a massive number of apps are guilty of this behavior.
Key paragraph: "We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information. We also believe that actions speak louder than words. So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers. Your trust matters to us and we want you to feel completely in control of your information on Path." Great save for…
It's not a "great save", it's a piece of PR flak arse-covering.
There it is. If you have a button that stores all contact information, Why can't you add a button that says remove all my contact information ? Ofcourse, then more people will click it. Just a stunt, nothing more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 whic…
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would bold it if I were them. It's a nicely written message, but it reads like a lot of other PR apologies and it's easy to skim over it, deep in its position in the 5th paragraph. Sometimes you need to make actions speak louder than words. :)
>We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts Better would have been 'we are sorry we misused your phone contacts', rather than trying to make the users responsible by invoking their feelings. Aside: interesting how the concept of theft seems meaningless when applied to copyrighted material, but meaningful when applied to private data.
Not all that interesting.
Theft of personal data can cause real loss and harm if misused.
"Theft" of songs/movies does not cause any direct loss or harm, as no otherwise confidential information was exposed and the only "loss" is theoretical and hyper-inflated loss-of-potential-sales.
The issue here is one of violation of privacy and of confidentiality (if I was a journalist my contacts may be highly sensitive information), not of theft.