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Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

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391–400 of 678 posts

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#391
post #46

I already changed all my data on my profile (including email), so I won’t be getting the apology email. It’s not just failure of ,,effects’’. I’m an EU citizen and it was a clear intent of GDPR violation.

Wow, they had European users? They are fucked. This is about a serious and willful GDPR contravention as you can get. I hope they have good lawyers because they are gonna be hauled over the coals by multiple countries' data commissioners. Wow just wow.

If Triplebyte has no staff or assets in an EU jurisdiction, what could they do?

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#392
Scummy move, scummy response. If you truly thought this feature was something valuable for your users, you wouldn’t just cancel it entirely, and you wouldn’t have dumped it on a Friday night. But it’s cool, most businesses are scummy. Foolish for us to expect otherwise from you.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#393

> I failed to see the significance of “default public” in my head. Hmm? This just raises more questions about Triplebyte's product development process than answers, especially since privacy is a core product feature .

Going to show my age here, but I find that younger generations are much less concerned about privacy in the sake of self-promotion via social media. By definition, keeping user's data private when developing a sharing platform is prohibitive of gaining traction. Gathering users data for a non-sharing site, and then pivoting to a sharing platform without user's consent to use the existing data is absolutely 100% without a doubt wrong (should be criminal).

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#395
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This e-mail (which I also got) seems like a heartfelt apology. Even if it is heartfelt, I'd argue that if no alarm bells went off internally when they were discussing this feature, they are not the group of people to entrust with information such as this.

Given the prevalence of comments like this, I wonder why any company would ever bother offering an apology or retraction. As soon as a company does something that a chunk of people on the internet don’t agree with, there’s really no way out. They’re going to get bad press regardless of whether they retract, whether they apologize, and whether they say they’re taking actions to avoid the sequence that led to the actio…

Just as with a person, you'd need them to also demonstrate a series of correct decisions, and moving to give greater accountability to their actions before trusting them again.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the penalty for looking too kindly at somebody in this context?

One continues to be taken advantage of, over and over again. Assuming good faith is not prudent when dealing with people who want your money or data. We have enough collective experience at this stage to say this conclusively. Edit: Being cynical is the new normal when dealing with companies. Especially if they have your data, or want it.

> Assuming good faith is not prudent when dealing with people who want your money or data. We have enough collective experience at this stage to say this conclusively.

Well said. This ought to be taught in schools.

Being slightly pedantic I'd change it to "when dealing with companies that want your money or data" rather than "people" (though I've pretty sure that's the general meaning you intended anyhow).

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#397

Good lesson for other founders here. Early on nobody knows you, but as soon as they do, you'll need to have chosen if you're on the trust-and-brand-building marathon or not. By default, if you do nothing, you're building up to an explosion like this that can take years to recover from. How did the CEO, the board, the sales team, the marketing team, customer support team, and the engineering team all fail to notice an…

Ammon says a postmortem is in the works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23304127

Yes, I was responding to the apology. This should have been part of it, and is part of the lesson to founders. If you are in position of responsibility, mistakes are inevitable, and so is having to correctly apologize. (I learned the hard way.)

This incident is about a self-inflicted customer data breach. As it surprised the CEO, it suggests a full-company culture & governance issue, and is hard to be reactive about. Even when things are going well, customer responsibility & data protection should be a constant and non-obvious responsibility for everyone as soon as anything like marketing, sales, engineering, hiring, delegation, etc. gets interesting. A lot of people are involved in a major move like this and the governance structures that inform them. Think their VCs / VPs / managers / etc either signing off... or not caring.

And again, I'm writing this more as a warning for other founders. Building a culture is a constant marathon, and it's way harder to fix one. (For the CEO: I'd consult with a few folks knowledgeable about communicating apologies ASAP, esp. before any further unvetted public comms, and for longer-term, get regular external advisors + directly responsible internal leaders for fixing culture + security, and rethink why multiple internal leaders failed in both. But that's super generic.)

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often, the driving force of such moves is not the founders, but investors: the company accepted a generous investment in past and had to sign a contract where the investor may wind up the company if the returns are low. In other words, it could be that Ammon was given a choice: triple profits by end of year or sell his share. Regarding your question. Mistakes and apologies are words from the lexicon of normal emotion…

> it could be that Ammon was given a choice: triple profits by end of year or sell his share That seems unbelievably unlikely.

Pardon my ignorance, but what insight or experience leads you to this conclusion?

Venture capital is quite the opposite of passive investing. I guess everyone on here is well aware investors are not doing it for fun but first and foremost for protecting and, ideally, multiplying their assets.

Re: Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology

#400
post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They scrapped the feature so that's an action backing up his words.

Question is why was it there in the first place , so hideous, so late on Friday, one week time to update the profile. Why not more time when it concerns privacy.

The fact that it got to this point I think would be concerning:

a) No one thought this was a bad idea, or

b) people who thought it was a bad idea didn't want to say it was a bad idea (why?), or

c) people who did say it was a bad idea were not listened to (feedback was not acted on).

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