No. Recommending commercial entities to others is not what HN is for.
If you want such a thing you are more than welcome to contact me or others out-of-band.
> It helps them and it may help others in the HN community.
Yes, or it may steer them in the wrong direction entirely.
I don't think this sort of advice is best dispensed through a public forum, reputations of companies are at stake and without enough context it is impossible to make a good advice to begin with.
It is closely related to people dispensing legal advice in forums, better yet if they're not lawyers. The line that comes to mind is 'advice is worth what you pay for it'.
> What you should not be doing, is your previous reply. In no way was it warranted, nor was it solicited.
That's your opinion, mine is a different one.
I get regularly asked to recommend services or companies (by those companies and by their prospective customers) and as a rule I will only do this if I familiar with both parties and consider them a good fit.
That's a thing borne from experience, which again you may disagree with but this has served me well over the years.
> I cannot believe some elements of HN behave in this manner.
And I can not believe that you feel that you are doing any better with this comment.
You need to know the law inside out to be able to tell someone exactly what to do in their situation. We - our little band of friends - have been reading up on this subject since the previous privacy law was enacted and all I can tell you is that it is much easier to spot things that are in conflict with the law(s) as written than to come up with a single workable solution that does not leave things open to interpretation.
Even so, these laws are good, they will force people to wake up to the underlying issues and to begin to think about their responsibilities when before the mantra seems to have been that any effort spent on privacy and security is better spent on growing the business because otherwise the other guy that doesn't care about those things will eat your lunch.