Very few "ordinary people" would describe websites as "places", anyway. They don't say they're "at" Facebook, they say they're "on" it, much like they could be "on the phone" or "on TV". Maybe this hasn't always been the case, but the courts aren't tied to 1990s-era metaphors. No one on a jury remembers those silly "Welcome to the BatCave, Come on in if you Dare" geocities pages.
Incidentally, Facebook and its ilk hold ordinary people to much more complicated standards of behavior than those to which you and they would hold sites, all the time. Oh, you didn't read all 50 pages of TOS and then update the (hidden) configuration, every week? Silly user, that's why we gave all your data to the English!
Meanwhile, you don't think Facebook should have to understand how HTTP works, just because one person working at the company might not. Interesting, that the benefits go one direction and the duties go the other.
In the physical world, one can accidentally walk into a room they shouldn't have, perhaps mistaking it for the bathroom, and then leave without having committed any transgression. Entering a room you shouldn't be in doesn't mean you've automatically taken the contents of the room. On the internet, however, visiting a URL means just that. There's no "oh, it looks like I shouldn't be here" opportunity.
URLs are not doors. They aren't rooms. The same reasoning can't be applied to them, as they behave in fundamentally different ways.
What a computer does may be evidence of intent, just as a lock (or lack thereof) may be evidence of intent. But just like an unlocked door is not evidence of intent to make something accessible, neither is an unlocked computer.
> Consider, if you will, whether your preferred position is one that will lead to improvements.
The Internet belongs to ordinary people, not folks who have read the HTTP spec. (It's their world, we just live in it.) "Improvements" will be had when the rules comport with what ordinary people want and expect. Ordinary people don't think about computer security; they expect that, like in the real world, people won't go into places that don't look like they're meant for the public just because there's no locks to prevent them from doing so. The law should reflect those expectations.
Laws exist to create social norms. HN users are preoccupied with data security, but ordinary people hate security measures and are bad at it. So it seems completely backward to me to codify in the law the idea that accessing data should be presumed to be permissible just because the owner of the data didn’t secure it.