I am still trying, and achieving, to give them the benefit of the doubt. They understood and took it back.

But I am scratching my head how they could honestly miss the importance of what they were planning to do.. I guess a combination of stress, pressure and usual disregard of privacy by big players clouded their judgement.

They didn’t miss anything, they just weren’t able to get away with it.

They could get away with but just charging forward despite the backlash.

To me, that puts them at least in the middle

Malicious

Meh<---

Respectful

Amoral if I had to suggest a word, but business and amoral is basically redundant.

I read their answers in the discussion here and it felt a lot like:

I'm sorry that you...

That might have been another bad day at work but whatever it was it really doesn't inspire confidence

Yeah it’s hard to reconcile that discussion and this apology. That is unless they were hemorrhaging users after that email hit and reversed course because of that. I like the idea of triplebyte but I’m a bit hesitant now. Perhaps this is the blindness that people in privileged positions in life can’t see... similar to the real name policy on google that caused a problem for the people that didn’t want their identities tied to it. Gay people that weren’t out of the closet yet or gay people in countries with laws against that or people escaping abusive exes/stalkers etc.

Hopefully this reflection is sincere.

> Perhaps this is the blindness that people in privileged positions in life can’t see...

Yep, and that privilege may take many forms.

- Secure, well paid job.

- Friends in high places.

- Correct opinions for your area.

etc

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).

Completely agree - it demonstrates quite succinctly how seriously they take privacy. Doubly do when the CEO was on HN the other day arguing with those complaining about it!

Exactly what I was thinking. Either they’re just not ready for this Brave New World, or they did think about the issues and did it anyway.

I’m just tickled pink that privacy is becoming a feature people care about.