I use DDG and the possibility of getting a statement directly from an engineer conveys much more trust than a carefully crafted PR statement ever could. I would think again about using it if the company does indeed come down on employees that live the values the company writes on its flags to have honest and transparent business practices.
That said, I am careful too when I state things about my company, even if I believe there is nothing to hide. Still, people that think it isn't the place for others with knowledge to comment are often not too impressive and would have difficulties in convincing me that privacy and transparency are real goals instead of just looking decent enough.
Furthermore the naming of management of DDG creates a stark contrast to the suggestion for more professional distance. I don't like PR very much as you might have guessed, but like a good design it needs some congruence.
If people find out that you just shut up for your company, it might give people the wrong impression about their business.
By commenting on an ongoing PR crisis without consulting management, you are both undermining their ability to respond in an effective way — imagine how strange it would look to see a “Hey, X from <company> here” after an existing one was already posted — and you’re acting on your own rather than in a team. You’re a part of a team; how could you think it’s a good idea to act alone?
Of course, I am talking to my former self with this comment, since that’s exactly what I did at S2 when working on HoN. It was a mistake, and I gave the community the wrong impression about the company’s priorities.
You have to understand, when you’re given money to do a job, you’re not given authority to become that job. Just because your job is getting beat up on social media doesn’t mean you should just jump in and go “Hey, that’s not true!” It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. Here, let me pretend to be DDG:
“Hi, Shawn from DDG here. You’re right; this was an oversight on our part. Obviously we dropped the ball on this. To clarify, we were unintentionally gathering the data as a side effect of our favicon service. <some technical details here>. We’ll be acting immediately to reverse this, and we’ll be enacting policy changes to ensure that user privacy — our core mission — is maintained going forward.”
But that’s not what they said. And if you’re gonna tell the community the opposite of what they want to hear, you’d better be in charge of the company’s Telling The Community Things division.
I was once an honest engineer too, publicly. Being honest in private is enough for me now. It’s a lesson worth learning.
That said, it’s not like a single HN comment will make or break a company, so if they’re really just a rank-and-file engineer, I hope the company won’t come down on them too hard. A simple “don’t do that” would suffice.