Umm, who exactly cares about what 'mistake' Vincent Fratta made at work?

But who cares that Citi lost half a billion dollars because of an interface mistake?

The latter is news. The former is not. The story loses none of its impact or relevancy leaving the names out.

If a journalists writes "Vincent Fratta did X", this is something that can be verified or disputed by Fratta or his colleagues. If the journalists writes "A low-level employee did X", then it's much, much more difficult to verify or dispute.

Similarly, if a journalist writes "A judge ruled X for court case Y", this is something that can be verified or disputed using public records for the court case... but that court case is never identified in the article except for a link to a PDF document hosted by a third-party organization. The public records for that court case (including the linked document) identify those individuals - along with many more useful details - for anyone seeking further validation.

Anonymous contributors where all the craze during the Trump admin, I'm not sure how dedicated the papers are to 3rd party verification.

Also, it's possible to reach out to Fratta and ask for comment beforehand - then you can either include that response, or lack of response, without naming them.

Court proceedings are public.

If Vincent Fratta is alleged to have urinated in a public park and gets arrested for it that's public information, and those kind of things often end up in police blotters, even if the charges are later dropped. If Vincent Fratta is overwhelmed by medical debt and files for bankruptcy that's in the public record as well.

But we should concern ourselves with Vincent Fratta's privacy when he botches a financial transaction in a way that has hundreds of millions of dollars in consequences for public companies and involves an interesting and newsworthy legal precedent?

The information is already public - why distribute it widely when there are potential negative consequences for the named in doing so?

Are you the judge to rule whether the individual has lost his right of privacy?

Yet you comment here under a pseudonym. What if you made a mistake, would you want to be named?

> Are you the judge to rule whether the individual has lost his right of privacy?

I mean, there is an actual judge. This is a major legal case, and they've placed the info in the public record. The judge has in fact made a ruling.

I'm not saying it's always a perfect system, but it's definitely a very well established system in the U.S. that all court proceedings are very public. It's one of the core founding principles of the judicial branch, and it's also been a staple of American journalism for hundreds of years.

I personally think the European approach is much better on this specific issue, and that right to be forgotten laws and similar are justified.

But the reason I mentioned it in this context is that the idea that journalists naming people who are clearly notable in the context of reporting news only seems to generate a critical response when it's someone that the average HN reader identifies with.

(Your last sentence is a fine point, but they aren't pseudonymous. Their bio contains personally identifiable information.)

I don’t think those first two examples should be done either. In many countries in central and Northern Europe, it’s common journalistic practice not to print the names of those accused of crimes. Innocent until proven guilty, right? I think we’ll look back at the NYT et al publishing mugshots and full names of the accused as downright barbaric.

nobody except the person who approved GUI botched anything here.

And just because you can name the persons, doesn't mean you should.

It's different, if person is caught doing something illegal, that his name does add to the story.

But this was just big oopsie, and individuals did nothing wrong. (or you can bet, Citibank would try do divert blame on them)

Undoubtedly this mistake and the media coverage has ruined this employee’s life, for something that’s surely a very poorly run operation. Anyone who has ever worked in operations knows this type of error happens daily and repeatedly.

> It's a strange new world

Not really. In Germany it's very uncommon to name individuals in news reports, even in murder cases. If at all the format used is Angela M.

There is always a balance between the 'personality rights' of the individual and the public's right of information.

The story here is a good example - there is zero need to know the individuals' names.

Who is the relevant person to name here? The one who screwed up designing the UI so much? The one who decided to enter into the contract with oracle? There are much more relevant people to this story, but this is presumably just reporting on public records without doing any legwork. If the more relevant names aren’t in there, the reporter isn’t going to go find them and will instead just go with what’s easy.

You don’t actually say what this thing we’re supposed to understand is, but I think you’re implying that it’s in the public’s interest to know it? If that’s what you meant, I’d disagree that these names are in the public interest.

The risks involved of naming someone have gone up quite dramatically. Today, anyone can take a random person and, from anywhere in the world, cause them direct pain. Swatting, slandering them as a pedophile, bank fraud, etc.

Sure, their names are “news” but how does the name of someone who made an innocent mistake help me understand the news? What’s the value-add? The “ROI” seems in strongly negative territory here.

It means "The people's names are irrelevant to the actual event that happened. Especially when they're rank-and-file engineers and not people in positions of power."

They were not even engineers, they were glorified data entry officers and their boss.

How does the name of a contractor that can be hardly blamed for the mistake matter? Including the name is gossip, not news.

There is no public interest in naming these people since they're ordinary employees and there is no particular blame on them since it's indeed clearly a UI issue. For a high-up manager, this would be different.

Naming the developers who wrote this and signed off on it, now that might be more relevant.

The status quo does not justify itself by its existence.