Of course, there are some things for which no amount of apology could ever bring about true forgiveness (think godaddy). I personally don't feel this is one of those times, but everyone is entitled to their opinion.

EDIT: Switching "amoral" to "immoral"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoral

"Amorality, the absence of morality; for example, a stone, a chair, or the sky may be considered amoral",

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/amoral

"not involving questions of right or wrong; without moral quality; neither moral nor immoral."

Merriam-Webster: lacking moral sensibility <infants are amoral> | being outside or beyond the moral order or a particular code of morals <amoral customs>

Apple dictionary: lacking a moral sense; unconcerned with the rightness or wrongness of something : an amoral attitude to sex.

thefreedictionary.com: Lacking moral sensibility; not caring about right and wrong.

Admittedly, some of these do mention definitions along the lines of "having no moral component", so it looks like everyone was wrong. Hurray!

Now you may say, "Who cares what the factors are? A wrong decision is a wrong decision." And you're right. However, as a practical person who wants to see real change come about, I cannot be satisfied with the run-of-the-mill, "They did it because they're evil and untrustworthy" response.

People are rarely inherently evil. I find it hard to believe that this group of engineers is really so different from you and I. It's likely that all of us grew up in similar environments, have gone through similar experiences, and possess similar moral beliefs. So aren't you the least bit curious why they're capable of making a decision you could never imagine yourself making? I think simply dismissing them as untrustworthy people is an irresponsible and short-sighted reaction. Human beings are more complex than that.

A lot of teachers believed that the only students who cheat are the dishonest ones. Well, some clever psychologists came along and -- lo and behold -- they showed that under the right circumstances, you can convince almost any student to cheat. That's the nature of humans.

Like it or not, we react to situations much more than to our personal moral codes. No amount of shaming greedy bankers, book-padding executives, dishonest politicians, privacy-invading programmers, etc is going to work. If we want to effect real change, we need to change the systems that allow for and incentivize this type of behavior.

I highly recommend reading up on basic human psychology. Influence (by Robert Cialdini) is a good place to start. Charlie Munger's writings, although unorthodox, are also great.

No, its not. You do not kill a person over any of these. You do not kill someones trust in you over any of these.

>I cannot be satisfied with the run-of-the-mill, "They did it because they're evil and untrustworthy" response.

Then how about that they are shitty crappy company who are unconcerned about ethical matters of things and more concerned about what they can get away with. You know that they must have spent considerable time and effort to enable their app and service to steal all Contact data in the first place, right?

>I think simply dismissing them as untrustworthy people is an irresponsible and short-sighted reaction. Human beings are more complex than that.

irresponsible, irresponsible? What shit are you smoking chief? I have zero responsibility for their actions, or the pubic outrage against it, or my own reaction to crap. Let them rot in hell for all I care.

>convince almost any student to cheat. That's the nature of humans.

I am alarmed, you are now equating cheating under the right circumstances, to planned and intentional thieving under business as usual.

>I highly recommend reading up on basic human psychology

and I highly recommend some common sense.

  No, its not. You do not kill a person over any of
  these... they are shitty crappy company who are
  unconcerned about ethical matters of things

  I am alarmed, you are now equating cheating under
  the right circumstances, to planned and intentional
  thieving under business as usual.

  irresponsible, irresponsible? What shit are you
  smoking chief? I have zero responsibility for their
  actions, or the pubic outrage against it, or my own
  reaction to crap. Let them rot in hell for all I care.

The facts in this case are simple. The judgement is clear. You seem to be justifying their actions. There is no moral justification.

>type of perfectly disastrous environment that could entice even the most noble of people to make bad decisions

see, because of this incident we can now clearly tell which companies are noble and which were pretending to be so. "ducks in a row" is not a moral argument.

>Either you care more about verbally abusing people who behave poorly, or you care more about preventing poor behavior in the future

I am sorry, it is not an either-or, and not the way you put it too. You admonish people for __bad__ behaviour because you care about preventing it in the future.

  You seem to be justifying their actions.
  There is no moral justification.

  because of this incident we can now clearly
  tell which companies are noble and which were
  pretending to be so.
  ...
  You admonish people for __bad__ behaviour because
  you care about preventing it in the future.

Hopefully at least Five good things will come out of this:

  1) Social Apps immediately remove the "upload contact list code from their
     apps"
  2) Social Apps come up with a more privacy clueful way of searching for 
     your friends.
  3) Social Apps (all apps, ideally) focus more on user privacy.
  4) Apple requires permission to be granted before allowing an app to read 
     your contact list.
  5) Apple is more explicit about what app developers are _not_ allowed to do 
     when transmitting information off the IOS Device
  6) The App review process adds a check to see if certain user private fields 
     are accessed, (Contact, Photos) - and ensures (through audit, or 
     confirming with the developers) that private information is not 
     being uploaded without opt-in.

This is precisely my reaction to Facebook's Beacon. I decided that they were either completely inept or amoral. In either case I don't trust them.

But it's also possible for management to make a mistaken decision, and that's what Path is meaning here.

I think their flaw was either in not polling their user base before hand or making it opt in to begin with, but I also think that this oversight happened because they truly believed in the usefulness of what they were doing.

Then again, I still believe that Google isn't trying to be evil (nor do I really think they ARE particularly evil for the time being), so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

If the going is so bad, I will soon end up using a clam shell that I put up with all these years before an eventful day that I fell in love with an "are you getting it?" product. Makes one wonder what all those jerks making the rounds on SOPA and PIPA are doing to protect us from these Path like shit makers.

I don't think the developers behind the product were thinking about it in a bad way when they did it that way. It was probably more practical to do it that way at that moment and they didn't give it more thoughts, like they would never have considered selling those informations.

I get that now it's a big deal since it became a huge product. I wouldn't call that a mistake though, the problem with personal information on internet is pretty recent (facebook, google+...) and developers don't really know how to deal with it yet.

I guess the more we see problems like that, the more developers will educate themselves on the matter.

Well, you can make a mistake intentionally.

As in: "I intentionally opted for course A, and I realize it was a mistake".

And if you ask me, that breach of their users trust is not something that you can just turn around. If they didn't understand that their users might get upset that only makes it worse (when it comes to trusting them).

"Privacy empathy" (no .. pun not intended I swear) seems hard to come by these days.

> They did it deliberately, there was not a mistake anywhere when implementing this

Exactly - so that's why those "oh I realize that now and really want you all to understand my deeeep commitment to the exact opposite moral values of what I actually did" apologies make me so sick. It completely side-steps the fact that it was done deliberately, 100% on purpose and they basically cover that up by trying their hardest to scrape it under the rug as an "oopsy-daisy!" now and let users feel as if thousands of phonebooks beamed themselves totally magically into their servers and they really had no idea that was happening!

You can simply not be so detached from reality that you do not worry about reading people's phone books like that.

Want to apologize and really speak through actions? Dave Morin, Co-Founder and CEO, step down immediately because you have deliberately violated human rights and now you are just trying to get away with it, IMHO. And as CEO, you are ultimately responsible.

That they've wiped their user data and are giving people the opportunity to use their product in a setting with opt-in sharing seems to demonstrate to me, at least, that they still believe that hosting your contact information would add value to their product, but they now realize that concerns regarding privacy are significant enough to warrant using the product without this feature. To reference a parallel thread, I don't think this is a reflection of morality/amorality/immorality, but rather that this never registered in their engineering oriented brains.

Outside of establishing boundaries there needs to be a way to deal with those who break the rules. Sending CEOs straight to the slaughter house doesn't accomplish anything. Companies need an opportunity to react and do the right thing. Especially when intentions were good, and the reaction from the Company is as responsible as Path's.

+1 Paths Owned their mistake +1 Deleted all the data +1 Fixed the mistake by publishing an opt-in feature.

They did everything they could to right their wrong.

You also need to realize they didn't commit murder. They weren't 'caught red handed with the murder weapon'. They had some digital data, and then deleted it. It's not like they raped and murdered your wife and family. They didn't commit genocide. They made a minor mistake and fixed it.

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/02/15/congress-weighs-in-on-io...