It is too bad all these people trusted a bad company which cared little about them or their privacy.
Technology
Which posts fit here?
Anything that is at least tangentially connected to the technology, social media platforms, informational technologies and tech policy.
Post guidelines
[Opinion] prefix
Opinion (op-ed) articles must use [Opinion] prefix before the title.
Rules
1. English only
Title and associated content has to be in English.
2. Use original link
Post URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
3. Respectful communication
All communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. Inclusivity
Everyone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacks
Any kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangents
Stay on topic. Keep it relevant.
7. Instance rules may apply
If something is not covered by community rules, but are against lemmy.zip instance rules, they will be enforced.
Companion communities
!globalnews@lemmy.zip
!interestingshare@lemmy.zip
Icon attribution | Banner attribution
If someone is interested in moderating this community, message @brikox@lemmy.zip.
It has nothing to do with the company, it's an issue about privacy and not sharing personal information so freely.
I mean the company was incompetent, but the primary issue is privacy.
I design systems similar to this; in my mindset the competency and privacy are the same.
There is simply no way anyone competent or knowledgeable would have made this series of mistakes in good faith. And it’s very hard for someone not knowledgeable about the tech to understand the magnitude.
It’s rather like designing and selling car with bad breaks, and your car gets into an accident which could have been avoided had the breaks worked. But nobody could test the breaks fully?
I don't disagree that competency is an element, but your analogy is lacking because the user provided the information that increased their risk (sharing their photo IDs and real information).
Its more like the share buttons on porn sites. If you're logged into a social media site while browsing porn and accidentally dox yourself, it's partially your fault for creating a situation where that was possible. Yeah, having the share buttons is a terrible design, but also you have to be doing insecure stuff too.
Users are funneled towards actions exploited by both politics and greed. Many have no choice.
This isn't an issue if you give private information to "good" companies since they don't suffer data breaches. Make sure to check their website for the authentic "good company" seal.
Indeed, how can anyone know?
I think failures like this will be readily apparent, within months after launch, to technically minded people only. But only if people have summaries in their news feeds or know how to research the opinions of others..
Perhaps non technical people should wait at least a year or two of before trying a new service? By then the worst of them will have crashed or be found out.
This will not be the last time it happens. With llm coding, I think there will be dozens similar to this in a few years