[bengotow]

Yeah this is hilarious. I feel like tech companies get away with this because the internet is more "mysterious".

This is no different than a chemical plant "accidentally" building a conduit a quarter mile and dumping waste into a river. Of course they know.

[paggle]

I don't think it's equivalent. In the physical world, it's easy to make a mistake that destroys the entire thing (e.g. causes a power plant to explode) but it's hard to make a mistake that causes the system to do something completely random and not designed. Like, you can't make a mistake with a weedwacker that turns it into an airplane.

However I have made mistakes like that programming all the time... for example, having massively more data written out to disk than I had intended. You are never going to make a mistake in a factory that increases its electricity consumption by 1,000,000x but I have made errors that caused a million times more data to be written out to disk than planned.

[TeMPOraL]

> You are never going to make a mistake in a factory that increases its electricity consumption by 1,000,000x

Maybe not a million, but a thousand times? Sure. Just short some heavy machinery and watch the amperes light up the day like a second sun as they rush out to pour into the ground. Factories have breakers to prevent that, you'll say. Turns out software projects don't have fuse equivalents, even though they should. The reason is that bleeding electricity is expensive (and dangerous to people, which from the company's POV means "even more expensive"), whereas data leaks aren't. I hope the latter is going to change.

[shsjxjbsbs]

You really don’t think that a chemical company dumping waste into a river is worse than using phone numbers to target ads? Deep in your heart of hearts? Are you sure you don’t have an axe to grind against tech companies and perhaps that’s clouding your moral calculus?

[55555]

He wasn't saying they are just as bad as one another, he was saying the excuses are just as unbelievable.

[sdegutis]

They never said it was an accident. They just said it was an error, which is true! They did err.

[imihai1988]

why call it error ? there was no undefined behavior; someone actually implemented and tested whether it worked properly. why not call it a mistake? this was a mistake. calling it an error makes it sound like it was not on purpose.