Comment by coryl
15 years ago
I'm a nice guy, but honestly, if I was a kid with that much power, I probably would have acted the same. People were feeding him their emails, photos, personal info straight to his servers. And they still ARE!
Still, he might have still been treating Facebook as a goofy side project at this point. And IM chat doesn't express jest or joking around.
Call a spade a spade.
This is a really weak argument, to say the very least.
For one thing, just because a lot of kids are immature doesn't mean that they have a license to break the law. Joking obviously isn't a violation of the law, but breaking into private e-mail accounts is (18 USC 1030).
For another, Mark had already been formally disciplined by the Administrative Board for Facemash when he wrote these, so he clearly knew better.
Aruging that Facebook has the right to misuse people's content just because they provide it is clearly wrong.
In addition, there are five people including myself who ultimately filed legal action against Mark and/or Facebook, Inc. because of what happened at Harvard.
Lastly, at roughly the same age, I ran the same core product at the same time in the same place with the same name with the same people's information, and I didn't do that. I didn't joke with my friends about it, I didn't make fun of my users, I certainly never intended to abuse people's trust, and I never did. One of those users was Mark and I have his SHA-1 password hash sitting in my database, as well as his cell phone number--but I'm not going to share it with anyone, nor have I ever. Clearly it's possible to run such an operation in a different way than Mark.
"Call a spade a spade" indeed.
Jobs and Wozniak made hardware to steal long distance. Blekko founder Rich Skrenta wrote the first PC virus. YC founder RTM wrote the 'Morris Worm' that took down the internet in 1988. MySpacer Tom Anderson and Napster/Plaxo/Facebooker Sean Parker each had FBI visits (at least) for their teenage unauthorized computer access transgressions.
There are people who are sticklers for every rule from an early age, and then there are those who do impressive things. The overlap is very small.
Did he argue that he has the right to misuse content, or did he simply joke about it?
People joke about doing things they would never dream of doing. Heck, people lie about doing things to show off to people all the time - especially when younger (though not exclusively, by any means)
Are there any examples of him actually misusing this data?
Whenever people start accusing other people of crimes, including citing the section of the US Code that they broke, I flip the bozo bit.
You are too personally invested in this situation to act rationally.
Maybe he dropped out of Harvard before he took Business Ethics.
Heh. Sorry for all the downvotes, I thought it was funny...
I agree with you. If the shit I say in IM to my friends get published, it would look exactly like this. It doesn't mean I would ever do anything like that. It's just excited bragging. Some guys brag about women, money, physical accomplishments. Nerds like me brag about stupid computer tricks we can do...
You should consider changing your IM habits, if you expect to ever be in a situation where someone somewhere wants to sue you.
I'm a nice guy, but honestly, if I was a kid with that much power, I probably would have acted the same.
That might be true AND still not excuse a given behavior.
If I had vast power, I too might do a number of unpleasant things too... It's up to you to folks stop me... AND I'm OK stopping someone else at the same time...