Comment by chris37879

Didn't they grant them access? HTTPS has access control mechanisms in place, if that page wasn't meant to be accessed, that's one thing, but it was literally a public page on their website. Furthermore, if it wasn't data the user was meant to access, why did the website owner transmit it to them? (And not just the Journalist in question, but everyone who had gone to that page while this was there).

Where this page not meant to be public, I'd tend to agree with you, but it was meant to be public and was transmitting this data to use as an identifier. The encoding its in is irrelevant, encodings are not encryption and this journalist did nothing illegal.