[pjc50]

> they REMOVED access to it as soon as they realized what sharing that data meant.

Did that unleak the data? No. It was a mistake, but it required a cleanup which wasn't achieved and wasn't made public.

Ed Felten coined the phrase "Exxon Valdez of privacy" over a decade ago in anticipation of this: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2006/06/12/exxon-valdez-privac...

[ngcazz]

Wow, that's an amazingly prescient post.

[pjc50]

I'd suggest that people popularize the phrase "Exxon Valdez of Privacy" but that may be old enough that people have forgotten it. Maybe substitute "Deepwater Horizon" or "Fukushima". If you want even more prescient, go back fifteen years to see him post a link to https://www.wired.com/2003/01/google-10/

"The company's growth spurt has spawned a host of daunting questions that no data-retrieval system can easily answer. Should Google play ball with repressive foreign governments? Refuse to link users to "hate" sites? Punish marketers who artificially inflate site rankings? Fight the Church of Scientology's attempts to silence critics? And what to do about the cache, Google's archive of previously indexed pages? "

Whenever a colossal disaster happens, there is nearly always someone who was telling anyone who would listen what the problem was years in advance.

Felten is not as famous as Schneier but just as important, and has been doing lots of important work such as fighting against electronic voting systems.