[jonahx]

Your analogy misrepresents the grandfather's point. A closer analogy for his argument might be:

- Some high number X of dark alley stabbings occur each year.

- But alleys still "feel" safe to people, because the stabbings aren't well-publicized. So people don't know to avoid them and the rate X remains the same.

- Let's publicize alley stabbings in an emotionally impactful way, so people know to avoid alleys and we can bring X down.

In the actual case at hand, the argument is that you break a few eggs so people understand the issue viscerally, and hope to achieve massive regulatory change because people now actually care. I don't know if it would work, but it's a more reasonable idea than you're making it out to be.

Solving the root problem here is orders of magnitude more important than any single data breach today is.

[RyanZAG]

I don't think this is correct. For all the people who would have their data exposed in a public torrent, their data is likely safe at present and just needs to be removed from that website. If you put it in a torrent, you're hurting all of those people in a very direct way - you're the one stabbing them in the back.

What the authors here did is correct - they've publicized the issue. Releasing this data as a torrent is not 'publicizing' anything - it is stabbing millions of people in the back, and then waiting for the crowds to come and gape at the dead bodies.

[smsm42]

> Let's publicize alley stabbings in an emotionally impactful way

The top post doesn't promote publicizing data breaches that already happened. It is promoting obtaining and publishing the data which weren't published before. It is completely different things. Like making a TV series about alley stabbings - and stabbing actual people in the alley to get better scenes for this video. The former is great, the latter is a heinous crime which can ruin the whole cause.

[botverse]

It says that the tech savvy bad actors may already have it

[smsm42]

Doesn't matter. It's like justifying mugging by saying "well, criminals might have mugged you anyway, if not me then somebody else". If somebody might have committed the crime, does not justify committing it again.