[FrustratedMonky]

"public search engine indexes"

Then it should be the search engine at fault.

If you leave your house unlocked is one thing.

If there is a company trying everyone's doors, then posting a sign in the yard "this house is unlocked", has to account for something.

[lmm]

A plain URL is an open door not a closed one. Most websites are public and expected to be public.

[FrustratedMonky]

Isn't that the point of the post?

There are URL's that are out there 'as-if' public, but really should be private.

And some people argue they should be treated as private, even if it is just a plain URL and public.

[lmm]

You can't blame the search engine for indexing plain URLs. Listing a closed-but-unlocked door is a bad analogy.

[FrustratedMonky]

Well. You also can't charge joe blow with a crime for browsing URL's, that happen to be private but accidentally made public.

Just by looking, you are guilty. That is wrong.

[pixl97]

You've been appropriately downvoted for a terrible take.

Imagine if you left your house unlocked it would be broken into seconds later. Even worse, the people that broke into it live in a different country with no extradition law and you'd never figure out who they are anyway.

In this case your insurance company would tell you lock your damned doors and the police may even charge you under public nuisance laws.

[FrustratedMonky]

Yeah, it is a terrible take. It's a bad situation.

Just like charging people for a crime for accessing private material, simply by browsing a public URL.

Maybe Better take:

It is like someone being charged for breaking and entering, simply by looking at a house from the street, when the door was left open. Your guilty by simply looking, and seeing inside. But you were just walking by, you saw inside before realizing it was a crime, now your guilty.

If you are going to charge people for accessing private sites, potentially by accident, by simply being provided a public URL from a search engine. Then shouldn't the search engine have some culpability?

Or. Better. Change the law so the onus is on the site to protect itself.

[FrustratedMonky]

"" Imagine a journalist finds a folder on a park bench, opens it, and sees a telephone number inside. She dials the number. A famous rapper answers and spews a racist rant. If no one gave her permission to open the folder and the rapper’s telephone number was unlisted, should the reporter go to jail for publishing what she heard?

If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is. And yet, add in a computer and the Internet, and that’s basically what a newly unsealed federal indictment accuses Florida journalist Tim Burke of doing when he found and disseminated outtakes of Tucker Carlson’s Fox News interview with Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, going on the first of many antisemitic diatribes.""

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/charges-against-...

"According to Burke, the video of Carlson’s interview with Ye was streamed via a publicly available, unencrypted URL that anyone could access by typing the address into your browser."