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Showing posts with the label Pierre Omidyar

Private Data vs Public Data

Five years ago, someone by the name of Hacker Croll acquired a large amount of sensitive internal corporate documents from Twitter employees . Hacker Croll took 310 of these documents and sent them to the website Techcrunch . Techcrunch decided to use the information, publishing a series of stories based on the documents and the reactions of Twitter and Techcrunch's readers to the release of the documents. The documents themselves were not all that terrible. Twitter, it seems, is not an internet Enron. The release of the documents did not result in any serious consequences for Twitter - no flight of investment, no investigations, no indictments. Techcrunch summarized the contents of the documents as: "executive meeting notes, partner agreements and financial projections to the meal preferences, calendars and phone logs." For a crooked company such documents would be an absolute disaster. But few outside of the Internet and journalism industries noticed what happened.