Reading this wasn't easy, but let's appreciate the authenticity.
This post doesn't reflect well on you, you were disrespectful to every person in the story. You really need to grow up, and you could've handled this way better.
You could have, for example, asked exactly what their concerns were, and proposed ways to address them.
Your site looks very amateur, but from your description, it doesn't sound like you are doing anything clearly forbidden by law.
>someone had written a comment about S which he did not like.
Couldn't this also be done in the reddit? Then is the lack of moderation and language filters the problem?
If you're ever going to record an interaction with people who do not want it seen by the masses that they are breaking the law, you need to ensure that you livestream it.
Then you can tell them, "Go ahead, confiscate my phone. Proof of your illegal acts have already left the building, and the country."
I suspect if he changed the name to not include the college name, while people would be angry, there wouldn't be a real reason to take it down. The sending emails to the college system is also iffy.
I love how OP directly borrowed the plot of The Social Network by scraping the campus directory for a student rating system. And somehow it's playing out in the exact same way.
> I had scraped data for all students at IIT Delhi, and made a profile for all of them.
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile. Each profile also had 4 fields, where you could tag anyone, in the "has dated", "crushing on", "crushed on by" or "haters" category.
> he told me, take the site down or you WILL face DISCO, so again I was like sure, I dont mind it (I was just gettting reminded of Social Network lmao)
> also at one point i literally said the social network dialogue, " I feel like i deserve some recognition from you guys"
One can hope that time will lead to more maturity than was shown in launching a site like this or acting that way when pressed.
Yes, the admin didn't handle it well, but the writing style and general tone of this post/incident is incredibly off-putting. All while talking about future "investors" and how many great ideas he has. You created a clone of hot-or-not (or whatever Zuck called his site) and you think you're the next coming? Get real. There was nothing innovative here at all, it might be one thing if it was innovative while being scummy but it's just scummy and a tired copy.
I mean it's not at all related to hot-or-not?
I feel like this site idea, and the implementation was really innovative honestly.
and also, "you think you're the next coming? Get real"
lol just witness history
Hahaha, I get 'The Social Network' vibes from this story. You should read his other posts also. Let's just say the guy has more than enough confidence.
I really felt like i was living in the movie too.
also for the posts, haha thanks for reading. i feel like they'll be pretty cool for people to look back on when im really succesful
I mean, this guy seems absolutely clueless. Anyone with even the slightest social awareness would know this site is going to result in hurting people and people are going to really dislike him for making it... and further his own conduct is super immature (wtf is [0])... He basically made a harassment service, complete with allowing anonymous posting? Definite "FAFO" moment. I don't feel a shred of sympathy for his situation.
When you build social technology, you have a responsibility to put some serious thought into what the social effects are of what you're producing. Every feature will have social and psychological implications for the people using the service. If you don't care about that, you especially shouldn't even be trying to make social-related software.
honestly, i do not get the hurting people thing.
like ok, i do get it, but i just feel like people should be more thick skinned in general, people have said a lot of stuff about me too... but i just dont care.
and like ok, if you do care, just report the post, i would have taken it down. why do you need to call the police and tell the dean to kick me out? that's just very malicious. and i mean i kind of get why people were writing bad stuff about people like these
Hurting with words via live speech is one thing. A website amplifies it and makes it permanent.
When people say stuff, only other people around them hear, and even then it can be denied. When people write things online, what they write is public for everyone to read, and it's permanent, forever screenshotted and reposted.
I find it hard to blame the young ambitious teenager and much easier to blame the grown-ass adults in supervisory roles who apparently can't cite a single violation by name and later violently steal a kid's phone.
The kid might have some things to learn, sure, but the adult behavior is what I would call "super immature".
lol this happened at my college (IIT delhi). He's being disengeious in the blog, the reason they made him take the site down is cos people writing some really really bad things about students, and Obv that should not be allowed at a place for higher education. Be more mature.
I meant he's being disengeious in being surprised about the dean. like this should have been obvious to him, obv if you make something like this, you will face consequences...
I don't think he's being disingenuous. OP is transparent they started a campus gossip website inspired by The Social Network.
> I had scraped data for all students at IIT Delhi, and made a profile for all of them.
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile. Each profile also had 4 fields, where you could tag anyone, in the "has dated", "crushing on", "crushed on by" or "haters" category.
I am surprised that OP, having seen that movie and quoting lines from it during his meeting with the administration, didn't see this coming.
> also at one point i literally said the social network dialogue, " I feel like i deserve some recognition from you guys"
I meant he's being disengeious in being surprised about the dean. like this should have been obvious to him, obv if you make something like this, you will face consequences...
How is some people writing bad things about some students a valid reason to make me take my website down? like iit should honestly have been proud of me for building something cool, which over 80% of their uni is using. instead of threatening to kick me out...
It's incredible to me that you don't feel any responsibility for a platform that you created. What happens on the platform is shaped directly by the choices you make as its creator - to be anonymous or identifiable, what the topics of discussion are, whether moderation happens.
By allowing anonymous commentary, scraping every student's data and seeding the conversation around "rumors", you created an environment that is perfect for targeted harassment. You created the platform and maintained it; what happens on that platform is absolutely your responsibility.
I highly recommend that you take this opportunity to do some introspection and consider why so many people were upset.
I honestly think the "targeted harrasment" thing is completely overblown. i mean that was just a very very very small part of the site. like okay, maybe 3 people are getting hurt (which btw, they could js report and id take the post down), but over four thousand kids were also enjoying using the site right? like people would come up to me everywhere and say how much fun they're having etc.
You might have gotten positive acknowledgement of the technical work if you were like, 13. By your age (which I assume is greater than 16 or 17) you're expected to understand things like "not enabling anonymous attackers to harass the shit out of literally anyone at your entire school with impunity".
you are still being disingenuous. We live in a society, the college as a whole is a society of various people. Your site was hurting some people's sentiments and that's enough reason to take it down. I can admit it was maybe cool, but try to do cool things which do good to people, not harm.
and be a little more humble.
When I read things like this I glimplse the enormous cultural gulf between generations. I instictively want to take the side of the underdog in most situations. But in this case, I do not find the protagonist very sympathetic. But clearly, many young people feel otherwise. The world is a-changing.
I feel like it's not really generational, I remember bros like this when I was on IRC as a kid and we were all hacking around on stuff and winnuking each other or whatever. Some of them actually grew up and did real things which is always cool to see (I have plenty of said ppl on LinkedIn who are now crazy successful), and then yeah lots of 'em who uhhh, went in other directions.
The implementation of the idea looks more like a kiwifarm egg than a facebook egg.
Thinking about Anonymous posting about non public figures is perturbing. If the poster can't be made responsible for the post, then the platform and the platform of the platform (and so on) are in line. That is: new website, then the hosting servers (and so on)
DMCA is a pretty good model for this sort of thing IMO. You take down the post, notify the poster, and if the poster wants they can have you put it back up and tell the original complainant "sue me".
Preliminary comment on tone and behavior in writing: Everything about the story, from the described details about what allegedly happened to the way those details are communicated, is infantile. That makes it very hard to treat the author as a reliable narrator about specific details.
Anyway...
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile
Jesus christ. You built a platform specifically designed for targeted abuse. I know that you're still young, but one day when you're older I hope you come to realize that a platform for spreadings rumors about others is not an ok thing to want to build. You don't have the moral high-ground here. The only thing you accomplished was being a creep.
This whole blog post shows an extreme level of immaturity that I really do hope you grow out of. Literally every line is absolute cringe.
> this is that story. its really really fucking crazy.
The craziest thing to me about this story is that everything in the story makes you look bad and yet you chose to post it anyway.
You either:
A) never realized that you were building a harassment platform despite being told this multiple times, which demonstrates a complete lack of awareness
or
B) thought it would be a good idea to build a harassment platform, which demonstrates a complete lack of empathy
I'm surprised at how few comments there are about just how creepy this is. Going to a university is not implied consent for random people to throw up searchable websites with your name and face, let alone allowing random, anonymous other people to attach anything they want to it in a comment section.
I get it he was copying The Social Network, but just because it's been done before doesn't make it better now.
I'd rather live in a world where a student's website hosts an anonymous mean comment about me than live in the authoritarian nightmare of how the school officials, guards and police acted in this behavior.
Tea is still available on the app store, which is a far more targeted harassment and slander app, than this one that was clearly more of a 4chan style "for the lulz" that no one would take seriously.
> I'd rather live in a world where a student's website hosts an anonymous mean comment about me than live in the authoritarian nightmare of ...
False dichotomy fallacy. Also fallacy of emotive language. That is a deflection, not a rebuttal.
> Tea is still available on the app store
Whataboutism. Fallacy of relative privation. That is a deflection, not a rebuttal.
Since we're talking about worlds we'd like to live in, I'd like to live in a world where people believe that it's bad to think harassment platforms are ok/cool/fun.
It is your obligation to remove defamatory comments immediately, ideally never allowing them to be posted at all (by means of an LLM). Secondly, you probably failed to provide the profile owners a way to delete their own profile if they seek privacy. These inactions are probably what led to complaints.
...in response to someone politely asking to have his profile removed. Then the school told you to take it down and you refused.
You deserved to get kicked out of school.
Yes, this site would probably have been fine (if distasteful) in the U.S...because the U.S. has a different legal system. This site is not legal under Indian law. Defamation works very differently in India.
You should consider yourself lucky that you're able to write this blogpost instead of finding out what the inside of an Indian prison is like.
I think this kind of puritism is not good, at all. It honestly feels really elitist whenever people bring up the way of speaking, instead of the things being said.
A person from medevial britain could look at your language and say it's the "mouth of a sailor".
Different people speak differently. obv a college student would speak different from like a mid thirties software employee right?
I hope you can look past it and give me your thoughts on the actual story, which i felt was really really crazy
"What do you mean I'm being fired for fucking workplace harassment? You're my goddamn boss, don't you know that swearing has a positive correlation with intelligence!?"
Yeah, something tells me that these studies aren't going to move the needle on swearing and professionalism.
Imagine if this was, say, at a bar. A person holds up a sheet of paper on a clipboard and says anyone can write about anyone else in the bar. Would the police be called? Would legal threats be made? People freaking out like this is not consistent with social norms. It's magical thinking about the internet somehow being different or unique.
Good luck dealing with these small minded administrators.
Okay. Now imagine he's doing it out on the public sidewalk and not using bar property. Would it be justified to use physical force and steal the clipboard owner's property?
Also the guy with a clipboard is only showing those notes to a couple people at a time after they journey to his location, which makes a pretty big difference for the amount of disruption. There's no magical thinking about the internet being special. The social norms are different because the situation is so different.
They stole his phone using physical violence. It's in the article. I'll quote it for you.
>So i was like chill out bro, ill just delete the video, but the dean said, "no confiscate his phone".
so one of the guards just snatched the phone from my hand
the dean said wipe everything, and dont give him his phone back. I was like wtf is happening? bro I have my private photos on there dont do this. like you cannot do this. I tried reaching for my phone but one of the security guys just held me. and started being rough with me. like pushing me around and shit.
That wasn't really because of the website though. The meeting could have been about basically anything and grabbing the phone for recording could have happened. It was bad but let's not mix up the two situations.
Tell me you never been to a bar without telling me you never been to a bar. Bars are usually a huge hot or not (well, parties in general). People are talking and gossiping about each other the whole time. At worst you only be talked about as well.
Bars probably don't have a directory of everyone that attends the bar, that you scraped and published without permission.
The fact that a person is a student at the school can be very sensitive information. The classic example is someone who leaves an abusive spouse/family and does not want to be found. Now their name and picture is out there, and their timetable and therefore whereabouts could be partially inferred from the school calendar by someone who knows their interests.
> The fact that a person is a student at the school can be very sensitive information.
But they were already in the directory? That's much more "out there" than the gossip site.
I'm really skeptical of this line of logic. It feels like motivated reasoning based on not liking the site, because a privacy issue like that is easier to attack (if it's real). I think the meaningful criticisms are based on the actual functionality, the commenting.
I understand that opinion, but the opposite view is now conventional. Corporate/college directories are usually not available in public, but only with a local auth. Even if the scraping site restricted signups to local email addresses, the college is responsible for the distribution of its directory PII so could not allow this.
Leaking PII like this would be illegal in Canada for example.
I don't understand how the word "leaking" would apply here. Unless there was an unmentioned login wall for the directory he scraped, the site is mirroring the names and faces off of a much larger and already public site that nobody has said a single word in complaint of.
Yeah, but he also took students' PII and put it on his website. If someone did that in a bar, there's a good chance they'd get their face punched by others in the bar.
The college was being abusive and they probably cannot take your phone and delete your stuff. What an awful thing to happen. By the way, the dean was not being nice by visiting you, don't go through Stockholm Syndrome, he was checking on you because he knew what he did was wrong.
IIT Delhi is in India so I'm not sure what the law looks like there, but yeah a university physically stealing an adult's phone and deleting his personal photos would definitely be illegal in the states.
I wonder if Delhi is the equivalent of a one-party or two-party consent state in the US? If it's one-party then OP recording their conversation wasn't even illegal.
Reading this wasn't easy, but let's appreciate the authenticity.
This post doesn't reflect well on you, you were disrespectful to every person in the story. You really need to grow up, and you could've handled this way better.
You could have, for example, asked exactly what their concerns were, and proposed ways to address them.
Your site looks very amateur, but from your description, it doesn't sound like you are doing anything clearly forbidden by law.
>someone had written a comment about S which he did not like.
Couldn't this also be done in the reddit? Then is the lack of moderation and language filters the problem?
If you're ever going to record an interaction with people who do not want it seen by the masses that they are breaking the law, you need to ensure that you livestream it.
Then you can tell them, "Go ahead, confiscate my phone. Proof of your illegal acts have already left the building, and the country."
I suspect if he changed the name to not include the college name, while people would be angry, there wouldn't be a real reason to take it down. The sending emails to the college system is also iffy.
Lack of moderation was the real issue with the site.
only a couple steps away from Idiocracy
what does this mean lol
I think he is saying you felt like a lion, we saw a hyena.
I love how OP directly borrowed the plot of The Social Network by scraping the campus directory for a student rating system. And somehow it's playing out in the exact same way.
> I had scraped data for all students at IIT Delhi, and made a profile for all of them.
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile. Each profile also had 4 fields, where you could tag anyone, in the "has dated", "crushing on", "crushed on by" or "haters" category.
> he told me, take the site down or you WILL face DISCO, so again I was like sure, I dont mind it (I was just gettting reminded of Social Network lmao)
> also at one point i literally said the social network dialogue, " I feel like i deserve some recognition from you guys"
One can hope that time will lead to more maturity than was shown in launching a site like this or acting that way when pressed.
Yes, the admin didn't handle it well, but the writing style and general tone of this post/incident is incredibly off-putting. All while talking about future "investors" and how many great ideas he has. You created a clone of hot-or-not (or whatever Zuck called his site) and you think you're the next coming? Get real. There was nothing innovative here at all, it might be one thing if it was innovative while being scummy but it's just scummy and a tired copy.
I mean it's not at all related to hot-or-not? I feel like this site idea, and the implementation was really innovative honestly. and also, "you think you're the next coming? Get real" lol just witness history
Hahaha, I get 'The Social Network' vibes from this story. You should read his other posts also. Let's just say the guy has more than enough confidence.
I really felt like i was living in the movie too. also for the posts, haha thanks for reading. i feel like they'll be pretty cool for people to look back on when im really succesful
I mean, this guy seems absolutely clueless. Anyone with even the slightest social awareness would know this site is going to result in hurting people and people are going to really dislike him for making it... and further his own conduct is super immature (wtf is [0])... He basically made a harassment service, complete with allowing anonymous posting? Definite "FAFO" moment. I don't feel a shred of sympathy for his situation.
When you build social technology, you have a responsibility to put some serious thought into what the social effects are of what you're producing. Every feature will have social and psychological implications for the people using the service. If you don't care about that, you especially shouldn't even be trying to make social-related software.
[0] https://monyatwu.com/blog/iitsocial/pic7.png
honestly, i do not get the hurting people thing. like ok, i do get it, but i just feel like people should be more thick skinned in general, people have said a lot of stuff about me too... but i just dont care. and like ok, if you do care, just report the post, i would have taken it down. why do you need to call the police and tell the dean to kick me out? that's just very malicious. and i mean i kind of get why people were writing bad stuff about people like these
Hurting with words via live speech is one thing. A website amplifies it and makes it permanent.
When people say stuff, only other people around them hear, and even then it can be denied. When people write things online, what they write is public for everyone to read, and it's permanent, forever screenshotted and reposted.
I find it hard to blame the young ambitious teenager and much easier to blame the grown-ass adults in supervisory roles who apparently can't cite a single violation by name and later violently steal a kid's phone.
The kid might have some things to learn, sure, but the adult behavior is what I would call "super immature".
lol this happened at my college (IIT delhi). He's being disengeious in the blog, the reason they made him take the site down is cos people writing some really really bad things about students, and Obv that should not be allowed at a place for higher education. Be more mature.
> He's being disengeious in the blog, the reason they made him take the site down is cos people writing some really really bad things about students
I don't understand what you mean. The blog is very clear about that being the problem.
I meant he's being disengeious in being surprised about the dean. like this should have been obvious to him, obv if you make something like this, you will face consequences...
The only surprise I see related to the dean is around getting his phone grabbed, which seems like legitimate surprise.
I don't think he's being disingenuous. OP is transparent they started a campus gossip website inspired by The Social Network.
> I had scraped data for all students at IIT Delhi, and made a profile for all of them.
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile. Each profile also had 4 fields, where you could tag anyone, in the "has dated", "crushing on", "crushed on by" or "haters" category.
I am surprised that OP, having seen that movie and quoting lines from it during his meeting with the administration, didn't see this coming.
> also at one point i literally said the social network dialogue, " I feel like i deserve some recognition from you guys"
I meant he's being disengeious in being surprised about the dean. like this should have been obvious to him, obv if you make something like this, you will face consequences...
How is some people writing bad things about some students a valid reason to make me take my website down? like iit should honestly have been proud of me for building something cool, which over 80% of their uni is using. instead of threatening to kick me out...
So you made JuicyCampus[0]/YikYak[1] and are surprised you’re being ostracized for it?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JuicyCampus
[1]: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/03/07/yik-yak-re-em...
It's incredible to me that you don't feel any responsibility for a platform that you created. What happens on the platform is shaped directly by the choices you make as its creator - to be anonymous or identifiable, what the topics of discussion are, whether moderation happens.
By allowing anonymous commentary, scraping every student's data and seeding the conversation around "rumors", you created an environment that is perfect for targeted harassment. You created the platform and maintained it; what happens on that platform is absolutely your responsibility.
I highly recommend that you take this opportunity to do some introspection and consider why so many people were upset.
I honestly think the "targeted harrasment" thing is completely overblown. i mean that was just a very very very small part of the site. like okay, maybe 3 people are getting hurt (which btw, they could js report and id take the post down), but over four thousand kids were also enjoying using the site right? like people would come up to me everywhere and say how much fun they're having etc.
There are several legal issues, including:
- You created profiles for students without consent
- You enabled anonymous posts about identifiable individuals
- There was no effective moderation/control system
Core issue: once you're aware of harmful content, you’re expected to act. If you don't address it in a reasonable time, you can become legally liable.
You might have gotten positive acknowledgement of the technical work if you were like, 13. By your age (which I assume is greater than 16 or 17) you're expected to understand things like "not enabling anonymous attackers to harass the shit out of literally anyone at your entire school with impunity".
you are still being disingenuous. We live in a society, the college as a whole is a society of various people. Your site was hurting some people's sentiments and that's enough reason to take it down. I can admit it was maybe cool, but try to do cool things which do good to people, not harm. and be a little more humble.
> Your site was hurting some people's sentiments and that's enough reason to take it down.
Like hell it is. I got news for you - every website hurts someone's sentiments. That's no reason to gatekeep.
I guess that’s how you get to be in Forbes 30 under 30 right?
When I read things like this I glimplse the enormous cultural gulf between generations. I instictively want to take the side of the underdog in most situations. But in this case, I do not find the protagonist very sympathetic. But clearly, many young people feel otherwise. The world is a-changing.
I feel like it's not really generational, I remember bros like this when I was on IRC as a kid and we were all hacking around on stuff and winnuking each other or whatever. Some of them actually grew up and did real things which is always cool to see (I have plenty of said ppl on LinkedIn who are now crazy successful), and then yeah lots of 'em who uhhh, went in other directions.
The implementation of the idea looks more like a kiwifarm egg than a facebook egg.
Thinking about Anonymous posting about non public figures is perturbing. If the poster can't be made responsible for the post, then the platform and the platform of the platform (and so on) are in line. That is: new website, then the hosting servers (and so on)
DMCA is a pretty good model for this sort of thing IMO. You take down the post, notify the poster, and if the poster wants they can have you put it back up and tell the original complainant "sue me".
Preliminary comment on tone and behavior in writing: Everything about the story, from the described details about what allegedly happened to the way those details are communicated, is infantile. That makes it very hard to treat the author as a reliable narrator about specific details.
Anyway...
> anyone could make an anonymous account, and then comment anything on anyone's profile
Jesus christ. You built a platform specifically designed for targeted abuse. I know that you're still young, but one day when you're older I hope you come to realize that a platform for spreadings rumors about others is not an ok thing to want to build. You don't have the moral high-ground here. The only thing you accomplished was being a creep.
This whole blog post shows an extreme level of immaturity that I really do hope you grow out of. Literally every line is absolute cringe.
> this is that story. its really really fucking crazy.
The craziest thing to me about this story is that everything in the story makes you look bad and yet you chose to post it anyway.
You either:
A) never realized that you were building a harassment platform despite being told this multiple times, which demonstrates a complete lack of awareness
or
B) thought it would be a good idea to build a harassment platform, which demonstrates a complete lack of empathy
I'm surprised at how few comments there are about just how creepy this is. Going to a university is not implied consent for random people to throw up searchable websites with your name and face, let alone allowing random, anonymous other people to attach anything they want to it in a comment section.
I get it he was copying The Social Network, but just because it's been done before doesn't make it better now.
I'd rather live in a world where a student's website hosts an anonymous mean comment about me than live in the authoritarian nightmare of how the school officials, guards and police acted in this behavior.
Tea is still available on the app store, which is a far more targeted harassment and slander app, than this one that was clearly more of a 4chan style "for the lulz" that no one would take seriously.
> I'd rather live in a world where a student's website hosts an anonymous mean comment about me than live in the authoritarian nightmare of ...
False dichotomy fallacy. Also fallacy of emotive language. That is a deflection, not a rebuttal.
> Tea is still available on the app store
Whataboutism. Fallacy of relative privation. That is a deflection, not a rebuttal.
Since we're talking about worlds we'd like to live in, I'd like to live in a world where people believe that it's bad to think harassment platforms are ok/cool/fun.
I wish the people currently building the global terror nexus would have that mature realization.
It is your obligation to remove defamatory comments immediately, ideally never allowing them to be posted at all (by means of an LLM). Secondly, you probably failed to provide the profile owners a way to delete their own profile if they seek privacy. These inactions are probably what led to complaints.
FTA: "Mony: bitch come suck my dick"
...in response to someone politely asking to have his profile removed. Then the school told you to take it down and you refused.
You deserved to get kicked out of school.
Yes, this site would probably have been fine (if distasteful) in the U.S...because the U.S. has a different legal system. This site is not legal under Indian law. Defamation works very differently in India.
You should consider yourself lucky that you're able to write this blogpost instead of finding out what the inside of an Indian prison is like.
Hard to have the high road with the mouth of a sailor
I think this kind of puritism is not good, at all. It honestly feels really elitist whenever people bring up the way of speaking, instead of the things being said. A person from medevial britain could look at your language and say it's the "mouth of a sailor". Different people speak differently. obv a college student would speak different from like a mid thirties software employee right? I hope you can look past it and give me your thoughts on the actual story, which i felt was really really crazy
This is how evil tends to win. Idiots will select the “cleaner” option even if it’s worse.
Usually ad-hominem fallacies have a little more padding than that.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/26/health/swearing-benefits-...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/01/170117105107.h...
"What do you mean I'm being fired for fucking workplace harassment? You're my goddamn boss, don't you know that swearing has a positive correlation with intelligence!?"
Yeah, something tells me that these studies aren't going to move the needle on swearing and professionalism.
That's not what's on display here.
Imagine if this was, say, at a bar. A person holds up a sheet of paper on a clipboard and says anyone can write about anyone else in the bar. Would the police be called? Would legal threats be made? People freaking out like this is not consistent with social norms. It's magical thinking about the internet somehow being different or unique.
Good luck dealing with these small minded administrators.
Any bar worth going to would kick out the asshole with the sign and ban them from returning.
Okay. Now imagine he's doing it out on the public sidewalk and not using bar property. Would it be justified to use physical force and steal the clipboard owner's property?
What about this imaginary scenario has anything to do with OP scraping their college’s student directory to populate their rumor mill website?
Where did stealing property come from?
Also the guy with a clipboard is only showing those notes to a couple people at a time after they journey to his location, which makes a pretty big difference for the amount of disruption. There's no magical thinking about the internet being special. The social norms are different because the situation is so different.
They stole his phone using physical violence. It's in the article. I'll quote it for you.
>So i was like chill out bro, ill just delete the video, but the dean said, "no confiscate his phone". so one of the guards just snatched the phone from my hand the dean said wipe everything, and dont give him his phone back. I was like wtf is happening? bro I have my private photos on there dont do this. like you cannot do this. I tried reaching for my phone but one of the security guys just held me. and started being rough with me. like pushing me around and shit.
That wasn't really because of the website though. The meeting could have been about basically anything and grabbing the phone for recording could have happened. It was bad but let's not mix up the two situations.
Tell me you never been to a bar without telling me you never been to a bar. Bars are usually a huge hot or not (well, parties in general). People are talking and gossiping about each other the whole time. At worst you only be talked about as well.
Bars probably don't have a directory of everyone that attends the bar, that you scraped and published without permission.
The fact that a person is a student at the school can be very sensitive information. The classic example is someone who leaves an abusive spouse/family and does not want to be found. Now their name and picture is out there, and their timetable and therefore whereabouts could be partially inferred from the school calendar by someone who knows their interests.
> The fact that a person is a student at the school can be very sensitive information.
But they were already in the directory? That's much more "out there" than the gossip site.
I'm really skeptical of this line of logic. It feels like motivated reasoning based on not liking the site, because a privacy issue like that is easier to attack (if it's real). I think the meaningful criticisms are based on the actual functionality, the commenting.
I understand that opinion, but the opposite view is now conventional. Corporate/college directories are usually not available in public, but only with a local auth. Even if the scraping site restricted signups to local email addresses, the college is responsible for the distribution of its directory PII so could not allow this.
Leaking PII like this would be illegal in Canada for example.
I don't understand how the word "leaking" would apply here. Unless there was an unmentioned login wall for the directory he scraped, the site is mirroring the names and faces off of a much larger and already public site that nobody has said a single word in complaint of.
Yeah, but he also took students' PII and put it on his website. If someone did that in a bar, there's a good chance they'd get their face punched by others in the bar.
The college was being abusive and they probably cannot take your phone and delete your stuff. What an awful thing to happen. By the way, the dean was not being nice by visiting you, don't go through Stockholm Syndrome, he was checking on you because he knew what he did was wrong.
IIT Delhi is in India so I'm not sure what the law looks like there, but yeah a university physically stealing an adult's phone and deleting his personal photos would definitely be illegal in the states.
I wonder if Delhi is the equivalent of a one-party or two-party consent state in the US? If it's one-party then OP recording their conversation wasn't even illegal.