Am still bemused that when Apple undocumented hardware gets misused by the NSA people are all like “…it must be for testing” yet when I *personally* wrote one cookie-handling goof/bug on Facebook it spawned (1) conspiracy theories (2) academic white papers (3) newspaper headlines and (4) EU-wide lawsuits by Belgian privacy activists

The latter: https://securehomes.esat.kuleuven.be/~gacar/fb_tracking/ — I was not aware that I was supposed to add a new endpoint to a blocklist; as part of “lessons learned” the entire codebase was revised to use an allowlist for various forms of cookie-manipulation, instead.

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One response to “Am still bemused that when Apple undocumented hardware gets misused by the NSA people are all like “…it must be for testing” yet when I *personally* wrote one cookie-handling goof/bug on Facebook it spawned (1) conspiracy theories (2) academic white papers (3) newspaper headlines and (4) EU-wide lawsuits by Belgian privacy activists”

  1. @alecm I've seen something as simple as an unclosed html tag (resulting in an missing paragraph) on a government website being discussed online as though it signalled something sinister.

    I was quite conspiratorially-minded as a teen, so it was quite mind-changing to see firsthand that sometimes potentially sinister-seeming stuff happens for incredibly reasonable reasons that can't be explained (or even acknowledged) without causing damage (usually to an individual).

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