alt Hacker News> As soon as you shift from showing that there is a problem to downloading data to establish the size of the problem
This is not a self-evident argument, what are you basing this on?
Problem scope is part of problem definition. If you dont know the scope, you dont know the problem.
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jacquesm • yesterday at 9:14 PM
On this quote by the OP:
"What isn’t mentioned in the analysis is that we ran a System 1 decision model on each dataset to determine whether it contained privacy-sensitive data."
You can't do that without downloading the data first.
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The point is that once you realize you're seeing data you shouldn't be seeing, you should either stop and just report it, or save the smallest amount reasonable to demonstrate the issue.
IANAL, but I think it'd be advisable to seek legal advice if you decide to take door number 2 and collect a corpus of evidence to decide what "the smallest reasonable" is; at least put some serious thought into it — because while I have no reason to suspect that neathack had bad intentions, it doesn't seem likely that it was necessary to collect 159k projects to show the scale of the impact.
He could instead have collected a representative sample, and then extrapolate the true size of the impact. I'm not trained in statistics, so don't know how to calculate the required sample size, but I know it's possible.
Isn't this what you're getting at jacquesm?