alt Hacker NewsFar less than possible but far more than needed to prove there is a vulnerability.
> Morally: downloading data, not reading it, then deleting it, then reporting it does not strike me as unethical.
How will you prove you didn't read it?
How will you prove you deleted it and that you did not make a copy?
The company has no option: it is now documented that there is a breach. They will have to report that breach (which if I were them I'd be doing immediately, they have 48 hours to do so). And then they are going to have to make a tough decision: thank you for your time and effort and hope that you really didn't read it and that you didn't copy it or play it safe and file a case against you.
Lots of companies are going to play it safe, if only because their compliance department is not going to want to take the risk of you popping up a few months later with another interesting analysis of data that you shouldn't have had in the first place. That's what makes this so risky, it turns a clear 'good deed' into something that could well end up in court. Morality rarely factors into such situations.
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Honest question: how would you determine how much data is reasonable to download and inspect while remaining "white hat"? Are you advocating they stop at a single record, since that's enough to prove that a vulnerability exists? Or that OP downloaded _more_ than necessary and should have stopped earlier (but not at the first instance)?
Another question: I'm not sure if you noticed, but he obtained it from a 3rd party called Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/) which "maintains a free, open repository of web crawl data that can be used by anyone." Doesn't this imply the damage is already done, since the data's been made available to _anyone_ at this point?
Put another way, since it's been put on Common Crawl, which presumably follows rules about what to scrape, hasn't Lovable effectively published this data?
How do you square this with the news article being published on November 2nd, and referring to prior attempts to report going back to August?
It seems far more likely that Lovable and Supabase won’t consider or report this as a breach, nor will they take any action against the reporter.