Human rights? If I'm correctly understanding the issue, their software monitored your contact list so they could notify you when one of your contacts joined the service. You seem ready to throw him before the International Court.
That they've wiped their user data and are giving people the opportunity to use their product in a setting with opt-in sharing seems to demonstrate to me, at least, that they still believe that hosting your contact information would add value to their product, but they now realize that concerns regarding privacy are significant enough to warrant using the product without this feature. To reference a parallel thread, I don't think this is a reflection of morality/amorality/immorality, but rather that this never registered in their engineering oriented brains.
IMHO privacy should become a human right in these surveillance-ridden times but that was ahead of time - replace with "privacy", if you ask me it was a huge intrusion into the privacy of the users.
Sure, privacy should become a human right. I personally am a very private person. What you need to understand is we live in a world where there is no such thing as privacy. We need to clearly define what is right and what is wrong. What needs to be opt-in and what needs to be opt-out. What we, as a community, need to do is set a standard. We need to establish boundaries so that we can regain our privacy.
Outside of establishing boundaries there needs to be a way to deal with those who break the rules. Sending CEOs straight to the slaughter house doesn't accomplish anything. Companies need an opportunity to react and do the right thing. Especially when intentions were good, and the reaction from the Company is as responsible as Path's.
+1 Paths Owned their mistake
+1 Deleted all the data
+1 Fixed the mistake by publishing an opt-in feature.
They did everything they could to right their wrong.
You also need to realize they didn't commit murder. They weren't 'caught red handed with the murder weapon'. They had some digital data, and then deleted it. It's not like they raped and murdered your wife and family. They didn't commit genocide. They made a minor mistake and fixed it.
That they've wiped their user data and are giving people the opportunity to use their product in a setting with opt-in sharing seems to demonstrate to me, at least, that they still believe that hosting your contact information would add value to their product, but they now realize that concerns regarding privacy are significant enough to warrant using the product without this feature. To reference a parallel thread, I don't think this is a reflection of morality/amorality/immorality, but rather that this never registered in their engineering oriented brains.