Wow! Just wow! Just as I think the situation cannot get any worse, the OP reveals even worse things going on. I know the UX of this blog and the lack of capitalization is going to turn many people off! But I urge you to power through and read the whole OP anyway.
Use reader mode, block Javascript or whatever it takes. Give the author a break. They're a teenager. What kind of websites were you making as a teenager? I'm sure one of those dark background websites with MARQUEEs and BLINKs with glaring contrast colors! So give them a break. Behind the annoying UX is an article about serious and appalling privacy and security issues.
Like read this:
> i raised this with chris, who's a full-time staff member (not a teenager), and he insisted that exposing physical addresses and sensitive info was "just a vuln" not a breach. said he's "never heard the term 'data breach' used that way" and... also relied on chatgpt instead of actual legal advice.
Actually this Chris guy has a point. I don't call it breach either. It's PII data exposure but it is a serious exposure. So I don't 100% agree with the OP but the cavalier attitude towards security coming from the staff of a legitimate organization is appalling.
It's just mind boggling that an organization handling PII data has such appalling privacy and security lapses and they still remain arrogantly indignant about it making bold claims about laws they don't understand, why, because ChatGPT told them so? Cherry on top is they are employing teenagers to answer legal questions! Not kidding! Just read the OP! Unbelievable!
Nobody—certainly not any adult staff—at Hack Club relied on ChatGPT for legal advice. Nor do we employ teenagers to answer legal questions, we have actual legal counsel for that! Or in my personal case I ask my wife, who is a law professor, and then she asks ChatGPT (just kidding).
There is too much nonsense in this post to rebut line by line, and these conversations have all been had to death within Hack Club (we put a lot of time into transparently and publicly discussing our programs, problems, and decisions). Here's the short version of this saga:
- The author found a serious vuln in one of our programs introduced by a junior engineer
- We take vulns seriously—especially the serious ones! It was fixed immediately by a senior engineer upon report (within a day?)
- The author insisted that their test of the vuln to access their own address was a data breach, therefore obligating us to notify all 5,000 participants of this "breach" as per GDPR
- We judged this to be Prima Facie incorrect. A lawyer has since confirmed this judgment.
- It is, in fact, bad practice to notify users for every vulnerability. If this were the norm, you would inundated with notices from practically every software product you interact with. Almost all of these notices would be virtually non-actionable by the user, and they would wash out the few notices of breaches which are actionable. There is a good reason why the GDPR does not demand notice for vulns; mass notices are reserved for incidents where there is a known exfiltration of a meaningful amount of user data!
- The author was ultimately banned from the community not for their opinions on this matter, but because of a long streak of unrelated conduct issues that culminated in a spree of saying horribly abusive things to multiple other members of the community.
— They have been pursuing a grudge against the organization ever since. They are not a reliable narrator, this post is a fantasy version of events that casts them as a martyred hero.
Hack Club is an oddly-shaped organization with operations that often raise very real security concerns, but these are wrapped up in a complex web of tradeoffs that are very much still evolving as we refine and expand our core infrastructure. We are not Google, and it is a mistake to import reasoning from that kind of environment when analyzing our security/threat model. Nonetheless, privacy/security is something we think about and invest extensively in. In the past year we have started an organization-wide bounty system, moved all PII storage into a central "identity vault", and consulted extensively with a very fancy lawyer who specializes in corporate compliance with the growing raft of online privacy laws around the world. The good news is, according to that lawyer we already do almost everything we need to be compliant; we just need to publish a privacy policy! We are actively iterating on a mostly-finished draft of this document with our counsel, but it is taking time because, well, this stuff is very complicated. We serve or have served teenagers in almost every country, and GDPR is just the most prominent of many laws that are now on the books worldwide.
It most certainly was. You have someone outside your organization who accessed the data, and you know about it. Here's what you just wrote about the person who accessed this endpoint:
> - The author was ultimately banned from the community not for their opinions on this matter, but because of a long streak of unrelated conduct issues that culminated in a spree of saying horribly abusive things to multiple other members of the community.
> — They have been pursuing a grudge against the organization ever since. They are not a reliable narrator, this post is a fantasy version of events that casts them as a martyred hero.
Someone who has been acting maliciously against your organization accessed that data. And you think it's fine? They're a teenager. An angry teenager, who is acting out. You honestly believe you can trust they didn't distribute this data or tell anyone else about the problem before you found out about it?
When I was a teenager, someone in my year level gained access to a lot of personal data about a bunch of people in our year level. This was a smart individual who at least somewhat understood the gravity of the situation. But they were also a kid, of course they distributed some of the data — bragging rights and what not.
What about the section titled "the surveillance infrastructure (orpheus engine)" where the teenager claims children's data was intentionally being sent out to third parties, specifically to profile kids? What's that all about?
Look, no-one read this article and thought "Wow, this is well written article by a super mature well-adjusted individual. I'm taking this as gospel." The article is clearly written by an angry teenager. I feel far more invested in this now that I've seen your responses. The way you're handling this, and yourself, is just downright absurd. Stop.
I never said anything was fine. I said it was a serious vuln, and we took it seriously.
We patched the vulnerability, quickly. We addressed it with the engineer and made clear that this is no joke. We have extensive refactoring happening within our infrastructure to move to a model where this information is handled as much as possible through secure, audited, centralized systems. Is there something else we should be doing?
The crux of the question here was about whether GDPR obligates us to email all 5,000 people signed up for this program about this vulnerability. The two lawyers we have consulted on this have both said no. One of them specifically specializes in privacy compliance. It's not a complicated legal question, the answer is just no.
Look. This isn't on the front page of HN anymore. So I'm mostly writing this to you. You've work to do on your communication. This style of communication probably works just fine with teenagers, but it's not going to hold up to scrutiny with adults.
> The crux of the question here was about whether GDPR obligates us to email all 5,000 people signed up for this program about this vulnerability.
You are just not going to be able to control the narrative like this. Trying to tell someone else what the "crux of the issue is" will not allow you to shift the goal posts. The article described a pattern of issues, and in my previous comment I specifically raised one. No determined individual is going to just leave that thread dangling for you.
> Is there something else we should be doing?
Yes. Obviously. That's the point.
> The crux of the question here was about whether GDPR obligates us to email all 5,000 people signed up for this program about this vulnerability. The two lawyers we have consulted on this have both said no. One of them specifically specializes in privacy compliance.
It's not a great look for the leader of a children's organization to so blatantly flout that they lack a moral compass. You're currently interacting with the public, not the legal system. Sure, whether or not you're legally required to inform your kids is relevant. However, the law is quite literally the bare minimum of what you're obligated to do.
No-ones reading this thinking. "Oh great, they've done the bare minimum legally required of them." They're thinking, "Wait. Companies notify people of breaches all the time. You apologise, and explain what you're doing to rectify the situation. What have they got to hide? Are they worried they'll get an influx of outrage because this lack of care was something people in the community were already concerned about?" With the context given from the odd parent in this thread, it certainly comes across as the latter.
> It's not a complicated legal question, the answer is just no.
This detracts so much credibility from your communication. There is no lawyer on Earth that will describe this as "not a complicated legal question". No adult that's ever had any communication with a lawyer is going to believe this for a second. Lawyers are notorious for their non-committal attitude toward providing legal advice. Nothing is black and white — it's all grey. So this comes across as:
a. You've never interacted with a lawyer in your life. Or,
b. You're telling porkies, or at the very least, are way too flippant with hyperbole.
As a longtime member of hackclub, I can confirm that while OP may have been banned, most of her points are completely valid and I can find most of the original sources for them. Point-by-point:
> - We take vulns seriously—especially the serious ones! It was fixed immediately by a senior engineer upon report (within a day?)
What? From the many, many #meta posts and other sources I cannot back this up.
> - The author was ultimately banned from the community not for their opinions on this matter, but because of a long streak of unrelated conduct issues that culminated in a spree of saying horribly abusive things to multiple other members of the community.
OP did say some bad stuff, but it wasn't a spree and was an isolated incident. I don't agree with her actions, but I see where she was coming from: she didn't feel heard and just wanted to get back at people she saw as having wronged her. She definitely shouldn't have done what she did but it was an isolated incident or two.
> — They have been pursuing a grudge against the organization ever since. They are not a reliable narrator, this post is a fantasy version of events that casts them as a martyred hero.
You'll note that in the article that isn't what she portrays herself as and she explicitly bookends the article with paragraphs of text praising the mission and all of the good hackclub has done. Which is it, is she rightfully praising the organization but rightfully getting angry about it or is she wrongfully praising the organization and wrongfully getting angry?
> Nonetheless, privacy/security is something we think about and invest extensively in.
Based on HQ's HCB, #meta, posts in #hq, and more this is not true in the slightest.
> In the past year we have started an organization-wide bounty system, moved all PII storage into a central "identity vault"
Bounties were addressed in the article and last thing I heard PII is still massively distributed. If that isn't the case anymore, please actually make a post about it so the community is aware?
> consulted extensively with a very fancy lawyer who specializes in corporate compliance with the growing raft of online privacy laws around the world
That's good but again, make an announcement in hackclub?
> The good news is, according to that lawyer we already do almost everything we need to be compliant; we just need to publish a privacy policy!
The fuck?? No?? if this has happened in the last year, how angry has your lawyer about the numerous vulnerabilities that were pushed, not notified, underpaid bounties, and more? Oh, and don't forget you TAKING DOWN THE GDPR EMAIL AND NOT DELETING DATA??
> We are actively iterating on a mostly-finished draft of this document with our counsel, but it is taking time because, well, this stuff is very complicated.
I can definitely understand that. I really love hackclub and think the mission is amazing but at the moment I don't feel safe with my data in its hands.
My child has been involved in Hack Club for a number of years, and I support their mission. However, HC do seem to be lacking in "adult supervision", and I understand that is kind of their approach: having the kids figure stuff out on their own. However, there are things that kids, due to lack of experience, just can't figure out for themselves. For example, the reliance on ChatGPT and reluctance to use professional SMEs is a very "immature" attitude.
This sort of cavalier attitude is going to get them in trouble; I'm honestly surprised that this hasn't already gotten them into trouble. Hack Club has enough money that they can easily be a worthwhile target if any of their decisions turns out badly.
I'm going to be a bit oblique here because I don't want HC to take this out on my child, but at one of the HC events, the "figure it out for yourselves" lead to our child making decisions and taking actions that could have very easily turned into life threatening. Another situation led to our child being "ditched" in a foreign city and unsure how to get ahold of anyone on the ground to help.
Hack Club is a great idea, and I'm glad it exists, but I do think that the way it is currently organized is going to end badly.
> the "figure it out for yourselves" lead to our child making decisions and taking actions that could have very easily turned into life threatening
I haven't heard about Hack Club until this very story, so forgive my ignorance, but what exactly happened here? According to their website, it seems to be about a community for teenage programmers, who build open source projects together, sometimes during events. Looking around at the types of events they host, nothing really looks life threatening at all? I'm not doubting your experience, just curious how a bunch of programmers could end up in a life threatening situation during those sort of events.
During Hack Club's IRL Hackathons, teens can get their parents to sign a "freedom waiver" to allow them to leave the hackathon venue and explore the city (they usually happen in high profile cities like NYC or Boston) without supervision. I assume what happened to them was they got lost during this optional exploration period
I would really like to know more about these incidents at HC events. We have a lot of very complex tradeoffs within hack club involving security/privacy/safety for exactly the reasons you identified (ie, giving teenagers a very high level of agency/responsibility in running programs). However, staff try to be extremely conscious of these tradeoffs and highly attentive to the realistic risk vectors that come about in our operations.
No teenager will ever (ever!) have anything 'taken out' on them by myself or anyone else that works here. Any time things go wrong or almost go wrong, we just want to know so we can manage that risk in the future. If you are willing to share, please reach out at cwalker@hackclub.com
As someone who is part of the Hack Club community, I would urge caution before blindly trusting this account.
- This person has also used their access to attempt to extort the admins and their Airtable data, demanding a bounty payment for access they were previously given.
- In her arguments about the program leads earning higher bounties, they had said that they both did bounties for Coinbase and Google, neither of which being non-profits
- Many of her arguments are flawed in other ways.
Theo (yes the ffmpeg guy) also commented on it in a livestream, and I would just point to that:
> This feels really in the weeds of something we are not supposed to see externally. It is a lot of writing for what seems like clueless people doing backend
As someone who is/was also a part of the hack club community, this article is mostly correct. I've seen most of these events occur second hand as well in real time and can mostly corroborate with the accuracy of the article, except the minors in legal roles part. The community is severely mismanaged, data leaks happen often in very predicable ways and it does seem as if much of it is symptoms of vibe coding.
They created a new website just for this topic, and named it "kill yourself LLC". Not something you'd do if you wanted to be taken seriously, just IMO. Smells more like a KiwiFarms user.
However there's still no excuse for these problems if they are describing it correctly. When you're storing the home address of thousands of users, (1) you shouldn't do that at all for this type of organisation and (2) you should be very careful to protect it and (3) the first several times it gets stolen, you should think harder about whether your protection is working and there should never be a several+1th time.
I am not the OP but I think I know the back story behind this name and if I'm not wrong, it is related to events that went down in hackclub revolving a suicide attempt in HC being taken unseriously.
Companies should quickly realize that ChatGPT can go both ways - it can turn a "script-kiddie" into fully fledged hacker if vulnerabilities continue to be this sloppy. I am fairly certain that low-skill hacker sweatshops already heavily rely on LLMs to quickly exploit trivial vulnerabilities like these.
Like it or not but I feel like account logins, PII and payment stuff will have to be handled by central big orgs. Ideally, I would like that to be a competent open-source government service. For now it is big companies like Google that can shove its SSO around in accessible manner to other sites.
It's an article by a teenager. We weren't making any great websites as teenagers either. I remember websites with glaring contrast and moving marquees and blinks everywhere. At least the author here writes full words without abbreviating every word. So the author is already writing better than what I wrote as a teenager.
May I suggest you use reader mode to remove the annoying flashing background? If you can get past the annoying UX of the article, it has interesting stories about serious issues.
For all of you discussing the chatgpt, this was after borderline harassing an intern who quoted ChatGPT as a joke in her DMs. There was no legal advice. There used to be a previous version with receipts and screenshots if I remember correctly, with very, very extensive discussions within Hack Club (to the order of thousands of messages of critical discussion).
Please take what's said here with a grain of salt. This is the same person who attempted to extort Hack Club out of thousands by using an airtable token they previously had (all tokens have since been examined as to whether they are truly necessary).
> another asked: "if you found a security vulnerability within hackclub, severe or major, given how they have currently handled reports so far, would YOU report it and go through the same process and payouts that previous people have experienced?"
> the answer from most people was a resounding no.
Popular request is for the program to be expanded. I don't know about the "resounding no".
> teenagers are positioned as "independent contractors" to avoid employment protections, holiday pay, and wage floors. this isn't "scrappy nonprofit" energy - it's child exploitation dressed up as opportunity.
It isn't a full-time job.
> email compliance failures
Recently, email sending has been revamped, and there are tools to subscribe to individual mailing lists.
Criticism isn't ever censored - there's anonymous reporting, a public forum channel for feedback (which only has temporary threadlocks upon very inflammatory or irrelevant discussion), and you can discuss it anywhere else within the Slack.
I could keep going, but the raw truth is that this misses a lot of context for independent observers.
As someone who has co-founded and co-organized a leaderful non-hierarchical community that has lasted 10 years of weekly hacknights (we've literally never missed a week) and many generations of stewards... I've done reflection on the value of messiness/disorder and "aggressively relaxed" constraints. I sometimes tongue-in-cheek describe myself as having some meagre expertise in "operationalising anarchy", which is only half a joke :)
I suspect the things this author is critiquing and the internal resistance to it is DIRECTLY related to the wonderful things this org can do and how it operates.
I'm of the belief that you can't truly love a thing without loving its mother. This applies to orgs as it does all creatures undergoing evolutionary processes. If you do straddle this belief tension, you perhaps love something other than the thing you thought you loved. And this other thing you love will eventually take shape under your care and watch. Which is nice, that "what we put our attention on grows".[1]
So obviously, you are permitted to love a thing and take issue with its incubating process/culture, but I would suggest you're the site of contradiction that has some explaining to do. If you win and change the process of the thing you love, the thing you love is on a new path toward being something else. And maybe that's fine. A new seed will grow in the empty space. People probably need to have a thing to love that looks like the thing you loved. It will be back.
But there's some other healthy dissonance here that the author isn't grasping. I would say this to them: You are the bringer of the end of what you love, not its saviour. It's all good -- these transitions happen, and in a more zen sense, it can come to pass without [my] judgement. But just please understand your role. You're not a hero, you're a death. Maybe a healthy one, but a death all the same. The thing you love perhaps won't survive your care.
To be clear, I have very mixed feelings. The critiques are valid, but I wish I could acknowledge them without compulsion to demand an action. I think orgs that work like this need to stay small, only scale horizontally (inspiring/supporting other sister orgs to grow), and resist any central/vertical scaling that brings you under the rules and norms that they are desperately trying to steer clear of, but are now accountable to (according to our shared societal values).
I have a RTX Pro 6000 as my main GPU currently, and this website pins it to ~40% utilization! Never seen a website do that before, some sort of kudos to the webmaster is deserved.
It still renders smoothly though and doesn't go above 40C so I guess it could have been worse.
With that website open, runs at 2850 MHz to be specific, it normally idles at 400-500 MHz with ~20 processes (firefox, gnome-shell, alacritty, etc, etc) using the GPU
I would highly suggest to block JS while you're only browsing. It loads fast, most trackers won't load and better security as most browser exploits leverage JS all the time
Exactly this. I was surprised to see these comments and then I realized that NoScript blocked the JS (as it should have). The web is so much nicer without JS.
I expected this to happen. I knew people who were involved in the organization who were unnecessarily chummy to TPOT/Postrat/FTX culture before it blew up.
> Hack Club has been handling children's data for 4 years without a privacy policy
The title doesn't make is sound bad.
I mean, besides lawyers, who cares if some legal document is missing. You can respect privacy without a privacy policy, plenty of people do.
Here, it seems the actual problem is that there is no adult in the room, literally. Just kids that are completely clueless about how to care about personal data. Here, "no privacy policy" doesn't just mean "we dislike paperwork", it means "we are letting kids play with personal data without adult supervision".
No idea why this was flagged. This is a really good article in terms of both form and content and I was very surprised to learn that the author is actually also a teenager.
I get it, some people dislike the appearance but c'mon, this is HN. If we can use vi(1) on a 80 column terminal, reading an html page is not an impossible task.
If they're ignoring GDPR because they're in the US, you can potentially flag these as COPPA violations. COPPA is serious stuff. Courts can fine over $50k for each violation, where each individual impacted can be considered a unique violation. COPPA applies to under 13s, I'm not sure if there are age restrictions in place to join Hack Club, but if there isn't even a privacy policy, I doubt age restrictions are properly enforced.
> so in july 2025, i discovered that neighbourhood was exposing thousands of users' full legal names through an unprotected API endpoint. literally anyone with a slack ID could access this data. no authentication, no nothing. just a URL parameter and boom, there's your real name.
> i sent formal breach notifications to security@hackclub.com and gdpr@hackclub.com on july 9th. radio silence. nothing. not even an automated "we've received your email" response.
> when i tried talking to HQ staff informally, the responses were... well, shocking doesn't quite cover it. the first intern told me that since hack club is US-based, they're "not held to GDPR," that if fined "nothing compels us to pay it," and that EU people "void your EU protections" by coming to the US.
What? How did we get from (allegedly) informing them about a security vulnerability to them responding "nothing compels us to pay it"? It feel like the author is not being quite as candid in their account of the events as one would hope.
> yep. no auth. just an email parameter. and what did it return?
> full names. emails. phone numbers. flight receipts. all just by passing an email address in a URL.
> i reported it through their security bounty program, made a bug fix pr (because apparently that's how you get things done around here), and maybe made the slight mistake of sharing the vulnerable endpoint in that group chat - which less than 10 people saw, for what that's worth.
The author then proceeds:
> their security bounty program states minimum payouts for this kind of thing start around $150. but exposing passport numbers (which are classed as government documents) should bump it up significantly. apparently "responsible disclosure" means "don't tell anyone, even in a private chat" so they docked the entire payout.
I'm not sure why they're being seemingly sarcastic about responsible disclosure. Yes, responsible disclosure absolutely means that you disclose this to the vendor before disclosing it to anyone else. As someone who works as a penetration tester and security researcher (both at work and in my free time), in my opinion, there should be no confusion about what responsible disclosure is. You disclosing the vulnerability in public before the vendor has had the chance to fix or apparently even triage it is not "responsible disclosure" or a "slight mistake".
It sounds like the author started off by telling them they're doing illegal stuff. It's unclear if it's actually illegal or not.. but they naturally got the other side defensive and tried to avoid the author
If instead they framed it in terms of "hey you guys are sharing stuff you probably didn't mean to" then the reaction would have likely been different
Sounds like Hack Club is doing a great job at preparing teenagers for the real world: nobody cares about the things you care about as much as you do. The most important skill to learn for the real world is to pick your battles. Using ChatGPT for legal advice is dumb, but it’s not your battle to fight.
As a union organizer with Hack Club staff, this is only the surface - the things that are clear to the end consumer. It gets a whole lot worse on the inside; from payment below minimum wage, mandatory overtime beyond child labor law, hiring kids as contractors to deny them rights, union busting & retaliation and a blatant disrespect for members and community democracy despite pretending to be `teen-led.` I'm not going to re-hash the whole thing here, I've written an article on my blog, but Hack Club is a deeply misleading "charity" that suckers teens in trying to build a better world and funnels them towards supporting our ever-rapid decline into techno-fascism at the hands of the wealthy elite funding them.
This user was banned from Hack Club for attempting to stage an "uprising" against the org, and has also engaged in tactics like Wikipedia vandalism. I would not take their word for being "a union organizer with Hack Club staff", although their blog does make several good points (https://place.reeseric.ci/writings/2024-05-05/)
I participated in a few hackathons early in my career. I quickly realized that I wasn't benefitting at all from participating in them. In fact, they were a great way to fall behind in the work I actually needed to get done. Those organizing the hackathons on the other hand...
I'm not at all surprised that people are trying to program young teenage minds to think hackathons are a good pathway to advancing one's tech skills / career. Nor am I surprised to hear all of the sketchy behavior surrounding this organization and their leadership. It all fits very nicely together.
Hackathons can be fun. And I think that people should try and do one or two when they are in college (ideally run by a university, not a shady 3rd party). The microsoft puzzle challenge (idk if that still exists) is also great. These are fun, give you a bit of networking, probably wont get you a job. Your university work gets you a job.
It would have been stupid if that's what actually happened :)
I am the Chris cited in the piece. We have actual legal counsel that we go to for legal advice! However, that's not what was being sought here. In this conversation, the question on the table was "What is a data breach?" according to common convention (setting aside the more technical question of what it means specifically in the context of GDPR). The author contended that a single address record—her own record, IIRC—retrieved as a test of an unsecured endpoint counts as a data breach, and therefore that we are legally obligated under GDPR to email all 5,000 participants about it. My contention was/is that a data breach implies exfiltration of a meaningful amount of data. This was a vulnerability, which we patched within about a day, but we had no reason to believe there was a breach by any definition. I pointed to a few sources to demonstrate the consensus definition of "data breach", and one of them was Gemini (or "Omniscient Robot God", as I called it in the conversation).
There are real issues touched on in this post, but the author is not a reliable narrator and they are flattening a very complex issue into a narrative that centers themself as the hero. In reality, this user was banned from our community for a long string of conduct violations, culminating in repeated incidents of saying horribly abusive things to other teenagers. They have been pursuing a grudge against the organization ever since.
I'm not going to pretend this is an easy read. So I wouldn't blame you if you stopped early. However, there's a section titled "the surveillance infrastructure (orpheus engine)" which claims that children's private information is being distributed to third-parties without consent.
Who cares? I mean, obviously this author, but pointing out "GDPR this" and "GDPR that" isn't going to make a difference or move the needle. Many companies have given up on GDPR - I've made requests and had blanket refusals to provide data.
Report them, you say? Many DPC's such as the Irish DPC are very friendly in terms of their lax approach to the regulation, just ask Max Schrems, he's been at this for years. I think the EU and the regulators do not have resources to enforce the law, so whilst there are requirements to protect customer data, nothing bad happens if you don't. Just check the top of HN as I write this [1] "Checkout.com hacked, refuses ransom payment, donates to security labs". Will anyone be arrested, charged, fined, or otherwise penalized? Nope, not a chance. I 100% guarantee absolutely nothing will happen as a result of this article. GPT makes it so easy to capture user data these days and people will just willingly hand it over.
The truth is, you should be very careful what data you hand out, always. Use an alias, use privacy tools, always be weary and check if they have a privacy policy, check to see if it works (make a dummy account, do GDPR request, if no reply, be weary).
If they are not serious about privacy, stop, think and act accordingly. While it is a disgrace what these individuals have done, individuals need to take personal responsibility just as in a real world, would you trust a random stranger giving you pills? Hopefully not!
Wow! Just wow! Just as I think the situation cannot get any worse, the OP reveals even worse things going on. I know the UX of this blog and the lack of capitalization is going to turn many people off! But I urge you to power through and read the whole OP anyway.
Use reader mode, block Javascript or whatever it takes. Give the author a break. They're a teenager. What kind of websites were you making as a teenager? I'm sure one of those dark background websites with MARQUEEs and BLINKs with glaring contrast colors! So give them a break. Behind the annoying UX is an article about serious and appalling privacy and security issues.
Like read this:
> i raised this with chris, who's a full-time staff member (not a teenager), and he insisted that exposing physical addresses and sensitive info was "just a vuln" not a breach. said he's "never heard the term 'data breach' used that way" and... also relied on chatgpt instead of actual legal advice.
Actually this Chris guy has a point. I don't call it breach either. It's PII data exposure but it is a serious exposure. So I don't 100% agree with the OP but the cavalier attitude towards security coming from the staff of a legitimate organization is appalling.
It's just mind boggling that an organization handling PII data has such appalling privacy and security lapses and they still remain arrogantly indignant about it making bold claims about laws they don't understand, why, because ChatGPT told them so? Cherry on top is they are employing teenagers to answer legal questions! Not kidding! Just read the OP! Unbelievable!
> Actually this Chris guy has a point. I don't call it breach either. It's PII data exposure but it is a serious exposure.
At least California defines it as
> unencrypted personal information, as defined, was acquired, or reasonably believed to have been acquired, by an unauthorized person.
https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/databreach/reporting
So I guess if you authorize the entire world to read the data, it’s not a breach.
If nobody reads the data it is not a breach.
So the junior engineer who couldn't secure an endpoint implemented thorough request logging and auditing? Impressive.
Hello, Chris here!
Nobody—certainly not any adult staff—at Hack Club relied on ChatGPT for legal advice. Nor do we employ teenagers to answer legal questions, we have actual legal counsel for that! Or in my personal case I ask my wife, who is a law professor, and then she asks ChatGPT (just kidding).
There is too much nonsense in this post to rebut line by line, and these conversations have all been had to death within Hack Club (we put a lot of time into transparently and publicly discussing our programs, problems, and decisions). Here's the short version of this saga:
- The author found a serious vuln in one of our programs introduced by a junior engineer
- We take vulns seriously—especially the serious ones! It was fixed immediately by a senior engineer upon report (within a day?)
- The author insisted that their test of the vuln to access their own address was a data breach, therefore obligating us to notify all 5,000 participants of this "breach" as per GDPR
- We judged this to be Prima Facie incorrect. A lawyer has since confirmed this judgment.
- It is, in fact, bad practice to notify users for every vulnerability. If this were the norm, you would inundated with notices from practically every software product you interact with. Almost all of these notices would be virtually non-actionable by the user, and they would wash out the few notices of breaches which are actionable. There is a good reason why the GDPR does not demand notice for vulns; mass notices are reserved for incidents where there is a known exfiltration of a meaningful amount of user data!
- The author was ultimately banned from the community not for their opinions on this matter, but because of a long streak of unrelated conduct issues that culminated in a spree of saying horribly abusive things to multiple other members of the community.
— They have been pursuing a grudge against the organization ever since. They are not a reliable narrator, this post is a fantasy version of events that casts them as a martyred hero.
Hack Club is an oddly-shaped organization with operations that often raise very real security concerns, but these are wrapped up in a complex web of tradeoffs that are very much still evolving as we refine and expand our core infrastructure. We are not Google, and it is a mistake to import reasoning from that kind of environment when analyzing our security/threat model. Nonetheless, privacy/security is something we think about and invest extensively in. In the past year we have started an organization-wide bounty system, moved all PII storage into a central "identity vault", and consulted extensively with a very fancy lawyer who specializes in corporate compliance with the growing raft of online privacy laws around the world. The good news is, according to that lawyer we already do almost everything we need to be compliant; we just need to publish a privacy policy! We are actively iterating on a mostly-finished draft of this document with our counsel, but it is taking time because, well, this stuff is very complicated. We serve or have served teenagers in almost every country, and GDPR is just the most prominent of many laws that are now on the books worldwide.
So was kids' data exposed or no?
Not exposed but hackclub's security practices always seems to make it easy to access if you want to.
The short answer is no.
It most certainly was. You have someone outside your organization who accessed the data, and you know about it. Here's what you just wrote about the person who accessed this endpoint:
> - The author was ultimately banned from the community not for their opinions on this matter, but because of a long streak of unrelated conduct issues that culminated in a spree of saying horribly abusive things to multiple other members of the community.
> — They have been pursuing a grudge against the organization ever since. They are not a reliable narrator, this post is a fantasy version of events that casts them as a martyred hero.
Someone who has been acting maliciously against your organization accessed that data. And you think it's fine? They're a teenager. An angry teenager, who is acting out. You honestly believe you can trust they didn't distribute this data or tell anyone else about the problem before you found out about it?
When I was a teenager, someone in my year level gained access to a lot of personal data about a bunch of people in our year level. This was a smart individual who at least somewhat understood the gravity of the situation. But they were also a kid, of course they distributed some of the data — bragging rights and what not.
What about the section titled "the surveillance infrastructure (orpheus engine)" where the teenager claims children's data was intentionally being sent out to third parties, specifically to profile kids? What's that all about?
Look, no-one read this article and thought "Wow, this is well written article by a super mature well-adjusted individual. I'm taking this as gospel." The article is clearly written by an angry teenager. I feel far more invested in this now that I've seen your responses. The way you're handling this, and yourself, is just downright absurd. Stop.
By the way, orpheus engine is available publicly at https://github.com/hackclub/orpheus-engine.
I never said anything was fine. I said it was a serious vuln, and we took it seriously.
We patched the vulnerability, quickly. We addressed it with the engineer and made clear that this is no joke. We have extensive refactoring happening within our infrastructure to move to a model where this information is handled as much as possible through secure, audited, centralized systems. Is there something else we should be doing?
The crux of the question here was about whether GDPR obligates us to email all 5,000 people signed up for this program about this vulnerability. The two lawyers we have consulted on this have both said no. One of them specifically specializes in privacy compliance. It's not a complicated legal question, the answer is just no.
Look. This isn't on the front page of HN anymore. So I'm mostly writing this to you. You've work to do on your communication. This style of communication probably works just fine with teenagers, but it's not going to hold up to scrutiny with adults.
> The crux of the question here was about whether GDPR obligates us to email all 5,000 people signed up for this program about this vulnerability.
You are just not going to be able to control the narrative like this. Trying to tell someone else what the "crux of the issue is" will not allow you to shift the goal posts. The article described a pattern of issues, and in my previous comment I specifically raised one. No determined individual is going to just leave that thread dangling for you.
> Is there something else we should be doing?
Yes. Obviously. That's the point.
> The crux of the question here was about whether GDPR obligates us to email all 5,000 people signed up for this program about this vulnerability. The two lawyers we have consulted on this have both said no. One of them specifically specializes in privacy compliance.
It's not a great look for the leader of a children's organization to so blatantly flout that they lack a moral compass. You're currently interacting with the public, not the legal system. Sure, whether or not you're legally required to inform your kids is relevant. However, the law is quite literally the bare minimum of what you're obligated to do.
No-ones reading this thinking. "Oh great, they've done the bare minimum legally required of them." They're thinking, "Wait. Companies notify people of breaches all the time. You apologise, and explain what you're doing to rectify the situation. What have they got to hide? Are they worried they'll get an influx of outrage because this lack of care was something people in the community were already concerned about?" With the context given from the odd parent in this thread, it certainly comes across as the latter.
> It's not a complicated legal question, the answer is just no.
This detracts so much credibility from your communication. There is no lawyer on Earth that will describe this as "not a complicated legal question". No adult that's ever had any communication with a lawyer is going to believe this for a second. Lawyers are notorious for their non-committal attitude toward providing legal advice. Nothing is black and white — it's all grey. So this comes across as:
a. You've never interacted with a lawyer in your life. Or, b. You're telling porkies, or at the very least, are way too flippant with hyperbole.
As a longtime member of hackclub, I can confirm that while OP may have been banned, most of her points are completely valid and I can find most of the original sources for them. Point-by-point:
> - We take vulns seriously—especially the serious ones! It was fixed immediately by a senior engineer upon report (within a day?)
What? From the many, many #meta posts and other sources I cannot back this up.
> - The author was ultimately banned from the community not for their opinions on this matter, but because of a long streak of unrelated conduct issues that culminated in a spree of saying horribly abusive things to multiple other members of the community.
OP did say some bad stuff, but it wasn't a spree and was an isolated incident. I don't agree with her actions, but I see where she was coming from: she didn't feel heard and just wanted to get back at people she saw as having wronged her. She definitely shouldn't have done what she did but it was an isolated incident or two.
> — They have been pursuing a grudge against the organization ever since. They are not a reliable narrator, this post is a fantasy version of events that casts them as a martyred hero.
You'll note that in the article that isn't what she portrays herself as and she explicitly bookends the article with paragraphs of text praising the mission and all of the good hackclub has done. Which is it, is she rightfully praising the organization but rightfully getting angry about it or is she wrongfully praising the organization and wrongfully getting angry?
> Nonetheless, privacy/security is something we think about and invest extensively in.
Based on HQ's HCB, #meta, posts in #hq, and more this is not true in the slightest.
> In the past year we have started an organization-wide bounty system, moved all PII storage into a central "identity vault" Bounties were addressed in the article and last thing I heard PII is still massively distributed. If that isn't the case anymore, please actually make a post about it so the community is aware?
> consulted extensively with a very fancy lawyer who specializes in corporate compliance with the growing raft of online privacy laws around the world
That's good but again, make an announcement in hackclub?
> The good news is, according to that lawyer we already do almost everything we need to be compliant; we just need to publish a privacy policy!
The fuck?? No?? if this has happened in the last year, how angry has your lawyer about the numerous vulnerabilities that were pushed, not notified, underpaid bounties, and more? Oh, and don't forget you TAKING DOWN THE GDPR EMAIL AND NOT DELETING DATA??
> We are actively iterating on a mostly-finished draft of this document with our counsel, but it is taking time because, well, this stuff is very complicated.
I can definitely understand that. I really love hackclub and think the mission is amazing but at the moment I don't feel safe with my data in its hands.
[flagged]
My child has been involved in Hack Club for a number of years, and I support their mission. However, HC do seem to be lacking in "adult supervision", and I understand that is kind of their approach: having the kids figure stuff out on their own. However, there are things that kids, due to lack of experience, just can't figure out for themselves. For example, the reliance on ChatGPT and reluctance to use professional SMEs is a very "immature" attitude.
This sort of cavalier attitude is going to get them in trouble; I'm honestly surprised that this hasn't already gotten them into trouble. Hack Club has enough money that they can easily be a worthwhile target if any of their decisions turns out badly.
I'm going to be a bit oblique here because I don't want HC to take this out on my child, but at one of the HC events, the "figure it out for yourselves" lead to our child making decisions and taking actions that could have very easily turned into life threatening. Another situation led to our child being "ditched" in a foreign city and unsure how to get ahold of anyone on the ground to help.
Hack Club is a great idea, and I'm glad it exists, but I do think that the way it is currently organized is going to end badly.
> the "figure it out for yourselves" lead to our child making decisions and taking actions that could have very easily turned into life threatening
I haven't heard about Hack Club until this very story, so forgive my ignorance, but what exactly happened here? According to their website, it seems to be about a community for teenage programmers, who build open source projects together, sometimes during events. Looking around at the types of events they host, nothing really looks life threatening at all? I'm not doubting your experience, just curious how a bunch of programmers could end up in a life threatening situation during those sort of events.
During Hack Club's IRL Hackathons, teens can get their parents to sign a "freedom waiver" to allow them to leave the hackathon venue and explore the city (they usually happen in high profile cities like NYC or Boston) without supervision. I assume what happened to them was they got lost during this optional exploration period
Hello! This is Chris from Hack Club staff (the one cited in the post)
I addressed the post itself in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=45921428&), so I'll skip that part.
I would really like to know more about these incidents at HC events. We have a lot of very complex tradeoffs within hack club involving security/privacy/safety for exactly the reasons you identified (ie, giving teenagers a very high level of agency/responsibility in running programs). However, staff try to be extremely conscious of these tradeoffs and highly attentive to the realistic risk vectors that come about in our operations.
No teenager will ever (ever!) have anything 'taken out' on them by myself or anyone else that works here. Any time things go wrong or almost go wrong, we just want to know so we can manage that risk in the future. If you are willing to share, please reach out at cwalker@hackclub.com
As someone who is part of the Hack Club community, I would urge caution before blindly trusting this account.
- This person has also used their access to attempt to extort the admins and their Airtable data, demanding a bounty payment for access they were previously given. - In her arguments about the program leads earning higher bounties, they had said that they both did bounties for Coinbase and Google, neither of which being non-profits - Many of her arguments are flawed in other ways.
Theo (yes the ffmpeg guy) also commented on it in a livestream, and I would just point to that:
> This feels really in the weeds of something we are not supposed to see externally. It is a lot of writing for what seems like clueless people doing backend
>As someone who is part of the Hack Club community, I would urge caution before blindly trusting this account.
As the parent of a Hack Clubber, a lot of what is said here rings true to our experience with the Hack Club leadership.
As someone who is/was also a part of the hack club community, this article is mostly correct. I've seen most of these events occur second hand as well in real time and can mostly corroborate with the accuracy of the article, except the minors in legal roles part. The community is severely mismanaged, data leaks happen often in very predicable ways and it does seem as if much of it is symptoms of vibe coding.
They created a new website just for this topic, and named it "kill yourself LLC". Not something you'd do if you wanted to be taken seriously, just IMO. Smells more like a KiwiFarms user.
However there's still no excuse for these problems if they are describing it correctly. When you're storing the home address of thousands of users, (1) you shouldn't do that at all for this type of organisation and (2) you should be very careful to protect it and (3) the first several times it gets stolen, you should think harder about whether your protection is working and there should never be a several+1th time.
I am not the OP but I think I know the back story behind this name and if I'm not wrong, it is related to events that went down in hackclub revolving a suicide attempt in HC being taken unseriously.
Companies should quickly realize that ChatGPT can go both ways - it can turn a "script-kiddie" into fully fledged hacker if vulnerabilities continue to be this sloppy. I am fairly certain that low-skill hacker sweatshops already heavily rely on LLMs to quickly exploit trivial vulnerabilities like these.
Like it or not but I feel like account logins, PII and payment stuff will have to be handled by central big orgs. Ideally, I would like that to be a competent open-source government service. For now it is big companies like Google that can shove its SSO around in accessible manner to other sites.
I'm usually the type to be annoyed at hn people who nitpick about articles but.. this is unreadable.
It's an article by a teenager. We weren't making any great websites as teenagers either. I remember websites with glaring contrast and moving marquees and blinks everywhere. At least the author here writes full words without abbreviating every word. So the author is already writing better than what I wrote as a teenager.
May I suggest you use reader mode to remove the annoying flashing background? If you can get past the annoying UX of the article, it has interesting stories about serious issues.
For all of you discussing the chatgpt, this was after borderline harassing an intern who quoted ChatGPT as a joke in her DMs. There was no legal advice. There used to be a previous version with receipts and screenshots if I remember correctly, with very, very extensive discussions within Hack Club (to the order of thousands of messages of critical discussion).
Please take what's said here with a grain of salt. This is the same person who attempted to extort Hack Club out of thousands by using an airtable token they previously had (all tokens have since been examined as to whether they are truly necessary).
> another asked: "if you found a security vulnerability within hackclub, severe or major, given how they have currently handled reports so far, would YOU report it and go through the same process and payouts that previous people have experienced?"
> the answer from most people was a resounding no.
Popular request is for the program to be expanded. I don't know about the "resounding no".
> teenagers are positioned as "independent contractors" to avoid employment protections, holiday pay, and wage floors. this isn't "scrappy nonprofit" energy - it's child exploitation dressed up as opportunity.
It isn't a full-time job.
> email compliance failures
Recently, email sending has been revamped, and there are tools to subscribe to individual mailing lists.
Criticism isn't ever censored - there's anonymous reporting, a public forum channel for feedback (which only has temporary threadlocks upon very inflammatory or irrelevant discussion), and you can discuss it anywhere else within the Slack.
I could keep going, but the raw truth is that this misses a lot of context for independent observers.
As someone who has co-founded and co-organized a leaderful non-hierarchical community that has lasted 10 years of weekly hacknights (we've literally never missed a week) and many generations of stewards... I've done reflection on the value of messiness/disorder and "aggressively relaxed" constraints. I sometimes tongue-in-cheek describe myself as having some meagre expertise in "operationalising anarchy", which is only half a joke :)
I suspect the things this author is critiquing and the internal resistance to it is DIRECTLY related to the wonderful things this org can do and how it operates.
I'm of the belief that you can't truly love a thing without loving its mother. This applies to orgs as it does all creatures undergoing evolutionary processes. If you do straddle this belief tension, you perhaps love something other than the thing you thought you loved. And this other thing you love will eventually take shape under your care and watch. Which is nice, that "what we put our attention on grows".[1]
So obviously, you are permitted to love a thing and take issue with its incubating process/culture, but I would suggest you're the site of contradiction that has some explaining to do. If you win and change the process of the thing you love, the thing you love is on a new path toward being something else. And maybe that's fine. A new seed will grow in the empty space. People probably need to have a thing to love that looks like the thing you loved. It will be back.
But there's some other healthy dissonance here that the author isn't grasping. I would say this to them: You are the bringer of the end of what you love, not its saviour. It's all good -- these transitions happen, and in a more zen sense, it can come to pass without [my] judgement. But just please understand your role. You're not a hero, you're a death. Maybe a healthy one, but a death all the same. The thing you love perhaps won't survive your care.
To be clear, I have very mixed feelings. The critiques are valid, but I wish I could acknowledge them without compulsion to demand an action. I think orgs that work like this need to stay small, only scale horizontally (inspiring/supporting other sister orgs to grow), and resist any central/vertical scaling that brings you under the rules and norms that they are desperately trying to steer clear of, but are now accountable to (according to our shared societal values).
[1]: http://adriennemareebrown.net/2012/08/09/giftingmyattention/
Not sure if it is just me, but the background animation absolutely kill my browser (Chrome) and scrolling is _super_ laggy.
The worst part to me is the lack of a scroll bar. Had to dust off the pgup/pgdown keys to check my progress in the article.
I have a RTX Pro 6000 as my main GPU currently, and this website pins it to ~40% utilization! Never seen a website do that before, some sort of kudos to the webmaster is deserved.
It still renders smoothly though and doesn't go above 40C so I guess it could have been worse.
40% might just mean nothing because your core is probably not running at full clock.
With that website open, runs at 2850 MHz to be specific, it normally idles at 400-500 MHz with ~20 processes (firefox, gnome-shell, alacritty, etc, etc) using the GPU
FWIW it's smooth on my $150 android shitbox.
>13 years old hardware, Linux, Chromium-based browser, seems fine to me.
I'm using a high-end ThinkPad for CAD and it's slowing down the page for me too.
I would highly suggest to block JS while you're only browsing. It loads fast, most trackers won't load and better security as most browser exploits leverage JS all the time
Exactly this. I was surprised to see these comments and then I realized that NoScript blocked the JS (as it should have). The web is so much nicer without JS.
the animation is so useless and doesnt add anything to the actual post
yes, had to use reader mode.
I had no performance problems on my Thinkpad T410.
Oh wait, it's because it is too old to have WebGL support so the background crashed and thus consumed no processing power.
I expected this to happen. I knew people who were involved in the organization who were unnecessarily chummy to TPOT/Postrat/FTX culture before it blew up.
> Hack Club has been handling children's data for 4 years without a privacy policy
The title doesn't make is sound bad.
I mean, besides lawyers, who cares if some legal document is missing. You can respect privacy without a privacy policy, plenty of people do.
Here, it seems the actual problem is that there is no adult in the room, literally. Just kids that are completely clueless about how to care about personal data. Here, "no privacy policy" doesn't just mean "we dislike paperwork", it means "we are letting kids play with personal data without adult supervision".
I don't understand the UX complaints? I thought we needed to re-wild the web and do more weird shit when we feel like it?
No idea why this was flagged. This is a really good article in terms of both form and content and I was very surprised to learn that the author is actually also a teenager.
I get it, some people dislike the appearance but c'mon, this is HN. If we can use vi(1) on a 80 column terminal, reading an html page is not an impossible task.
Also see https://web.archive.org/web/20250920074405/https://ella.ad/p...
If they're ignoring GDPR because they're in the US, you can potentially flag these as COPPA violations. COPPA is serious stuff. Courts can fine over $50k for each violation, where each individual impacted can be considered a unique violation. COPPA applies to under 13s, I'm not sure if there are age restrictions in place to join Hack Club, but if there isn't even a privacy policy, I doubt age restrictions are properly enforced.
Hack Club realized this, and now doesn’t allow anyone under the age of 13 to participate in its programs (COPPA doesn’t apply to people over 13).
Data privacy should not be optional.
> so in july 2025, i discovered that neighbourhood was exposing thousands of users' full legal names through an unprotected API endpoint. literally anyone with a slack ID could access this data. no authentication, no nothing. just a URL parameter and boom, there's your real name.
> i sent formal breach notifications to security@hackclub.com and gdpr@hackclub.com on july 9th. radio silence. nothing. not even an automated "we've received your email" response.
> when i tried talking to HQ staff informally, the responses were... well, shocking doesn't quite cover it. the first intern told me that since hack club is US-based, they're "not held to GDPR," that if fined "nothing compels us to pay it," and that EU people "void your EU protections" by coming to the US.
What? How did we get from (allegedly) informing them about a security vulnerability to them responding "nothing compels us to pay it"? It feel like the author is not being quite as candid in their account of the events as one would hope.
Their other blog post[1] shares some more information which seems like it's relevant.
From the post:
> then i found this one:
> https://juice.hackclub.com/api/get-roommate-data?email=dont@...
> yep. no auth. just an email parameter. and what did it return?
> full names. emails. phone numbers. flight receipts. all just by passing an email address in a URL.
> i reported it through their security bounty program, made a bug fix pr (because apparently that's how you get things done around here), and maybe made the slight mistake of sharing the vulnerable endpoint in that group chat - which less than 10 people saw, for what that's worth.
The author then proceeds:
> their security bounty program states minimum payouts for this kind of thing start around $150. but exposing passport numbers (which are classed as government documents) should bump it up significantly. apparently "responsible disclosure" means "don't tell anyone, even in a private chat" so they docked the entire payout.
I'm not sure why they're being seemingly sarcastic about responsible disclosure. Yes, responsible disclosure absolutely means that you disclose this to the vendor before disclosing it to anyone else. As someone who works as a penetration tester and security researcher (both at work and in my free time), in my opinion, there should be no confusion about what responsible disclosure is. You disclosing the vulnerability in public before the vendor has had the chance to fix or apparently even triage it is not "responsible disclosure" or a "slight mistake".
[1] - https://kys.llc/blog/oops-leaked-your-passport
It sounds like the author started off by telling them they're doing illegal stuff. It's unclear if it's actually illegal or not.. but they naturally got the other side defensive and tried to avoid the author
If instead they framed it in terms of "hey you guys are sharing stuff you probably didn't mean to" then the reaction would have likely been different
Sounds like Hack Club is doing a great job at preparing teenagers for the real world: nobody cares about the things you care about as much as you do. The most important skill to learn for the real world is to pick your battles. Using ChatGPT for legal advice is dumb, but it’s not your battle to fight.
It absolutely is their battle to fight. This organisation appears to be exploiting them and their data.
Agreed.
DEATH handing out swords to kids as Santa in the Hogfather is a funny joke, not an example to follow.
As a union organizer with Hack Club staff, this is only the surface - the things that are clear to the end consumer. It gets a whole lot worse on the inside; from payment below minimum wage, mandatory overtime beyond child labor law, hiring kids as contractors to deny them rights, union busting & retaliation and a blatant disrespect for members and community democracy despite pretending to be `teen-led.` I'm not going to re-hash the whole thing here, I've written an article on my blog, but Hack Club is a deeply misleading "charity" that suckers teens in trying to build a better world and funnels them towards supporting our ever-rapid decline into techno-fascism at the hands of the wealthy elite funding them.
This user was banned from Hack Club for attempting to stage an "uprising" against the org, and has also engaged in tactics like Wikipedia vandalism. I would not take their word for being "a union organizer with Hack Club staff", although their blog does make several good points (https://place.reeseric.ci/writings/2024-05-05/)
More transparency on the background of this poster: https://hackmd.io/@alexjs/Bkm1KIpxR
I participated in a few hackathons early in my career. I quickly realized that I wasn't benefitting at all from participating in them. In fact, they were a great way to fall behind in the work I actually needed to get done. Those organizing the hackathons on the other hand...
I'm not at all surprised that people are trying to program young teenage minds to think hackathons are a good pathway to advancing one's tech skills / career. Nor am I surprised to hear all of the sketchy behavior surrounding this organization and their leadership. It all fits very nicely together.
Hackathons can be fun. And I think that people should try and do one or two when they are in college (ideally run by a university, not a shady 3rd party). The microsoft puzzle challenge (idk if that still exists) is also great. These are fun, give you a bit of networking, probably wont get you a job. Your university work gets you a job.
Asking AI to give free legal advice is a special kind of stupid.
It would have been stupid if that's what actually happened :)
I am the Chris cited in the piece. We have actual legal counsel that we go to for legal advice! However, that's not what was being sought here. In this conversation, the question on the table was "What is a data breach?" according to common convention (setting aside the more technical question of what it means specifically in the context of GDPR). The author contended that a single address record—her own record, IIRC—retrieved as a test of an unsecured endpoint counts as a data breach, and therefore that we are legally obligated under GDPR to email all 5,000 participants about it. My contention was/is that a data breach implies exfiltration of a meaningful amount of data. This was a vulnerability, which we patched within about a day, but we had no reason to believe there was a breach by any definition. I pointed to a few sources to demonstrate the consensus definition of "data breach", and one of them was Gemini (or "Omniscient Robot God", as I called it in the conversation).
There are real issues touched on in this post, but the author is not a reliable narrator and they are flattening a very complex issue into a narrative that centers themself as the hero. In reality, this user was banned from our community for a long string of conduct violations, culminating in repeated incidents of saying horribly abusive things to other teenagers. They have been pursuing a grudge against the organization ever since.
> i discovered that neighbourhood was exposing thousands of users' full legal names through an unprotected API endpoint.
Headline really buries the lede: this is the issue, not some missing ToS boilerplate.
The map is not the territory, the security policy is not the security.
I'm not going to pretend this is an easy read. So I wouldn't blame you if you stopped early. However, there's a section titled "the surveillance infrastructure (orpheus engine)" which claims that children's private information is being distributed to third-parties without consent.
Orpheus engine is publicly available at https://github.com/hackclub/orpheus-engine.
Who cares? I mean, obviously this author, but pointing out "GDPR this" and "GDPR that" isn't going to make a difference or move the needle. Many companies have given up on GDPR - I've made requests and had blanket refusals to provide data.
Report them, you say? Many DPC's such as the Irish DPC are very friendly in terms of their lax approach to the regulation, just ask Max Schrems, he's been at this for years. I think the EU and the regulators do not have resources to enforce the law, so whilst there are requirements to protect customer data, nothing bad happens if you don't. Just check the top of HN as I write this [1] "Checkout.com hacked, refuses ransom payment, donates to security labs". Will anyone be arrested, charged, fined, or otherwise penalized? Nope, not a chance. I 100% guarantee absolutely nothing will happen as a result of this article. GPT makes it so easy to capture user data these days and people will just willingly hand it over.
The truth is, you should be very careful what data you hand out, always. Use an alias, use privacy tools, always be weary and check if they have a privacy policy, check to see if it works (make a dummy account, do GDPR request, if no reply, be weary).
If they are not serious about privacy, stop, think and act accordingly. While it is a disgrace what these individuals have done, individuals need to take personal responsibility just as in a real world, would you trust a random stranger giving you pills? Hopefully not!
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45912698