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This may be controversial, but I don't agree. Any legitimate item can be used for bad things if someone wants.

At the risk of making a bad analogy, a car can be used by someone to go on a rampage and mow down hundreds of people. If that happened you can be sure that someone, somewhere would suggest that the auto manufacturers have a responsibility to stop this kind of thing from happening again by making a "kill switch" available to police that can be used to stop the vehicle remotely.

Another bad analogy would be using a hammer to kill someone.

Clearly there is a fuzzy line there somewhere. I am not saying that companies have no responsibility in keeping their products from being used in bad ways by bad people, but I do think it is important not to only look at the bad thing and say that companies need to stop that bad thing from happening at all costs.



I don't think Google is quite as neutral here. Google suggests adding "cheater" to the search of the victim's names and ranks those websites.

What if the manual of the hammer included a section "try hitting someone with it".

Now, Google's recommendation clearly came from seeing those words appear together, but to me Google is somewhere between completely neutral like grep, a hammer, or a car and fully editorialized like a blog or newspaper.


Why not apply this in the opposite direction? Google is allowingforvad things, and therefore shouldn't exist.

The potential for abuse is bad, but only when it's stopping this nonsense? To me, you're endorsing the bad behaviour


[flagged]


If your hammer is the most popular and least expensive hammer, there's not much to be done.


A pr statement addressing it would be a start. Probably also a token gesture, such as issuing a hammer recall. Sure it costs money, but this is PR 101.




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