Maciej Ceglowski:
After losing data or passwords, this is the about the worst kind of mistake I can make.
The heart of the problem was that it turned out to be possible to ask the Pinboard database to âgive me only bookmarks where the privacy flag is set to zeroââ and still get back results where the privacy flag was on. This is like accidentally baking something by putting it in your freezer. Unexpected.
In my email to users, I promised to give a more public and technical explanation of what I did wrong:
Many lessons to be taken from this brilliant post detailing exactly what mistakes led to a minor privacy breach for Pinboard.
This is exactly how to deal with sort of problem, fast, detailed and honest follow up explaining anything you could want to know about what happened, why it happened and why it should never happen again.
More importantly for me is that pride can often ruin the objectivity of a programmer, it's hard to admit your own mistakes and in his post Maciej clearly shows his desire to be honest and highlight what he did wrong and why it happened. Humility makes for a better relationship between an engineer and their work.
This post was an admission of a privacy issue which would normally make people less comfortable with the service, but I found it makes me even happier to have chosen Pinboard as my bookmarking tool of choice and even more likely to reccomend it to others.










