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Yes, but for every person I tell that they had a data breach causing them to phish their customers through calendar, I can poison 50 people in each organization, then they can poison 50 and so forth... let's call it exponential growth of the DELL-20 coronavirus.



And each of those 10 successes tells 50,

Don’t you get it?! They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work, and you are vastly outnumbered. It’s not right, it’s bloody annoying, but it’s there and it’s not going away.

Google needs to fix the root problem, so that the spammy behaviour is not possible.


I'm not claiming that you're wrong because I don't have any data to the contrary, but "They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work" isn't a strong argument. It's only true assuming rational actors and perfect information.

It is quite possible that the successes are more visible than the failures and thus it seems like it works. Or it "works" for the sales rep because he gets more leads and thus a bigger bonus, while hurting the company - but the company hasn't figured that out yet. Or it works in the short term but isn't worth the reputation damage in the long term.

Of course it's also possible that it just works, just pointing out that reality shows that people and companies often do things that are just stupid.


It would stop working if less people said "it will work even if you're difficult!" and more people just took a little time out of their workday to be difficult.


I hear "they wouldn't do it if it didn't work" about many dark patterns. Is there proof to this? I suspect that these kinds of things are easier to measure than less aggressive tactics, leading to a false sense of efficacy.

And what of the efficacy compared to the negative reputation gained from such practices? How do they measure that?


> Yes, but for every person I tell that they had a data breach causing them to phish their customers through calendar

The number of times I've managed to convince someone not to use a service because of data breaches or poor security settings is precisely 0.

If people are OK with banks and retirement accounts that follow poor security standards, they won't really care about Dell.




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