Posted by bearsyankees 12/3/2025
Go on write your blog post. Don't let your dreams be dreams.
They will stop letting you use the service. That's the recourse for breaking the TOS.
I say this as someone threatened by a billion dollar company for this very thing.
Things were easier when I first began practicing in the 1970s. There weren't too many ways confidential materials in our files could be compromised. Leaving my open file spread out on the conference room table while I went to lunch while attorneys arriving for a deposition on my partner's case were one by one seated into the conference room. That's the kind of thing we had to keep an eye on.
But things soon got complicated. Computers. Digital copies of files that didn't disappear into an external site for storage like physical files. Then email. What were our obligations to know what could - and could not - be intercepted while email traveled the internet.
Then most dangerous of all. Digital storage that was outside our physical domain. How could we now know if the cloud vendor had access to our confidential data? Where were the backups stored? How exactly was the data securely compartmentalized by a cloud vendor? Did we need our own IT experts to control the data located on the external cloud? What did the contracts with the cloud vendor say about the fact we were a law firm and that we, as the lawyers responsible for our clients confidential information, needed to know that they - the cloud vendor - understood the legal obligations and that they - the cloud vendor - would hire lawyers to oversee the manner in which the cloud vendor blocked all access to the legal data located on their own servers. And so on and so forth.
I'm no longer in active practice but these issues were a big part of my practice my last few years at a Fortune 500 insurance company that used in-house attorneys nationwide to represent insureds in litigation - and the corporation was in engaged in signing onto a cloud service to hold all of the corporate data - including the legal departments across all 50 states. It was a nightmare. I'm confident it still is.
I worked at Google and then at Meta. Man, the amount of "nonsense" of the ACL system was insane. I write nonsense in quotes because for sure from a security point of view it all made a lot of sense. But there is exactly zero chance that such a system can be used in a less technical company. It took me 4 years to understand how it worked...
So I'll take this as another data point to create a startup that simplifies security... Seems a lot more complicated than AI
My apologies to the frontend engineers out there who know what they're doing.
Can that company tell you to cease and desist? How does the law work?
They are strongly worded requests from a legal point of view. The only real message they send is that the sender is serious enough about the issue to have involved a lawyer, unless of course you write it yourself, which is something that literally anyone can do.
If you want to actually force an action, you need a court order of some type.
NB for the actual lawyers: I'm oversimplifying, since they can be used in court to prove that you tried to get the other party to stop, and tried to resolve the issue outside of court.
Just search "healthcare" in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46108941
In the same tenure I think that a professional etical hacker or a curious fellow that is poking around with no harm intent, shouldn't disclose the name of the company that had a security issue if they resolve it professionally.
You can write the same blog post without mentioning that it was Filevine.
If they didn't take care of the incident that's a different story...
... rummages around...
here you go: