When it comes to law, you're obviously punching about your weight.
I know you're casual on this, but I wanted to chime in to help you learn a thing or two about this (and to do a service to other who might also be oblivious).
Nothing neathack did was illegal, taking it at face value, of course.
Furthermore, he disclosed it responsibly, didn't publish any confidential data, etc,; actually he published no data at all, other than a statistic.
Criminal law deals with intent, it is clear that neathack's intent here was fueled by goodwill and a research purpose. No judge on the planet will look at this and find wrongdoing on his side.
Also read the room, everyone here has told you the same thing ... just say thanks and move on, man.
I care about people downloading stuff they have no right to in the name of security, when actually that wasn't strictly necessary to document the fact that there is an issue.
As soon as you shift from showing that there is a problem to downloading data to establish the size of the problem you are the problem.
Whether he disclosed it responsibly or not is besides the point: you don't get to download a database to prove that it could be done, then you've changed a white hat POC into an actual leak and that is a completely different affair.
FWIW this was in Germany against a server in Sweden if I've understood it all correctly and I would bet a sizeable amount of money that I know more about EU data protection laws than you do.
Leaving aside the legal argument and focusing on the technical side: Lovable is a Swedish company, but websites generated by Lovable are hosted on servers around the world. That said, the actual data is stored on Supabase servers, which -- as far as I know -- are located in the US.
"What isn’t mentioned in the analysis is that we ran a System 1 decision model on each dataset to determine whether it contained privacy-sensitive data."
You can't do that without downloading the data first.
Yes, you cannot determine if there is a breach of meaningless data or privacy data without inspection; as a layman, op appears to have downloaded as little as possible and inspected as little as possible to determine the nature of the problem.
So, let me get this straight: you are advocating that white hat hackers download data in bulk to determine whether or not there is a breach of privacy? Do you realize that at that point in time there is a breach?
I'm really more than a little bit surprised that people here don't seem to know the difference between reporting a vulnerability, which has the potential of being exploited and actually exploiting it.
This phrase is doing a lot of lifting here. Op clearly downloaded far less than is possible.
> Do you realize that at that point in time there is a breach?
As others have said elsewhere, this is a legal opinion and IANAL. Morally: downloading data, not reading it, then deleting it, then reporting it does not strike me as unethical.
Far less than possible but far more than needed to prove there is a vulnerability.
> Morally: downloading data, not reading it, then deleting it, then reporting it does not strike me as unethical.
How will you prove you didn't read it?
How will you prove you deleted it and that you did not make a copy?
The company has no option: it is now documented that there is a breach. They will have to report that breach (which if I were them I'd be doing immediately, they have 48 hours to do so). And then they are going to have to make a tough decision: thank you for your time and effort and hope that you really didn't read it and that you didn't copy it or play it safe and file a case against you.
Lots of companies are going to play it safe, if only because their compliance department is not going to want to take the risk of you popping up a few months later with another interesting analysis of data that you shouldn't have had in the first place. That's what makes this so risky, it turns a clear 'good deed' into something that could well end up in court. Morality rarely factors into such situations.
That may well be so. But that doesn't mean this is how you do it.
I draw the line at downloading data beyond what is required to prove there is an issue and I think you probably should cross that line only when you either have a contract with the company you are researching or if you have a lawyer that you pay that has signed off on what you are about to do. Anything less than that an - imnsho - you are playing the lottery.
Courts, especially in Germany, are typically not pleased if you take possession of the data.
This seems to make clear what several other commenters have been pointing to: this isn’t you relating absolute facts of law in the way you've been claiming. It’s you relating your personal ethical evaluation and your opinion about how the laws should be interpreted and followed.
That, and 280 or so company reviews, conversations with compliance officers, CISOs, auditors, pentesters, lawyers and other people in the M&A space about how those companies deal with security issues, reports and what constitutes a potential breach and what does not.
As for the absolute facts of the law: the only law I currently have in mind is the GDPR and that is a surprisingly readable piece of legislation.
And if I don’t see fines against Lovable and they don’t report this as a breach, it would seem to suggest that your stance across this post isn’t the degree of absolute fact you’ve presented it as?
> [...] nor will they take any action against the reporter.
To be fair, I don’t know for certain whether they will.
However, Lovable was informed weeks in advance. They provided an official statement confirming the findings, which is included in the Handelsblatt article. At no point did they ask us to delay publication or threaten legal action. I can assure you that we would not have published the findings otherwise.
I also want to point out that I contacted Lovable’s head of security directly and shared the results of the analysis: websites, table names, record counts, and an LLM-generated “privacy sensitivity score.” No actual records were shared, as they had already been deleted. He was very cooperative and said his team would review the information and contact the affected customers.
The whole thing was very professional and he was appreciative of our work.
Edit: I see that Igor (Lovable's head of security) has commented in this thread as well.
Honest question: how would you determine how much data is reasonable to download and inspect while remaining "white hat"? Are you advocating they stop at a single record, since that's enough to prove that a vulnerability exists? Or that OP downloaded _more_ than necessary and should have stopped earlier (but not at the first instance)?
Another question: I'm not sure if you noticed, but he obtained it from a 3rd party called Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/) which "maintains a free, open repository of web crawl data that can be used by anyone." Doesn't this imply the damage is already done, since the data's been made available to _anyone_ at this point?
Put another way, since it's been put on Common Crawl, which presumably follows rules about what to scrape, hasn't Lovable effectively published this data?
If you're researching I would stop at the minimum required to determine that there is an issue, maybe you have a lawyer that will tell you different. This being Germany I would play it very safe. From the company's perspective there is no difference between downloading 1, 10 or 50,000 records to prove the point, though they likely will respond a bit quicker if you tell them you could download tens of thousands of records.
> Another question: I'm not sure if you noticed, but he obtained it from a 3rd party called Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/) which "maintains a free, open repository of web crawl data that can be used by anyone." Doesn't this imply the damage is already done, since the data's been made available to _anyone_ at this point?
That is an interesting question. Common crawl could - and should - have realized they have no business hoovering this up and they may well be found to be negligent in how they set up their crawler. Note that the title makes it very clear that it is patently obvious that this data was not meant to be published 'passport details and more than 200K private messages' leaves very little to the imagination.
There is a massive difference between an unintentional disclosure and an intentional one. You can turn the one into the other and end up with a real problem.
The best way to handle these cases is to try to look through the eyes of the data subjects and then to do what is in their best interest. That will most likely guide you to what is safe to do without spending a fortune on legal opinions trying to find out where that bright line sits.
And that immediately illustrates the problem: the fewer people that have copies of this data the better, so by making one more copy - even though there already exists one that should not be publicly accessible - you are making the problem worse.
Common crawl, Lovable, Supabase and the OP all could do better with respect to the interests of the data subjects. OP at least realized there was a problem.
To clarify: no PII leaked from Lovable apps ended up in Common Crawl. Common Crawl was used solely to identify Lovable apps—not to retrieve leaked data. It does not store XHR responses, which are how data is retrieved from Supabase.
The point is that once you realize you're seeing data you shouldn't be seeing, you should either stop and just report it, or save the smallest amount reasonable to demonstrate the issue.
IANAL, but I think it'd be advisable to seek legal advice if you decide to take door number 2 and collect a corpus of evidence to decide what "the smallest reasonable" is; at least put some serious thought into it — because while I have no reason to suspect that neathack had bad intentions, it doesn't seem likely that it was necessary to collect 159k projects to show the scale of the impact.
He could instead have collected a representative sample, and then extrapolate the true size of the impact. I'm not trained in statistics, so don't know how to calculate the required sample size, but I know it's possible.
You seem to be confusing what feels intuitively wrong with what is actually unlawful. Law doesn't work on feelings. Where are the terms of use? Do they explicitly prohibit this kind of access? How do they define it?
If a website publishes data and provides a public key that automatically allows a browser to retrieve it, good luck arguing that your "security" was bypassed.
Also, OP mentions confidential information. That doesn't automatically make neathack liable. If I publish someone's medical records in a publicly accessible comment here, are you liable for reading them, or am I liable for publishing them on a website with essentially no access controls?
>an actual leak
Got a link? Or "just trust me, bro"?
>I would bet a sizeable amount of money
Unfortunately, my religion prohibits gambling, which we consider degenerate behavior. But by all means, keep the confidence. It would be even more impressive if it came with an actual legal argument.
> I care about people downloading stuff they have no right to in the name of security, when actually that wasn't strictly necessary to document the fact that there is an issue
It was strictly necessary to show the extent of the problem, which will lead to less products leaving their users' data exposed.
It's true that it might lead to legal problems, but there's no doubt that they were morally in the right, and that it's the laws that might punish this that are wrong and harmful.
They downloaded data, didn't (probably) do anything bad with it, and warned everyone about the problem, while in all likelihood many criminals already took it and used it without telling anyone.
You can give people legal advice, but you can't argue that they did anything morally wrong.
> Nothing neathack did was illegal, taking it at face value, of course.
Law varies significantly between jurisdictions. You're just blankly claiming it's not illegal. People have been convicted for way less than this, in different countries.
Plus, you could be creating more damages to the company by downloading more data like this, and you're not wearing a white hat when you're creating damage. A white-hat is in and out, without creating damage, with a clean report about the issue so the software provider can patch it.
I know you're casual on this, but I wanted to chime in to help you learn a thing or two about this (and to do a service to other who might also be oblivious).
Nothing neathack did was illegal, taking it at face value, of course.
Furthermore, he disclosed it responsibly, didn't publish any confidential data, etc,; actually he published no data at all, other than a statistic.
Criminal law deals with intent, it is clear that neathack's intent here was fueled by goodwill and a research purpose. No judge on the planet will look at this and find wrongdoing on his side.
Also read the room, everyone here has told you the same thing ... just say thanks and move on, man.
I care about people downloading stuff they have no right to in the name of security, when actually that wasn't strictly necessary to document the fact that there is an issue.
As soon as you shift from showing that there is a problem to downloading data to establish the size of the problem you are the problem.
Whether he disclosed it responsibly or not is besides the point: you don't get to download a database to prove that it could be done, then you've changed a white hat POC into an actual leak and that is a completely different affair.
FWIW this was in Germany against a server in Sweden if I've understood it all correctly and I would bet a sizeable amount of money that I know more about EU data protection laws than you do.
This is not a self-evident argument, what are you basing this on?
Problem scope is part of problem definition. If you dont know the scope, you dont know the problem.
"What isn’t mentioned in the analysis is that we ran a System 1 decision model on each dataset to determine whether it contained privacy-sensitive data."
You can't do that without downloading the data first.
I'm really more than a little bit surprised that people here don't seem to know the difference between reporting a vulnerability, which has the potential of being exploited and actually exploiting it.
This phrase is doing a lot of lifting here. Op clearly downloaded far less than is possible.
> Do you realize that at that point in time there is a breach?
As others have said elsewhere, this is a legal opinion and IANAL. Morally: downloading data, not reading it, then deleting it, then reporting it does not strike me as unethical.
> Morally: downloading data, not reading it, then deleting it, then reporting it does not strike me as unethical.
How will you prove you didn't read it?
How will you prove you deleted it and that you did not make a copy?
The company has no option: it is now documented that there is a breach. They will have to report that breach (which if I were them I'd be doing immediately, they have 48 hours to do so). And then they are going to have to make a tough decision: thank you for your time and effort and hope that you really didn't read it and that you didn't copy it or play it safe and file a case against you.
Lots of companies are going to play it safe, if only because their compliance department is not going to want to take the risk of you popping up a few months later with another interesting analysis of data that you shouldn't have had in the first place. That's what makes this so risky, it turns a clear 'good deed' into something that could well end up in court. Morality rarely factors into such situations.
It seems far more likely that Lovable and Supabase won’t consider or report this as a breach, nor will they take any action against the reporter.
I draw the line at downloading data beyond what is required to prove there is an issue and I think you probably should cross that line only when you either have a contract with the company you are researching or if you have a lawyer that you pay that has signed off on what you are about to do. Anything less than that an - imnsho - you are playing the lottery.
Courts, especially in Germany, are typically not pleased if you take possession of the data.
For instance:
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Modern-Solution-Court-of-Appeal...
And quite a few others besides.
As for the absolute facts of the law: the only law I currently have in mind is the GDPR and that is a surprisingly readable piece of legislation.
To be fair, I don’t know for certain whether they will.
However, Lovable was informed weeks in advance. They provided an official statement confirming the findings, which is included in the Handelsblatt article. At no point did they ask us to delay publication or threaten legal action. I can assure you that we would not have published the findings otherwise.
I also want to point out that I contacted Lovable’s head of security directly and shared the results of the analysis: websites, table names, record counts, and an LLM-generated “privacy sensitivity score.” No actual records were shared, as they had already been deleted. He was very cooperative and said his team would review the information and contact the affected customers.
The whole thing was very professional and he was appreciative of our work.
Edit: I see that Igor (Lovable's head of security) has commented in this thread as well.
That said, I think that OP didn't cross the line in relation to each company, but IANAL.
Another question: I'm not sure if you noticed, but he obtained it from a 3rd party called Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/) which "maintains a free, open repository of web crawl data that can be used by anyone." Doesn't this imply the damage is already done, since the data's been made available to _anyone_ at this point?
Put another way, since it's been put on Common Crawl, which presumably follows rules about what to scrape, hasn't Lovable effectively published this data?
> Another question: I'm not sure if you noticed, but he obtained it from a 3rd party called Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/) which "maintains a free, open repository of web crawl data that can be used by anyone." Doesn't this imply the damage is already done, since the data's been made available to _anyone_ at this point?
That is an interesting question. Common crawl could - and should - have realized they have no business hoovering this up and they may well be found to be negligent in how they set up their crawler. Note that the title makes it very clear that it is patently obvious that this data was not meant to be published 'passport details and more than 200K private messages' leaves very little to the imagination.
There is a massive difference between an unintentional disclosure and an intentional one. You can turn the one into the other and end up with a real problem.
The best way to handle these cases is to try to look through the eyes of the data subjects and then to do what is in their best interest. That will most likely guide you to what is safe to do without spending a fortune on legal opinions trying to find out where that bright line sits.
And that immediately illustrates the problem: the fewer people that have copies of this data the better, so by making one more copy - even though there already exists one that should not be publicly accessible - you are making the problem worse.
Common crawl, Lovable, Supabase and the OP all could do better with respect to the interests of the data subjects. OP at least realized there was a problem.
(Copied from another comment of mine.)
IANAL, but I think it'd be advisable to seek legal advice if you decide to take door number 2 and collect a corpus of evidence to decide what "the smallest reasonable" is; at least put some serious thought into it — because while I have no reason to suspect that neathack had bad intentions, it doesn't seem likely that it was necessary to collect 159k projects to show the scale of the impact.
He could instead have collected a representative sample, and then extrapolate the true size of the impact. I'm not trained in statistics, so don't know how to calculate the required sample size, but I know it's possible.
Isn't this what you're getting at jacquesm?
You seem to be confusing what feels intuitively wrong with what is actually unlawful. Law doesn't work on feelings. Where are the terms of use? Do they explicitly prohibit this kind of access? How do they define it?
If a website publishes data and provides a public key that automatically allows a browser to retrieve it, good luck arguing that your "security" was bypassed.
Also, OP mentions confidential information. That doesn't automatically make neathack liable. If I publish someone's medical records in a publicly accessible comment here, are you liable for reading them, or am I liable for publishing them on a website with essentially no access controls?
>an actual leak
Got a link? Or "just trust me, bro"?
>I would bet a sizeable amount of money
Unfortunately, my religion prohibits gambling, which we consider degenerate behavior. But by all means, keep the confidence. It would be even more impressive if it came with an actual legal argument.
It was strictly necessary to show the extent of the problem, which will lead to less products leaving their users' data exposed.
It's true that it might lead to legal problems, but there's no doubt that they were morally in the right, and that it's the laws that might punish this that are wrong and harmful.
They downloaded data, didn't (probably) do anything bad with it, and warned everyone about the problem, while in all likelihood many criminals already took it and used it without telling anyone.
You can give people legal advice, but you can't argue that they did anything morally wrong.
Law varies significantly between jurisdictions. You're just blankly claiming it's not illegal. People have been convicted for way less than this, in different countries.
Plus, you could be creating more damages to the company by downloading more data like this, and you're not wearing a white hat when you're creating damage. A white-hat is in and out, without creating damage, with a clean report about the issue so the software provider can patch it.
What are you talking about? Which data? Is this data in the room with us right now?
Pen testers here must be diligent about having a signed contract, or it is way too easy to end up in jail.
While the many posts may have been a bit excessive, jacquesm has a good point if you're looking at it through the lens of US law.
Never forget Aaron Swartz. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz