Imagine meeting someone you love and having a child with them, just for them to disappear one day. Imagine finding out that they actually never existed and were actually a government agent who was assigned to infiltrate your life and possibly frame you for daring to speak against the state. Imagine being that child. Or anyone else in these peoples lives for that matter.
Or imagine finding yourself abandoned in a foreign country by your closest friends of several years who were actually government agents you met on a holiday you won in a fake competition created by the government, then find out that the company you worked for was also a fake company set up just to try to entrap you in some elaborate plan, so now you are unemployed, and everything you said in your own home or car in the last several years probably exists forever on a government server somewhere. Imagine then opening a newspaper and reading that the police claim to be underfunded...
Imaging what it does to a person to find out that their life for years has been a real life government conspiracy. That their friends, neighbours, co-workers, partner, etc. are not real and that they have had no privacy. It may not even be you they are after, but someone close to you.
These are both real cases, one from the UK where this cop is from and one from Sweden where I'm from, and they are far from unique.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/25/activist-dec...
https://www-aftonbladet-se.translate.goog/nyheter/a/dwwdlO/p...
If nothing else, I think they should show more respect for people who are victims of the police and state-sponsored surveillance.
I would hazard a guess that a big part of the crowd who buy and use RaspberryPi products are privacy conscious. So it makes good business sense not to alienate that customer base and throw away all the goodwill the company has garnered over the years.
The concerns over this are justified, and could have been responded to in a calm manner.
Instead those in charge of that social media account decided to act up in an incredibly childish manner.
If the hiring of an ex surveillance specialist to a FOSS software & hardware company does not rub you the wrong way, then I would at least think the bad PR handling from a pure business standpoint would.
