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That leads to a philosophical question: How widespread does dangerous misuse of a tool have to be before we can attribute the "fault" to the behavior/presentation of the tool itself, rather than to the user?

Casting around for a simple example... Perhaps any program with a "delete everything permanently" workflow. I think most of us would agree that a lack of confirmation steps would be a flaw in the tool itself, rather than in how it's being used, even though, yes, ideally the user would have been more careful.

Or perhaps the "tool" of US Social Security numbers, which as integers have a truly small surface-area for interaction. People were told not to piggyback on them for identifying customers--let alone authenticating them--but the resulting mess suggests that maybe "just educate people better" isn't enough to overcome the appeal of misuse.






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