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It's simple. People are oblivious or just don't give a shit. As long as they can share their cat pictures and so on, it's all fucking dandy. Something really b
by Nux 10y ago
It's simple. People are oblivious or just don't give a shit.
As long as they can share their cat pictures and so on, it's all fucking dandy.
Something really bad needs to happen to move things in the right direction. Snowden was not enough, clearly.
- onion2k 10y agoPeople are oblivious or just don't give a shit. As long as they can share their cat pictures and so on, it's all fucking dandy. We (people who work in tech) have a duty to fix these issues and to implement our products in ways that respect the privacy and security of the people who use what we build without passing the buck on to them. A Facebook user doesn't have to give a damn about encryption before Facebook put good encryption in place - the engineers at Facebook should just do it anyway, because it's the right thing to do. If we build services that fail the user by allowing a malicious actor to violate their privacy then that is our fault. It is not the user's fault for not demanding we do our jobs properly. This is on us.
- joe563323 10y agoAll the above comments are thoughtful.
- rawfan 10y agoWe don't want to fix these things in our products because we want all that information about our customers because it's an extra revenue stream. The maclicious actor is us. Don't work for shitty companies and implement stuff right for the companies you do work for. Edit: Product owners give you jobs that are bad for the user/customer but they want it done ayways. Convince them why it's a bad idea and find another job if you can't.
- onion2k 10y agoWhen I said "people who work in tech", I meant that including product owners. Besides, the notion that Mark Zuckerberg hands out decrees of what Facebook must do next and the engineers have to choose between scampering away to build what he wants or resign if they disagree is utter nonsense. We're all human being who are capable of presenting a rational argument in favour of doing things properly. Product owners listen. Sometimes they disagree, and that's when you need to question your role as an engineer, but often they don't just ignore their team. If you think that being an engineer in tech is a job where you blindly implement someone else's will then you're failing to live up to both your potential and your responsibility.
- _samihasan_ 10y agoGovernments too should be proactive if they really care about the safety, security and privacy of their citizenry and start enacting laws and regulations that protect the rights of people to have secure communications but the problem is that some governments or agencies benefit from this situation and want to keep it this way the longest time possible and leave consumers at the mercy of operators like Facebook or Google.
- whack 10y agoI'm sorry, who exactly is us? I didn't realize that by becoming a programmer, I'm now morally responsible for the actions of every single programmer out there in the world. I didn't realize that i should now look in the mirror and blame myself because some guy I never met decided to follow his CEO's orders and implemented a backdoor in their product. There is no us. There's just hundreds of thousands of individuals, each doing their own thing. Some are angels, some are assholes, and a lot are in the middle. If you think that getting 500,000 people to make a pinky promise to be good is going to prevent shit from happening, that's just delusional thinking. No matter what you or I do, there will always be some asshole Investor/CEO/PM/programmer out there who will screw over people's privacy in order to make money, and you guilt-tripping the other 499,999 programmers is not going to change that. If we want to stop shit from happening, we need systems in place to do that. Either regulatory, certification or market-based systems that catch and punish bad actors. In the absence of such systems, expect dysfunctional outcomes regularly.
- onion2k 10y agoThere is no us. I think we actually agree with one another, but I'm just coming at the argument from a slightly more positive position. We, as the engineers who build stuff, need to start making it clear that we don't like what the bad actors do, that we won't build it ourselves, and the "asshole Investor/CEO/PM/programmer" who does won't have a place in our industry. You're quite right that we need systems in place to stop this shit, but you're quite wrong if you think it's someone else's job to make that happen. We can build the certification or market-based systems right now.
- whack 10y agoSorry if my previous message came across a bit harsh. I've been reading Chaos Monkeys lately and the author's style of writing is starting to rub off on me. I think we are indeed in agreement. As industry professionals, we do have the power to influence change. Not through wishful thinking or promises of good behavior, but by working to put in place certification/market-based systems that act as a check on bad corporate behavior. I hope we can start making progress towards those ends.
- mtgx 10y ago> Something really bad needs to happen to move things in the right direction. Fingers crossed that Trump's admin does something so terrible most people will want to use open source end-to-end encryption tools?
- raarts 10y ago> something really bad needs to happen to move things in the right direction. Something really bad already happened: genocide. What else needs to happen? The Netherlands (among others) required everybody to register their basic info, including religion, with local authorities. This made it very simple for the Germans to know whom to deport. Your data can be used for other things than originally intended. But people do not learn. So you may be right. More really bad things need to happen.