3 ms·

Are you seriously suggesting they lying-by-small-print is somehow the more moral course for them to have taken?

• mikeash 10y ago
  I think they might just be saying that we tend to reward lying and punish honesty, so we shouldn't be too surprised when this sort of thing happens. It frustrates the shit out of me, but I think it's true in many cases. This company would have died instantly if they had been up-front about what they were doing. By lying, they've managed to have some success. I don't condone lying and I wish they wouldn't do it, but given the incentives, I'm not surprised that they did.
  • fatbird 10y ago
    I take your point, but we didn't reward lying here--they profited as long as we were unaware they lied. Once revealed, the ship is going down fast. This is just to say that crime pays... until it doesn't. What would be scandalous (and still might be) would be for this to be revealed, and no one to care about it. I'm cautiously optimistic this might be the case--even Uber's bad behaviour is catching up to it.
    • mikeash 10y ago
      I think we did reward lying. We didn't intentionally reward lying, but that's not what I meant. We don't intend for this to happen, but that's how it works out the way things are set up. The ship is going down fast, but how much money did they make in the meantime? Will the CEO's salary and bonuses be clawed back? I doubt it.
• geofft 10y ago
  Not moral, profitable. Companies are evaluated on their profit, not on their moral decisions (unless those decisions are illegal, but there's no law against saying "By signing up, you consent to us data-mining your inbox and selling the data"). And, of course, nobody is saying that it's a good thing that companies are evaluated on profit and not morality, just that it's true.