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I do not want to be too snarky, but your comment highlights the mindset that is criticised here (the lack of ethics among engineers in SV). a ton of companies,

I do not want to be too snarky, but your comment highlights the mindset that is criticised here (the lack of ethics among engineers in SV). a ton of companies, even many startups here on HN, generate revenue from ads 'The rest does it as well, so it can't be wrong.' There's no social network lockin for gmail as a webmail client Except if you want to use a competing service or run your own mail server. Then you cannot deliver to Google Mail, you cannot find out why Google Mail does not accept your mail, you cannot contact Google to whitelist you. Moreover, as a non-Google Mail user I cannot opt out of my mail being scanned for advertising purposes. And no, I cannot just avoid sending to Google Mail addresses, some people forward their e-mail to Google Mail. Google [...] easy to ignore. The parent asks what it feels like to use your intellectual capacity to build an advertising machine that in the end aims to know as much as possible about every person with an internet connection. Your answer is, 'look here, perks'? Really?!? I mean, questions like 'What if we ever got a dictator? He/she would have a field day with all the data that we are collecting.' or 'Isn't my company stepping over the bounds what is permitted by privacy laws to gain more ad profit?' must cross the minds of a Google engineer sometimes, I hope? And doesn't it feel bad to be complicit of constructing what is one of the largest spying machines?

MiddleEndian 10y ago
I guess I just don't see making money from advertisements as an indictment of an organization. They are free to attempt to show ads, just as users are free to block them, and you can stop using their products should you find a better one. An example of a corporation I would never work for would be Nestle, which has caused death and dependency with their products in Africa. Email providers (Google, Microsoft, your ISP, or even Yahoo) having access to your email is the very nature of unencrypted email unless you expect everyone to run their own mail servers. And non-gmail users can definitely send email to gmail users; I've definitely sent email from an organization I worked at that used Outlook+Exchange to my personal gmail acocunt. I have also had scripts that sent out email from a (now defunct) website in the past and really had not issue getting email accepted once I set up reverse DNS, but admittedly that was many years ago. "Easy to ignore" just meant easy to ignore internal corporate-speak bullshit, similar internal buzzwords that I've seen at every company I've worked at of any size. A dictator could already gain control of any communications platform in theory, such as your phone company. In fact, the NSA already does spy on communications in the US (and probably abroad). Does that mean nobody should ever work for a communications-based company?
- danieldk 10y ago
  They are free to attempt to show ads, just as users are free to block them, and you can stop using their products should you find a better one. You cannot trivially opt out of Google tracking you or your environment. To give some examples: - Google reads all my e-mail sent to a Google Mail user to build advertising profiles. - Google Analytics is used by many websites and can be used by Google to track users' movements around the web. Obviously, ads can be used for the same purposes. - Google snoops access points and maps them to GPS positions. It's not opt-in, but you have to opt-out by adding _nomap to your SSID. To make this even more annoying, Microsoft has different requirements to opt out of their tracking. - Google snaps photos of my house, street, car without ever asking permission and puts them online. Applies machine learning to extract data. Unfortunately, we cannot know what data. A lot of things that Google does are incredibly offensive privacy violations (even if not by law), but it is hard or impossible to opt out of them. Does that mean nobody should ever work for a communications-based company? There are also communication companies with moral values and that try to avoid collecting and retaining as much possible data and metadata. (Fastmail, Protonmail, Signal, XS4All, to just name a few). I would also like to point out that there is a huge difference between (1) a dictator can monitor all your traffic from this point in time (ISP with short log retention) and (2) a dictator can scan virtually behaviour data of the last decade to see whether someone was gay, communicated with a leftist group, or whatever 'crime' one can commit. At any rate, 'others do it too' is a terrible argument. A lot of humans do a lot of terrible things. That does not mean that we do not have to strive for a more reasonable world.
  - Freak_NL 10y ago
    > Applies machine learning to extract data. Not only machines are let loose on that data. Ever try to open some websites through a VPN or Tor? Often you'll be presented with Google's Recaptcha tool to verify that you are not a robot but a genuine human visitor (to prevent spam and DDOS attacks). To gain access to the website itself you are enlisted to train Google's algorithms to properly recognize objects on outdoor photographs — including but not limited to mountains, store fronts, house numbers, and cars. A recent 'innovation' has you freehand draw the outline of traffic signs. All unpaid labour, all for a huge proprietary dataset. The old Recaptcha system of proofreading OCR scanned words from books at least had some public merit.

MiddleEndian 10y ago

I guess I just don't see making money from advertisements as an indictment of an organization. They are free to attempt to show ads, just as users are free to block them, and you can stop using their products should you find a better one. An example of a corporation I would never work for would be Nestle, which has caused death and dependency with their products in Africa. Email providers (Google, Microsoft, your ISP, or even Yahoo) having access to your email is the very nature of unencrypted email unless you expect everyone to run their own mail servers. And non-gmail users can definitely send email to gmail users; I've definitely sent email from an organization I worked at that used Outlook+Exchange to my personal gmail acocunt. I have also had scripts that sent out email from a (now defunct) website in the past and really had not issue getting email accepted once I set up reverse DNS, but admittedly that was many years ago. "Easy to ignore" just meant easy to ignore internal corporate-speak bullshit, similar internal buzzwords that I've seen at every company I've worked at of any size. A dictator could already gain control of any communications platform in theory, such as your phone company. In fact, the NSA already does spy on communications in the US (and probably abroad). Does that mean nobody should ever work for a communications-based company?

danieldk 10y ago
They are free to attempt to show ads, just as users are free to block them, and you can stop using their products should you find a better one. You cannot trivially opt out of Google tracking you or your environment. To give some examples: - Google reads all my e-mail sent to a Google Mail user to build advertising profiles. - Google Analytics is used by many websites and can be used by Google to track users' movements around the web. Obviously, ads can be used for the same purposes. - Google snoops access points and maps them to GPS positions. It's not opt-in, but you have to opt-out by adding _nomap to your SSID. To make this even more annoying, Microsoft has different requirements to opt out of their tracking. - Google snaps photos of my house, street, car without ever asking permission and puts them online. Applies machine learning to extract data. Unfortunately, we cannot know what data. A lot of things that Google does are incredibly offensive privacy violations (even if not by law), but it is hard or impossible to opt out of them. Does that mean nobody should ever work for a communications-based company? There are also communication companies with moral values and that try to avoid collecting and retaining as much possible data and metadata. (Fastmail, Protonmail, Signal, XS4All, to just name a few). I would also like to point out that there is a huge difference between (1) a dictator can monitor all your traffic from this point in time (ISP with short log retention) and (2) a dictator can scan virtually behaviour data of the last decade to see whether someone was gay, communicated with a leftist group, or whatever 'crime' one can commit. At any rate, 'others do it too' is a terrible argument. A lot of humans do a lot of terrible things. That does not mean that we do not have to strive for a more reasonable world.
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  > Applies machine learning to extract data. Not only machines are let loose on that data. Ever try to open some websites through a VPN or Tor? Often you'll be presented with Google's Recaptcha tool to verify that you are not a robot but a genuine human visitor (to prevent spam and DDOS attacks). To gain access to the website itself you are enlisted to train Google's algorithms to properly recognize objects on outdoor photographs — including but not limited to mountains, store fronts, house numbers, and cars. A recent 'innovation' has you freehand draw the outline of traffic signs. All unpaid labour, all for a huge proprietary dataset. The old Recaptcha system of proofreading OCR scanned words from books at least had some public merit.