It's been my hope that the russia story and Google and Facebooks realization of the technology they've built has been used in ways they never intended, might st

It's been my hope that the russia story and Google and Facebooks realization of the technology they've built has been used in ways they never intended, might stand as a sober reminder about the reality of evil in the world. People recognize evil in, say, Isis, Nazis, or a school shooter, but usually accompanied with that recognition is a distancing from the act - a way of saying "I'm not like them". And I'm not saying you are. But evil is insidious and pervasive. It affects everything we do. And that definitely includes software. I worked for a company that had a help chat room, where users could ask a support person questions about the product. It was publicly accessible from a link on the website, basically a slack room. One day we notice two teenagers had hijacked the room in the middle of the night and were using it for an erotic conversation. That's fairly mundane, but what if they weren't teenagers? What if one of them was underage, and we had accidentally facilitated a child molester? And this happens everywhere. I heard about a kid who got cyberbullied with scratch (scratch.mit.edu) because it allows you to share content with other users? Do you think the makers of scratch ever imagined that they'd play a hand in some middle-schooler committing suicide? (fyi, they actually police this stuff) I've built financial research sites, ad optimization software, phone calling apps, operational and monitoring tools. I think all that software has been mostly helpful for people, but I also recognize that it played a part in nefarious ends as well. Everyone's hands are dirty.