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> Facebook’s competitive advantage is its disregard for ethics. This appears to be a quality that occurs in some business owners. I know more than a single en
by goblin89 8y ago
> Facebook’s competitive advantage is its disregard for ethics.
This appears to be a quality that occurs in some business owners.
I know more than a single entrepreneur with similar disregard for things like data retention and PII. Their reluctance to address these issues when advised, I assume, would persist until they get burned.
Taking a step back, at the root it appears simply that some people are better at focusing than others. These entrepreneurs would work on improving metrics they see relevant and their effort will be more efficient thanks to zoning everything else out.
Seeing evil intent here would be counterproductive, similar to reprimanding someone on the spectrum for not saying hello: it might just not occur to a person. The key difference here is that these decisions negatively impact countless third parties, and those third parties lack the expertise to recognize the issue.
While there’s a lot that can be said against FDA[1], there seems to be a parallel here. I want to reserve my judgement about regulation in this area, but it seems like there’s a case for it, similar to how we’d like to keep food manufacturers in check.
[1] A movie called Dallas Buyers Club comes to mind.
- staplers 8y agosimilar to reprimanding someone on the spectrum for not saying hello Why hold anyone in the upper class accountable for their actions when we can just claim they all suffer from mental disorders and make excuses for them?
- goblin89 8y agoI might’ve been unclear, I do think we could push for more enforced accountability in these cases. The parallel between narrow focus and mental disorder was meant to illustrate how attributing these outcomes to malice (which I sometimes see) is ineffective. If those actors play by the rules and are immune to ethics-based arguments, then maybe the rules are due to be updated.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoThe comparison relies on an assumption that these corporate bad actors unwittingly "don't see the harm" that arises as a side effect of their laser focus on (non-maliciously) optimizing something else-- similar to how someone with a different behavioral orientation might unwittingly not register the effect of ignoring a common social convention. I'd say this claim needs a lot of supporting evidence before we should take it seriously. At the moment it's just a rhetorical device, and would almost certainly be used to mitigate blame aimed at corporate bad actors. So I'd say without some type of serious evidence of this unwitting laser focus, evidence of people genuinely "not seeing the harm" despite huge op-eds in major newspapers, outrage from tech communities, harrowing stories of data privacy issues, etc. etc., we really should not put any weight on this "non-malicious focus" interpretation. In other words, these are smart people. They knew full well what they were doing. Lobbying, PR, and attempting regulatory capture after the fact to launder their reputation and absolve blame are absolutely baked in as part of the strategy, until conclusively proven otherwise.
- dgzl 8y agoYou're describing a huge lack of regard for the victims in this situation, and an exceptional amount of forgiveness for the assailants. Unfortunately, this is the attitude that lets ethical gray-lines exist, and the attitude that should be beaten if you want to avoid stricter regulations.