This reminds me of the Simpson's episode where Homer leaves the nuclear power plant and gets a job with a new, great company. Great pay, lots of vacation, plent

This reminds me of the Simpson's episode where Homer leaves the nuclear power plant and gets a job with a new, great company. Great pay, lots of vacation, plenty of benefits, a great boss, and so on. The gag was that the boss was a super villain, and all through the show there was a James Bond kind of attack on his hidden base while Homer worried about work-related matters. The thrust of the joke was that you can be doing anything -- as long as your employees are happy at what they think the situation is. There's a hard, cold fact that we technology people hate to keep in our heads: once you make or record something, you lose control over how it's used. Whether user telemetry from you app or some code Google puts together to help users, once it's created, it's gone. The only reasonable thing to assume is that whatever we create or record will be used in the worst way possible. To think otherwise, at least to me, looks like a fool's game. We fool ourselves -- probably because the alternative is too difficult to contemplate. Applying a Simpon's joke to a real-world situation is probably dumb, but the lesson here seems pretty clear: tell people what they want to hear and build what you want. The world ends up in the same exact situation as being a true believer and building what you want. There's no effective difference between all the big tech companies tracking you like lab rat and then intelligence services stealing the data -- and the big tech companies giving the data freely to the intelligence services. Yes, one may feel good inside better than the other, but hell, if something I disagree with is going to happen, I'd much rather the people involved be honest about it than preach to me how good their motives were. You make it or record it, you're making and recording it for everybody. The only mystery is how long it takes to get out.