A _lot_ of folks here in the comments are missing the point and "getting distracted" by the word "kill." Sure, it was probably a bit short-sighted of the speak

A _lot_ of folks here in the comments are missing the point and "getting distracted" by the word "kill." Sure, it was probably a bit short-sighted of the speaker to not connect the dots and see that this software would be actively used to seek out and kill people. But to me the core message of this talk applies to the very large grey area that lies in between fully ethical software and stuff the DoD makes to kill people (yes killing _can_ be necessary I know, I know, don't get distracted!). And that grey area is mostly social media and ad-tech. These are two domains which require software to be written that is actively harmful to people's privacy and mental health. We see Twitter being used to target and harass people to the point of suicide. Instagram has been precisely designed to the point of addiciting its users into a fake world that makes them feel like they are nothing and that everyone is happier than they are and it depresses them. The examples I just cited are prevalent criticism and can start to echo in our chamber here (HN). But how about a real, recent example: Facebook's use of two-factor authentication phone numbers in advertisements. Some engineer at Facebook was given these requirements to implement this super shady and deceitful functionality and chose to implement it anyways without pushing back. It takes advantage of folks who were simply trying to improve the security of their account, but now it is being used to target them with advertisements. Most of us will have long careers that don't involve writing software that will kill people, but a stunning majority of us will be somewhere in this grey area at one point or another, and you must think about what you make at that point still.