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Even before we knew how nasty facebook behaves behind closed doors, I would have found this creepy. Not that I'm surprised companies are doing it...the profit a

Even before we knew how nasty facebook behaves behind closed doors, I would have found this creepy. Not that I'm surprised companies are doing it...the profit available to whichever company grabs the most data about people is huge, so there will always be huge resources devoted to figuring out more and more about people (even details they've chosen not to share). I used to be somewhat naively optimistic about companies like Google and Facebook. I knew so many people who worked at those places, and I had such positive feelings about their ethical core...but, in hindsight, that optimism and that faith was poorly placed. They're companies that make money entirely based on the profitability of violating people's privacy. Of course they're gonna be evil; evil is where the money is in the advertising industry.

consumer451 8y ago
My personal forward-looking concerns about both of the companies you mentioned are what will happen when the founders die or retire. It is likely that truly amoral Wall Street folks will take over. I am still very concerned about Google in this regard, but I am not convinced that FB could get any worse.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453958
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jaggederest 8y ago
  Imagine Larry Ellison running Facebook. The mind recoils at the thought.
  - consumer451 8y ago
    FB is already close to there in my opinion. My main concern is someone like Ellison running Google. For all of Google’s faults, they could be a lot more evil.
  - scottlocklin 8y ago
    Sounds better than Zuck and whatshername. Maybe they'd ship features users want once in a while.
    - biggusdickus 8y ago
      They do ship features for their users all the time. Just look at the linked patent.
- aj7 8y ago
  WILL take over?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- 706f6f70 8y ago
  It's not that Wall Street will take over. It's that Silicon Valley has become Wall Street but it doesn't realize it yet. It still thinks it's those counter-culture rebels hacking away in a garage, building products for the masses. Just look at them! They don't wear suits, they wear t-shirts with corporate logos - completely different. They're relaxed and chill and they take Soylent because they like it not because their corporate non-corporate overlords demand the time something resembling lunch would take. They celebrate losing money! Who else does that (other than activist investors who will intentionally restructure a company to bankrupt it)? They're not greedy, they just want to be fairly compensated with life-changing amounts of equity. That's just the value they bring. They're anti-capitalism man! They just voted in favour of more taxes so that they don't have to see as many homeless while they wait for the company bus to take them from their company-issued container home to the company campus. They don't live to work like those Wall Street drones. They're not cocaine-infused Wall Street Dude Bros! They're micro-dosing LSD and Adderall because they're performance hacking - can't you see the difference? It's totally not like Wall Street. Have you not seen the map? It's California man. West coast is the best coast!
  - Swizec 8y ago
    This is the best comment I ever read
  - mindgam3 8y ago
    “It's not that Wall Street will take over. It's that Silicon Valley has become Wall Street but it doesn't realize it yet“ 1000x yes. This is exactly what happened. An entire generation of impressionable youngsters, essentially brainwashed into believing to the depths of their soul that Silicon Valley is a utopian meritocracy, composed solely of founders out there saving the world by exploiting zero day vulnerabilities in the individual/social/collective/national psyche. Like a burning-man-gone wrong style acid trip, where everything starts out peachy and Friendly and then somehow, imperceptibly, so slowly that you never even saw it coming until it was far too late, the place for your friends turns into the circus, like LinkedIn but even more shameless self promotion and rampant fakery, and one day you wake and realize to your horror that real people’s lives are being destroyed due to this tone-deaf technology juggernaut. Shifts in global politics. Bullying. Teen suicides. Cognitive bias amplified by the collective intelligence of some of the greatest and most misguided minds of our generation, all united behind their leader’s vision of a world of programmable social interactions, backed by an absolutely ruthless win at all costs mentality. The war on reality has begun, people. It’s actually been going on for the last 14 years, but the masses are finally starting to pick up on it. Facebook employees: it’s time to pick a side and engage in some public collective action like your frenemies at Google. The #techlash is upon us. Ethics is coming back into fashion. Take a stand. Not only will it help save the world, for real this time, it will look good on a resume.
- nikofeyn 8y ago
  it is weird to me that you imply facebook and google have morals in your comparison to the amoral wall street. what is stranger to me is that i agree, but only because i believe facebook and google to have distorted or warped moralities. i think they truly believe they are making the world a better place, but i hold the opinion they both have contributed a net negative on society at large. to me, amorality is preferable over warped morality. it is clear what wall street wants: money. it isn’t clear to me what facebook and google actually want. i fear they strive for control.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    I can't buy into the idea that these companies have contributed a net negative to society. Their existence has vastly improved communication over the internet for billions of people. Weighed against their cons, I still think it's a net positive.
    - uep 8y ago
      Although it's kind of silly trying to make these judgements, I'd say Google has been a net-positive, Facebook is a little murkier. Google's net positive has almost certainly been search. I believe this has probably had a huge net-productivity improvement across the world. I don't even use their search engine anymore, but they started the modern search engine and made a great deal of information more easy to find. I don't think they've improved communication otherwise. I don't believe Gmail or Hangouts have improved communication. I don't think buying Android and mostly giving the OS away has been a net-positive either. Facebook is much harder to say. They've definitely connected many, many people via their service, but it has also been shown that the more someone uses Facebook the less happy they are. Now, this could easily be conflating causation with correlation (sad people use Facebook more), but they've also been caught doing bad things. It's fun to think about, but there are so many what-ifs. How long would it have been before modern search came about without Google? If we had a federation of smaller social networks, would that have limited the damage that a single company could have done?
WhitneyLand 8y ago
Say you founded a company tomorrow which started rocketing on unicorn tracjectory, but wanted to do better. What words or actions could you invoke that would allow it to be distinguished from what some previously friendly sounding companies said or did during their ascent?
- airstrike 8y ago
  D̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶e̶v̶i̶l̶
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  "We welcome and will assist in the implementation of regulation and oversight by an independent entity with the authority to sanction us, with penalties up to and including the dissolution of our company and pursuing company officers directly". Very similar to the game theory experiment of having a piece of cake to cut: one person gets to cut, the other person gets to pick the piece they want. You have to handcuff yourself to doing the right thing. Your decisions about "being evil" then become easy; you simply can't pick those paths knowing you've locked in the consequences.
- SwellJoe 8y ago
  "Make most of your money from something other than advertising." But, that doesn't account for Amazon who have become (or were always?) evil in their own special ways.
  - 0003 8y ago
    Even so, https://advertising.amazon.com/ https://advertising.amazon.com/
- opportune 8y ago
  I think the only way to stay true to a well-meaning mission statement is to not go public, but that’s kind of a non-starter for most VC backed companies. And even if you do stay private for a long time, the death/departure/retirement of the founders would be likely to result in acquisition either by PE/a public company or preempt an IPO
hkyeti 8y ago
There are large companies run ethically. eg patagonia, follow your heart etc It all comes back to the leader and culture they set...
- smt88 8y ago
  Patagonia isn’t that large, and it’s famous as an exception to the rule. There are so few truly ethical companies that it’s hard to come up with any that have no asterisk next to the name.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    Costco?
  - lozaning 8y ago
    Interface, Inc. the company that likely makes the carpet your chair is on right now if you're in A class office space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface,_Inc.
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  Quite. I think it comes down to having founders who define changing the world as "better for all" rather than simply "obscene amounts of money for us". Even if they sell up later the hollowing of a formerly ethical brand under a multi-national often means it stops performing. We seem to be in a gilded age of no consequences currently. Money, and absurd amounts of it, seems to be the be all and end all of everything. There have been times where philanthropic founders and industrialists have thrived. There can easily be another. Hopefully we can get it without need of pitchforks, but that seems like an evens bet right now.
mygo 8y ago
How often do companies patent things just so that they don't go to market? For example even if they have no intentions to use it, they know that their competitors might, so they patent it so that their competitors can't, and thus no one can? Does this happen? I see patents all the time that never made it to market, so I guess it's plausible. But is it even legal to patent something without intent to bring it to market?
- deytempo 8y ago
  With closed source software companies, it really doesn’t matter if they infringe on a patent like this because no one can prove they are doing it without a full code audit
kumarvvr 8y ago
> I knew so many people who worked at those places, and I had such positive feelings about their ethical core... Even one bad actor, at the right position and power, can make the ethical values of thousands of developers irrelevant until it's too late. I often wonder about companies that are filled with ordinary folks, companies that do real nasty stuff. Like say Nestle, or even Enron. How do normal, ethical people get by in these companies. Do big companies and corporate culture destroy the inherent compassion and empathy in people?

consumer451 8y ago

My personal forward-looking concerns about both of the companies you mentioned are what will happen when the founders die or retire. It is likely that truly amoral Wall Street folks will take over. I am still very concerned about Google in this regard, but I am not convinced that FB could get any worse.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453958 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453958

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jaggederest 8y ago
Imagine Larry Ellison running Facebook. The mind recoils at the thought.
- consumer451 8y ago
  FB is already close to there in my opinion. My main concern is someone like Ellison running Google. For all of Google’s faults, they could be a lot more evil.
- scottlocklin 8y ago
  Sounds better than Zuck and whatshername. Maybe they'd ship features users want once in a while.
  - biggusdickus 8y ago
    They do ship features for their users all the time. Just look at the linked patent.
aj7 8y ago
WILL take over?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
706f6f70 8y ago
It's not that Wall Street will take over. It's that Silicon Valley has become Wall Street but it doesn't realize it yet. It still thinks it's those counter-culture rebels hacking away in a garage, building products for the masses. Just look at them! They don't wear suits, they wear t-shirts with corporate logos - completely different. They're relaxed and chill and they take Soylent because they like it not because their corporate non-corporate overlords demand the time something resembling lunch would take. They celebrate losing money! Who else does that (other than activist investors who will intentionally restructure a company to bankrupt it)? They're not greedy, they just want to be fairly compensated with life-changing amounts of equity. That's just the value they bring. They're anti-capitalism man! They just voted in favour of more taxes so that they don't have to see as many homeless while they wait for the company bus to take them from their company-issued container home to the company campus. They don't live to work like those Wall Street drones. They're not cocaine-infused Wall Street Dude Bros! They're micro-dosing LSD and Adderall because they're performance hacking - can't you see the difference? It's totally not like Wall Street. Have you not seen the map? It's California man. West coast is the best coast!
- Swizec 8y ago
  This is the best comment I ever read
- mindgam3 8y ago
  “It's not that Wall Street will take over. It's that Silicon Valley has become Wall Street but it doesn't realize it yet“ 1000x yes. This is exactly what happened. An entire generation of impressionable youngsters, essentially brainwashed into believing to the depths of their soul that Silicon Valley is a utopian meritocracy, composed solely of founders out there saving the world by exploiting zero day vulnerabilities in the individual/social/collective/national psyche. Like a burning-man-gone wrong style acid trip, where everything starts out peachy and Friendly and then somehow, imperceptibly, so slowly that you never even saw it coming until it was far too late, the place for your friends turns into the circus, like LinkedIn but even more shameless self promotion and rampant fakery, and one day you wake and realize to your horror that real people’s lives are being destroyed due to this tone-deaf technology juggernaut. Shifts in global politics. Bullying. Teen suicides. Cognitive bias amplified by the collective intelligence of some of the greatest and most misguided minds of our generation, all united behind their leader’s vision of a world of programmable social interactions, backed by an absolutely ruthless win at all costs mentality. The war on reality has begun, people. It’s actually been going on for the last 14 years, but the masses are finally starting to pick up on it. Facebook employees: it’s time to pick a side and engage in some public collective action like your frenemies at Google. The #techlash is upon us. Ethics is coming back into fashion. Take a stand. Not only will it help save the world, for real this time, it will look good on a resume.
nikofeyn 8y ago
it is weird to me that you imply facebook and google have morals in your comparison to the amoral wall street. what is stranger to me is that i agree, but only because i believe facebook and google to have distorted or warped moralities. i think they truly believe they are making the world a better place, but i hold the opinion they both have contributed a net negative on society at large. to me, amorality is preferable over warped morality. it is clear what wall street wants: money. it isn’t clear to me what facebook and google actually want. i fear they strive for control.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  I can't buy into the idea that these companies have contributed a net negative to society. Their existence has vastly improved communication over the internet for billions of people. Weighed against their cons, I still think it's a net positive.
  - uep 8y ago
    Although it's kind of silly trying to make these judgements, I'd say Google has been a net-positive, Facebook is a little murkier. Google's net positive has almost certainly been search. I believe this has probably had a huge net-productivity improvement across the world. I don't even use their search engine anymore, but they started the modern search engine and made a great deal of information more easy to find. I don't think they've improved communication otherwise. I don't believe Gmail or Hangouts have improved communication. I don't think buying Android and mostly giving the OS away has been a net-positive either. Facebook is much harder to say. They've definitely connected many, many people via their service, but it has also been shown that the more someone uses Facebook the less happy they are. Now, this could easily be conflating causation with correlation (sad people use Facebook more), but they've also been caught doing bad things. It's fun to think about, but there are so many what-ifs. How long would it have been before modern search came about without Google? If we had a federation of smaller social networks, would that have limited the damage that a single company could have done?

WhitneyLand 8y ago

Say you founded a company tomorrow which started rocketing on unicorn tracjectory, but wanted to do better. What words or actions could you invoke that would allow it to be distinguished from what some previously friendly sounding companies said or did during their ascent?

airstrike 8y ago
D̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶e̶v̶i̶l̶
toomuchtodo 8y ago
"We welcome and will assist in the implementation of regulation and oversight by an independent entity with the authority to sanction us, with penalties up to and including the dissolution of our company and pursuing company officers directly". Very similar to the game theory experiment of having a piece of cake to cut: one person gets to cut, the other person gets to pick the piece they want. You have to handcuff yourself to doing the right thing. Your decisions about "being evil" then become easy; you simply can't pick those paths knowing you've locked in the consequences.
SwellJoe 8y ago
"Make most of your money from something other than advertising." But, that doesn't account for Amazon who have become (or were always?) evil in their own special ways.
- 0003 8y ago
  Even so, https://advertising.amazon.com/ https://advertising.amazon.com/
opportune 8y ago
I think the only way to stay true to a well-meaning mission statement is to not go public, but that’s kind of a non-starter for most VC backed companies. And even if you do stay private for a long time, the death/departure/retirement of the founders would be likely to result in acquisition either by PE/a public company or preempt an IPO

hkyeti 8y ago

There are large companies run ethically. eg patagonia, follow your heart etc It all comes back to the leader and culture they set...

smt88 8y ago
Patagonia isn’t that large, and it’s famous as an exception to the rule. There are so few truly ethical companies that it’s hard to come up with any that have no asterisk next to the name.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Costco?
- lozaning 8y ago
  Interface, Inc. the company that likely makes the carpet your chair is on right now if you're in A class office space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface,_Inc.
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
Quite. I think it comes down to having founders who define changing the world as "better for all" rather than simply "obscene amounts of money for us". Even if they sell up later the hollowing of a formerly ethical brand under a multi-national often means it stops performing. We seem to be in a gilded age of no consequences currently. Money, and absurd amounts of it, seems to be the be all and end all of everything. There have been times where philanthropic founders and industrialists have thrived. There can easily be another. Hopefully we can get it without need of pitchforks, but that seems like an evens bet right now.

mygo 8y ago

How often do companies patent things just so that they don't go to market? For example even if they have no intentions to use it, they know that their competitors might, so they patent it so that their competitors can't, and thus no one can? Does this happen? I see patents all the time that never made it to market, so I guess it's plausible. But is it even legal to patent something without intent to bring it to market?

deytempo 8y ago
With closed source software companies, it really doesn’t matter if they infringe on a patent like this because no one can prove they are doing it without a full code audit

kumarvvr 8y ago

> I knew so many people who worked at those places, and I had such positive feelings about their ethical core... Even one bad actor, at the right position and power, can make the ethical values of thousands of developers irrelevant until it's too late. I often wonder about companies that are filled with ordinary folks, companies that do real nasty stuff. Like say Nestle, or even Enron. How do normal, ethical people get by in these companies. Do big companies and corporate culture destroy the inherent compassion and empathy in people?