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I had a freelance gig, a very long time ago, to create a full-screen ad takeover for one of the UK's better known "lads' mags" (now defunct, I think). I hate a

I had a freelance gig, a very long time ago, to create a full-screen ad takeover for one of the UK's better known "lads' mags" (now defunct, I think). I hate ads and I hate those sorts of magazines, and I hate ruining people's browsing experiences. Yuck. When I was working as a permanent employee for an agency, I created two games for the UK's lottery operator. They both had quite intricate rules to snare and addict the people playing them (let's just say that these games are anything but a game of chance). I felt a constant sense of disgust as I was doing it, though it was a moderately interesting technical challenge. However, I have had the opportunity as a consultant several times to do work for gambling companies (and also for Camelot again!), and I have turned all of these down and made it extremely clear I was doing so for ethical reasons. I was once asked by a client if we could capture people's email addresses in a sign-up form even if they didn't hit submit, so we could email them later. I am still quite proud of my response, which was, "Yes, we absolutely can! No, we absolutely won't help you do that!"

mathewsanders 8y ago
Near the beginning of my career (~15 years ago) I was working at an agency for a lottery operator that was allowed to start online gaming and buying tickets for the physical lottery online. They had a really great public mission about “responsible gaming” but during one meeting with some execs they let slip that it was all just a joke for them and they didn’t care as long as they got the ticket sales. It made me feel sick, and I started being a bit uncoorporative on the project until my manager switched me into another project. So I regret the time I worked in that, and also for being a bit of an asshole on the project instead of just telling my manager I had a problem with that client.
- yboris 8y ago
  There may be moral reasons in favor of accepting a job that requires unethical behavior so that you can perform it poorly, so as to sabotage the progress. An actual example is of Oskar Schindler (if I recall correctly) whose munition factories in Germany produced faulty munitions during World War II.
  - cyphar 8y ago
    Oskar Schindler was a Nazi party member who owned an ammunitions factory and saved 1200 Jewish people in Nazi Germany (the movie Schindler's List was based on his life story), but I couldn't find any mention of him sabotaging his own wares. I would imagine this would've led to more suspicion on his factory, where he secretly employed many Jewish workers illegally.
    - sjcsjc 8y ago
      >> sabotaging his own wares The movie implies that he did so: "Stern, if this factory ever produces a shell that can actually be fired... I'll be very unhappy." https://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Schindler's-List.html https://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Schindler's-List.html
      - abecedarius 8y ago
        It's a great movie, but I wouldn't depend on it alone for a fact like that. The Lives of Others, another serious and moving film, shows the protagonist solo-monitoring a dissident in order to not report the latter's dissidence. The Stasi required its spies to work in pairs to plug that specific vulnerability. This was crucial to the plot and gave people a false idea of what resistance to a then-modern tyranny is like. (Disclaimer: actual East German dissidents have approved of the movie, while I'm just a guy with an opinion.)
  - alexis_fr 8y ago
    Oskar Schindler, from the movie The List of Schindler? He’s my idol, the guy rescues 1200 jews from the Holocaust, and still cries at the end (of the movie) because he could have sold his shoes and bribed one more assistant.
  - hprotagonist 8y ago
    there’s very strong circumstantial evidence that heisenberg pulled a similar trick and slow-rolled the nazis into not developing a nuclear program. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/private-heisenberg-absent-bomb/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/private-heisenbe...
- BurnGpuBurn 8y ago
  Reminds me of ads I see when I watch Formula1 on UK Sky television, where a company uses the oxymoronic slogan "We bet responsibly, at Bet365!". It's amazing to see the length these companies will go through to present their product as just an innocent entertainment community where responsibility and morals are held in high esteem, and at the same time using every possible psychological trick in the book to hook their users.
  - toyg 8y ago
    Bet365 owner Denise Coates was in the news just today[1] (although technically it's old news), for earning £265m only last year. That's a lot of "responsibility". [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/21/bet365-denise-coates-paid-herself-an-obscene-265m-in-2017 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/21/bet365-deni...
EdgarVerona 8y ago
Good on you for putting your foot down! You not only learned from your past experience, but you also are setting a good example for other software engineers who may not be thinking about their ethical duties. People entering the industry need to be thinking about the consequences of the products we make, and I feel like that's something that can be led in part by the visible example of experienced engineers like yourself - ones who have experienced being used for a harmful end and now are willing to both speak up and stand against it happening to them again. I know I needed this very same wake up call when I was a much younger engineer. I feel shame every time I speak about my involvement in harmful products and my cowardice in the moment, but that shame also reminds me of how important it is to talk about it, to try and make sure other engineers think about these duties that are so easily overlooked. And to remind myself that I don't ever want to be in that situation again.
dwild 8y ago
>They both had quite intricate rules to snare and addict the people playing them (let's just say that these games are anything but a game of chance). I'm from Quebec and here it's Loto-Québec that operate the lottery. They have games on their online platform too, I had some fun on there a few time, but once I read the actual rule and learned that the dice doesn't follow the real probability... that's just freaking wrong. It's a thing to hide probabilities, it's a whole other ballgame to fake them.
ashrk 8y ago
> I was once asked by a client if we could capture people's email addresses in a sign-up form even if they didn't hit submit, so we could email them later. I am still quite proud of my response, which was, "Yes, we absolutely can! No, we absolutely won't help you do that!" 1) letting Javascript initiate network connections without explicit user interaction with a narrow set of elements (say, a submit button) was a mistake. 2) not having a browser-provided summary of the data a form is about to submit before it's transmitted was a mistake. Basically letting Javascript escape from a little box of tightly-scoped input validation handling and maybe defining sort functions for tables was a mistake.
- monsieurbanana 8y ago
  It's hard to even wrap my mind about the consequences of those limitations though. The web as we know today would not exist, hell the world would be a different place without facebook and all the other social networks. And something would replace them, and the same problems would happen because the fundamental problem is not caused by some technological decisions, but stems from human nature.
  - ashrk 8y ago
    HTML stagnated badly and this was exacerbated by the "we can just let Javascript and/or CSS handle it" effect. With a less-free Javascript it'd have been necessary to add things like sortable tables and better form elements to HTML itself. Frames might have been improved to fix the various known problems with them, rather than abandoned. Social networks could still exist just fine and, judging from how things like Basic HTML Gmail or Craigslist or HN compare to more "advanced" websites, would have performed a whole lot better. That a cross-platform application distribution platform might have arisen anyway is beside the point. It'd have been nice to keep that separate from the locked-down hypertext platform that keeps the user in control. We've lost the latter in gaining the former, rather than having both. [EDIT] I'm with you on humans being the problem over technology in general, but in this particular case I think there were technical reasons that Web 1.0 was destroyed in the creation of Web 2.0 and we were left with one crappy platform that constantly betrays and tricks its users rather than two, at least one of which isn't capable of betraying its users the way this one does. We're where we are because no-one treated Javascript (or anything else with its capabilities and liberties in the browser) as the fundamentally terrible idea and permanent trust-ruiner that it was. It's inherently and unavoidably a security disaster for the Web, not in terms of secure communication between client and server or whatever, but in terms of practical personal security for the users and their data.

mathewsanders 8y ago

Near the beginning of my career (~15 years ago) I was working at an agency for a lottery operator that was allowed to start online gaming and buying tickets for the physical lottery online. They had a really great public mission about “responsible gaming” but during one meeting with some execs they let slip that it was all just a joke for them and they didn’t care as long as they got the ticket sales. It made me feel sick, and I started being a bit uncoorporative on the project until my manager switched me into another project. So I regret the time I worked in that, and also for being a bit of an asshole on the project instead of just telling my manager I had a problem with that client.

yboris 8y ago
There may be moral reasons in favor of accepting a job that requires unethical behavior so that you can perform it poorly, so as to sabotage the progress. An actual example is of Oskar Schindler (if I recall correctly) whose munition factories in Germany produced faulty munitions during World War II.
- cyphar 8y ago
  Oskar Schindler was a Nazi party member who owned an ammunitions factory and saved 1200 Jewish people in Nazi Germany (the movie Schindler's List was based on his life story), but I couldn't find any mention of him sabotaging his own wares. I would imagine this would've led to more suspicion on his factory, where he secretly employed many Jewish workers illegally.
  - sjcsjc 8y ago
    >> sabotaging his own wares The movie implies that he did so: "Stern, if this factory ever produces a shell that can actually be fired... I'll be very unhappy." https://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Schindler's-List.html https://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Schindler's-List.html
    - abecedarius 8y ago
      It's a great movie, but I wouldn't depend on it alone for a fact like that. The Lives of Others, another serious and moving film, shows the protagonist solo-monitoring a dissident in order to not report the latter's dissidence. The Stasi required its spies to work in pairs to plug that specific vulnerability. This was crucial to the plot and gave people a false idea of what resistance to a then-modern tyranny is like. (Disclaimer: actual East German dissidents have approved of the movie, while I'm just a guy with an opinion.)
- alexis_fr 8y ago
  Oskar Schindler, from the movie The List of Schindler? He’s my idol, the guy rescues 1200 jews from the Holocaust, and still cries at the end (of the movie) because he could have sold his shoes and bribed one more assistant.
- hprotagonist 8y ago
  there’s very strong circumstantial evidence that heisenberg pulled a similar trick and slow-rolled the nazis into not developing a nuclear program. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/private-heisenberg-absent-bomb/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/private-heisenbe...
BurnGpuBurn 8y ago
Reminds me of ads I see when I watch Formula1 on UK Sky television, where a company uses the oxymoronic slogan "We bet responsibly, at Bet365!". It's amazing to see the length these companies will go through to present their product as just an innocent entertainment community where responsibility and morals are held in high esteem, and at the same time using every possible psychological trick in the book to hook their users.
- toyg 8y ago
  Bet365 owner Denise Coates was in the news just today[1] (although technically it's old news), for earning £265m only last year. That's a lot of "responsibility". [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/21/bet365-denise-coates-paid-herself-an-obscene-265m-in-2017 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/21/bet365-deni...

EdgarVerona 8y ago

Good on you for putting your foot down! You not only learned from your past experience, but you also are setting a good example for other software engineers who may not be thinking about their ethical duties. People entering the industry need to be thinking about the consequences of the products we make, and I feel like that's something that can be led in part by the visible example of experienced engineers like yourself - ones who have experienced being used for a harmful end and now are willing to both speak up and stand against it happening to them again. I know I needed this very same wake up call when I was a much younger engineer. I feel shame every time I speak about my involvement in harmful products and my cowardice in the moment, but that shame also reminds me of how important it is to talk about it, to try and make sure other engineers think about these duties that are so easily overlooked. And to remind myself that I don't ever want to be in that situation again.

dwild 8y ago

>They both had quite intricate rules to snare and addict the people playing them (let's just say that these games are anything but a game of chance). I'm from Quebec and here it's Loto-Québec that operate the lottery. They have games on their online platform too, I had some fun on there a few time, but once I read the actual rule and learned that the dice doesn't follow the real probability... that's just freaking wrong. It's a thing to hide probabilities, it's a whole other ballgame to fake them.

ashrk 8y ago

> I was once asked by a client if we could capture people's email addresses in a sign-up form even if they didn't hit submit, so we could email them later. I am still quite proud of my response, which was, "Yes, we absolutely can! No, we absolutely won't help you do that!" 1) letting Javascript initiate network connections without explicit user interaction with a narrow set of elements (say, a submit button) was a mistake. 2) not having a browser-provided summary of the data a form is about to submit before it's transmitted was a mistake. Basically letting Javascript escape from a little box of tightly-scoped input validation handling and maybe defining sort functions for tables was a mistake.

monsieurbanana 8y ago
It's hard to even wrap my mind about the consequences of those limitations though. The web as we know today would not exist, hell the world would be a different place without facebook and all the other social networks. And something would replace them, and the same problems would happen because the fundamental problem is not caused by some technological decisions, but stems from human nature.
- ashrk 8y ago
  HTML stagnated badly and this was exacerbated by the "we can just let Javascript and/or CSS handle it" effect. With a less-free Javascript it'd have been necessary to add things like sortable tables and better form elements to HTML itself. Frames might have been improved to fix the various known problems with them, rather than abandoned. Social networks could still exist just fine and, judging from how things like Basic HTML Gmail or Craigslist or HN compare to more "advanced" websites, would have performed a whole lot better. That a cross-platform application distribution platform might have arisen anyway is beside the point. It'd have been nice to keep that separate from the locked-down hypertext platform that keeps the user in control. We've lost the latter in gaining the former, rather than having both. [EDIT] I'm with you on humans being the problem over technology in general, but in this particular case I think there were technical reasons that Web 1.0 was destroyed in the creation of Web 2.0 and we were left with one crappy platform that constantly betrays and tricks its users rather than two, at least one of which isn't capable of betraying its users the way this one does. We're where we are because no-one treated Javascript (or anything else with its capabilities and liberties in the browser) as the fundamentally terrible idea and permanent trust-ruiner that it was. It's inherently and unavoidably a security disaster for the Web, not in terms of secure communication between client and server or whatever, but in terms of practical personal security for the users and their data.