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One can also understand that you think certain practices are unethical, and disagree.
by closeparen 8y ago
One can also understand that you think certain practices are unethical, and disagree.
- luckylion 8y agoSure, I'm not claiming to be an authority on ethics here. It's just my experience that people aren't unsure of what's ethical and what's not, they just ignore their knowledge about ethics because it gets them what they want. That cannot be solved by making them more aware of ethics - they already are aware. Telling a pyromaniac about the dangers of accidentally setting a building on fire won't make him not start fires.
- closeparen 8y agoIt is not hard to find proprietary software developers who routinely query user data for debugging and product analytics. I’ll posit that almost none of them find this inherently unethical, though they probably understand that Stallman does. There are of course some bright lines, like looking up people you personally know, which norms and security auditing heavily deter. But the general concept? Not at all. The HN consensus is not the industry consensus. I mean look at the Hadoop community. What do you think is in those warehouses? The weather? No. Records of user interactions.