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I wonder why someone who knows how to do any of that, would think it is a good idea or go along with implementing that. The shitbirds who actually want to do th
by gnu8 7y ago
I wonder why someone who knows how to do any of that, would think it is a good idea or go along with implementing that. The shitbirds who actually want to do this type of thing are not smart enough to execute it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- etaioinshrdlu 7y agoTo make money on analytics?
- jdironman 7y agoHe is speaking of the developers and engineers who have the technical expertise and should know it's a bad idea but still agree to implement it regardless of their moral compass.
- gilrain 7y agoCapitalism requires corruption of everyone.
- afiori 7y agoThere are many different kinds of capitalism
- tidepod12 7y agoWhy the implication that devs/engineers who have such technical expertise "know it's a bad idea"? There are plenty of devs and engineers who would have no moral issue with mass data collection and analytics. You don't magically become a paragon of morality just because you got a CS degree. Just ask Zuckerberg.
- Trisell 7y agoI’m working at a company and they want to do a massive amount of logging from our companies IOS app. Basically log everything in the name of security. I made the statement today what does legal think about the data we would be now storing? It has user locations, gps coordinates, all the other fun stuff you can get from a users phone. They all looked at me like I was crazy for even asking that question. And I don’t think a single person in the room the devs included had even though about the personal data we were going to be able to collect. And if we SHOULD be collecting it.
- janvidar 7y agoIf your company does business in the EU, or has users within the EU then the GDPR kicks in. The legal department would care about that.
- mulmen 7y agoTo be fair Zuckerberg didn’t get a CS degree. Your point still stands of course.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoTo be even more fair, I feel pretty sure Zuckerberg would be happy to agree that "you don't magically become a paragon of morality just because you got a CS degree".
- mulmen 7y agoI’m not sure why anyone cares about Zuckerberg’s opinions on morality. The point that a CS degree does not impart a higher moral code is not controversial. My comment only pointed out that Zuckerberg was a bad example because he doesn’t have a CS degree.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoAnd my comment pointed out that your parent comment didn't present Zuckerberg as an example, but as a source of support. (Does that make sense? No, he'd make more sense as an example. But that's not what the comment said.)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tiew9Vii 7y agoI've worked on questionable projects at a big telecom. I refuse to run ISP provided modems/routers at home, i refuse to use my isps dns and use dns-tls etc etc based on what i have seen. The devs have often said things bad idea and raise concerns unfortunately you generally have no power, the decision to implement something is made above you. Generally the people making the decisions know things are questionable but you need to make your KPIs / get promoted / earn more money for the company etc etc. If you don't follow a direct order and refuse to work on a piece of work in reality you will be fired. That leaves you with the option of looking for a new job yourself or being forced to find a new job as you was kicked out. While some people can take the moral highground, outright refuse and resign, others have to deal with life issues such as paying the bills and supporting a family which makes it extremely hard to pick a fight refusing to do something. We do not like to think it but we are just another cog in the wheel and dispensable.
- carokann 7y agoNice point. I've been considering changing my router for a while out of privacy concerns. Do you have a suggestion? I was wondering whether i could use my raspberry pi 3b+ for it.
- gog 7y agoI've been using Mikrotiks for over a decade, they just work and are pretty cheap. They do require you to know a little bit more about networking then the regular, end user oriented, routers. Only negative I would mention is that some things are a little bit harder to setup, like a VPN for example (and it doesn't support OpenVPN over UDP).
- paganel 7y agoGoogle and FB are doing the same thing with their data (and worse) and the engineers they employ don’t seem to care that much, even though they are pretty smart.
- CameronNemo 7y agoSeriously browse through the who's hiring thread... some engineers may see it as an easy way to get their foot in the door in the data analytics industry. Hopefully they just focus on bettering their portfolio.
- xwdv 7y agoPersonally I have absolutely zero qualms with implementing any system to collect mass analytics. I just don’t give a shit, at these scales users are cattle.
- GrayTextIsTruth 7y agogiven the volume of data, i don't care as much on an individual level since each person is a drop in an ocean, but knowledge is power, and this is too much knowledge for ISPs, advertisers, and government agencies.
- _jal 7y agoEngineers are people who come in all ethical flavors. I used to know one whom I consider evil, in the actively, knowingly malicious sense. I've known a whole lot more who generally just don't think about these questions. Thinking knowledge, intelligence or capability correlates with ethics is a category error.
- frio 7y agoIt's more an industry error, I suspect. The University I went to forced all the Software Engineers to do some of the traditional Engineering papers, including courses on ethics. The professional institute that accredits the University's ability to call their course an Engineering course required those courses. Courses like that don't fix unethical people, but they make the rest of us aware that ethical concerns exist. Software/Computer Science is such a young discipline that, industry-wide, I don't think we've learnt that one from the other industries yet.
- tidepod12 7y agoI question the amount that such ethics courses actually help. Business majors have had ethics courses for as long as I can imagine, and yet you don't have to go far on HN (even in this very thread) before you see people saying business majors are unethical. The bigger problem, IMO, is that many tech companies have started handing out kool-aid that data collection and analytics is ethical. They justify it by saying that it helps people avoid spam, or get better advertisements, or whatever, and then the engineers think they are being ethical and beneficial to society by building these systems.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago> Business majors have had ethics courses for as long as I can imagine I took a business ethics course in undergrad, and it was surprising how many students advocated all sorts of (to me) aberrant ethical views. (Note I’m pretty traditional, morally speaking. The environment was strongly postmodern, and this was before all the modern insanity about “free speech is bad because some people say bad/offensive things”.) Not that I minded personally, but it was a strong lesson to me that teaching people categories and how to think won’t give them a desire to respect any particular brand of morality.
- ridaj 7y agoIn countries or locations with a nearly nonexistent tech industry, your employment options as a software engineer may be limited to that kind of crap
- mtgx 7y agoIt's probably not for them: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/nsa-att-intercept-surveillance/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/nsa-att-intercept-surveill...
- dspillett 7y agoThere are environments where traffic must be logged for regulatory or other legal reasons, so the technique and code to implement it is not universally malicious. Implementing the mis-feature on a public ISP will be done by people who think the matter isn't worth risking their job by taking a stand on, and just saying no once the decision has been made several levels above their rank won't help anyone because if they don't implement the feature their replacement will.
- ryanlol 7y agoWhat do you mean? There's a whole genre of reasonably talented morally bankrupt "whitehats" building passivedns mass surveillance infrastructure. Cisco collects more than 24TB of DNS query data every day. Here's a Cisco employee demonstrating the kinds of horrifying analytics they perform on this data https://www.first.org/resources/papers/conf2018/Mahjoub-Dhia_FIRST_20180712.pdf https://www.first.org/resources/papers/conf2018/Mahjoub-Dhia...
- BurnGpuBurn 7y agoWow, that is amazing. Is Cisco telling their clients they're doing this? That's a lot of root servers too.
- ryanlol 7y agoThis surveillance is mostly targeted at residential users. I’m sure they mention this in some opendns legalese, but they definitely don’t openly advertise this.
- ur-whale 7y ago> I wonder why someone who knows how to do any of that, would think it is a good idea or go along with implementing that The age-old answer: money.
- flukus 7y ago> I wonder why someone who knows how to do any of that, would think it is a good idea or go along with implementing that Modern silicon valley is built off people implementing similar pervasive tracking, without it there is no google, facebook and many other startups. Not to mention online newspapers and everyone who makes money indirectly from the tracking. I agree it's a bad thing, but that ship sailed long ago and things like the GDPR are only just starting to bring it back.
- boomlinde 7y agoThe nasty dilemma that capitalism poses is that of "take the moral high ground" vs "know whether I'll afford rent next month". It's not your moral compass that determines your worth to society, it's how much people are willing to pay you for your work. If they aren't, you are worth so little to society that you may be out of a home. Developers may be in a pretty sweet situation, generally, but if you don't have money saved or another job lined up you don't have much choice. I also think that people are great at finding excuses for what we're doing. I've read somewhere about a hypothesis that conscious thought is mostly just intellectual justification for subconscious urges.