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Each truly international product has hundreds, if not thousands policies like this codified. How to render border between India and Pakistan, Russia and Ukraine
by vl 7y ago
Each truly international product has hundreds, if not thousands policies like this codified. How to render border between India and Pakistan, Russia and Ukraine, what words to exclude from dictionaries and suspend in auto-suggest, etc.
For engineer it’s just another rule, they get update like “locale X passed the law to do Y, update software to comply”. It’s not their job to do legal or ethical evaluations, and it’s unreasonable to expect it from them.
If you think it’s obvious, and any engineer should be well-equipped to do so, there is a story from inside the Big G. When Google employees had a protest-du-jour about Google planning to implement restricted version of search in China, it turned out that many Google employees of Chinese descent actually supported implemented restricted search in China arguing that restricted search is better than no search. Now, if you were an internatialization engineer working on restricting features, how would you evaluate claims of both groups and is it your responsibility to do so?
- PowerfulWizard 7y agoAs the old saying goes, you don't create a HideTaiwan() function, you create a HideCountry() function and require Taiwan to be provided as a parameter.