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Imagine being asked by your boss to implement such a thing and actually doing it. How spineless and unethical would you have to be to even consider following su
by Lariscus 6y ago
Imagine being asked by your boss to implement such a thing and actually doing it. How spineless and unethical would you have to be to even consider following such an order.
- h3cate 6y agoI imagine tools like this would most likely come out of military companies such as Lockheed and Raytheon. Surprised to hear it coming out of Apple
- oh_sigh 6y agoYou're assuming the speculation is the actual intent. What if it was something more benign, like allowing it to turn off cameras in a nuclear power plant or secure facilities or something like that.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 3wolf 6y agoThey'd probably take the Volkswagen strategy: Team A builds a feature that detects when the device is in a localized area. (This already exists) Team B builds a feature that disables the camera. (I could see this being a parental control) Both features are reasonable by themselves. It's when they are combined that they become an issue. The trick is that Teams A and B don't know of each other's existence.
- enitihas 6y agoSomeone would have to add their integrations though. The features won't be joined magically together.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoThere are enough qualified amoral mercenary devs out there who would be willing to do it - and keep quiet about it.
- storedbox 6y agoI'm sure they can find at least one willing asshole.
- loltyler1 6y agog e n i u s I had a similar idea about bioweapons the other day
- fiblye 6y agoThere are also countless people who’d gladly knowingly sign up to implement such a feature. No need to try some roundabout way when all you need to do is feel out the political leanings of a couple guys in the office then recruit them for a secret project.
- PappaPatat 6y agoTIL the expression "the Volkswagen strategy" and I love it. Thanks, I'll be using that.
- lisper 6y agoIf it was a choice between following the order and being out of a job? Not very, particularly since your sacrifice would almost certainly be in vain.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoDepends on how valuable you are. I know people at Google who transferred internally fairly painlessly (i.e. the abridged loop) when they told their skip-levels they were uncomfortable with their work.
- Lariscus 6y agoThen the person in question is 'spineless and unethical' and shares a responsibility for the results of their labour. 'Just following orders' does not absolve them from their responsibilities to their community. That their sacrifice might be in vain is a separate issue that should be, in my opinion, addressed by making education in ethics a mandatory part of the curriculum of all engineering degrees.
- mr_spothawk 6y agoimagine being able to turn your boss over to authorities and trusting that you wouldn't be retaliated against.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- aspenmayer 6y agoWhat would you turn them in for? To whom would you report them? Would you quit or continue working at that place? Abuse of authority? Moral or ethical code violations? Those sound more like in-house problems with in-house HR and legal team solutions, which usually favor the bosses over the whistleblowing workers.
- wolfram74 6y agoHow would you go about implementing the feature so that it passes inspection but completely fails in the field? It's like a high stakes game of TDD-golf.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alexashka 6y agoAbout as spineless and unethical as every other human being. You know how we have some people worth billions and simultaneously people literally digging through garbage for food? That's not an accident, it's a constant built into this species, unless we start doing some eugenics, preventing idiots from breeding, which'll take far longer than your lifetime to come into effect. You interested in attempting to improve this species your whole life, getting nothing but shit for it and dying without seeing any fruits of your labor? I'm not and neither is anyone else who's not a fundamentalist idiot. So yes, spineless and unethical is everyday reality. If you don't want to deal with it, go into academia or get a high paying job. Once you spend some time around people who know how to behave themselves, you'll be the one asking for a police state to protect you from the masses upsetting your privileged existence. Funny how that works :) What do you think America and Europe are, but military states preventing the rest of the world from invading their cushy way of life? How awful right? Let's open all borders and have freedom for everyone. Right, alright then.
- Lariscus 6y agoAre you actually arguing for eugenics?
- alexashka 6y agoNo. I'm saying that anyone who gasps at how "unethical" other human beings are, wants eugenics, unless they're a real idiot who can't connect the dots to see that the only way to "fix" unethical behaviour is eugenics. I should say, most people who use the word "unethical" are of the real idiot variety. Arriving at eugenics as a potential solution to most of people's problems should automatically grant you a million dollars because it indicates interest in other people's well being and independent thought. Arriving at the attempt at eugenics being a really bad idea should land you another ten million, so that you can spend the rest of your life explaining to those behind you, why ideas that seem too good to be true, are too good to be true, so that we don't get another fundamentalist idiot like Hitler or Stalin in power.
- Lariscus 6y ago
- chrismcb 6y agoAlmost anything can have legitamate reasons. You can kill someone with a hammer, doesn't make it unethical to make a hammer. I don't know why you woukd have a reason to turn off a camera. What I'm saying is, it doesn't necessarily mean the programmers are unethical or evil.