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I accidentally built a spying app
- LeonB 6y agoThinking “how can this technology be used by stalkers, harassers, abusive partners” and so forth is something I didn’t think about when I was young, but always consider now. Having more diverse voices in your team and in your life is a big part of getting better at this stuff.
- PradeetPatel 6y agoWhat are some things a start up founder can do to foster a culture of diversity and inclusivety?
- fareesh 6y agoFocus on diversity of perspective as opposed to superficial diversity. For example, a second generation Taiwanese American can bring a very different perspective from that of a Taiwanese immigrant. The latter is more likely to bring something unique to the table.
- jradd 6y agoi just wanted to save this here. good point.
- jlgaddis 6y agoFortunately, HN has a feature to allow you to do that without polluting threads with useless comments: just click on the "timestamp" of the comment (next to the username) and then click on "favorite". In the future, you can view all of your "favorite" comments from your profile page (click on your username in the top-rigtht of the page). As an added bonus, it's much easier than having to sift through your own comments to find that one specific thread you're looking for.
- anoncake 6y agoAlso, browsers have bookmark features.
- LeonB 6y agoFully agree. Deep diversity is better than superficial diversity. But if you’re starting from a position with almost no diversity even seemingly “superficial” measures can help you move forward. You can’t turn around and tick a box and say “well that’s diversity taken care of!” But it’s a step on the journey. (And the journey isn’t “being diverse” it’s “making good things that aren’t accidentally riddled with blind sides”)
- gibolt 6y agoHire outside your bubble. Hire someone from non-elite schools who have amazing/interesting projects or clear success in spite of struggles or poor odds.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alacombe 6y agoDon't. Don't go woke, don't get broke.
- tomc1985 6y agoFavor people that don't fit your mold. Hang out with people that aren't your usual group. Hang out in an underground community (not literally underground, more like subcultures)
- ArnoVW 6y agoIn the last 25 years I've experienced the voyage from a staff count of 6 to a staff count of 100 three times in different companies (service provider, professional services, software editor). Your first hires determine largely your culture. The people that end up creating teams, and that eventually hire and influence people themselves, make your culture.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y agoPerhaps care less about “culture fit” in hiring? If you only hire people who think the way you do, the results are obviously not diverse.
- Yetanfou 6y agoMake sure to include diversity of opinion in your hiring criteria so as to avoid creating a bubble. This is true diversity as opposed to identity-based "diversity". Make sure to get people who themselves are open for true diversity as well, otherwise you risk creating factions inside your company.
- drdeadringer 6y agoSo far it looks like "Don't Hire Who Drinks Your Kool-Aid". Kool-Aid is good for some of your group. The opposite is also good for your group.
- terracatta 6y agoOne time a friend and I built an app for a weekend hackathon competition called Rails Rumble. At the time (2010), link shortening services were all the rage, but they were being used to obfuscate malware links. To fight this, we wanted to create a link shortening service that couldn't be used for malware. Instead of redirecting to a webpage, it broke the page apart into its core elements so you could see what it was about before you visited it. If the site had photos, we even put them into a nice looking image gallery that you could peruse. We finished the project in 72 hours and got an honorable mention for the competition, but we didn't win. A month later, our free server hosting we were given for the competition was about to expire. I logged in to spin the whole thing down. Poking around the DB a bit, I realized our little weekend project had thousands of links shortened and the traffic for the site was actually exceeding the limits of the server. Looking at the URLs, I realized they all had one thing in common; they were all porn sites. The simple inclusion of the image gallery had inadvertently created a porn scraping service. It was like your browser's reader view, but perfect for adult sites! It was so obvious in retrospect, but sometimes in your rush to build an idea, you can be completely blind to its true nature. This time it was amusing, but the next time it could be dangerous, and the lesson always stuck with me.
- wolco2 6y agoDid you ever open source the project? I can see it being useful in a more limited context.
- Scoundreller 6y agoReminds me of Firefox Send. Found myself in a situation needing it a few weeks ago and was like, ugh, what do I do now.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoI swear Mozilla misses out on a ton of opportunities to make money and fund MDN / Firefox properly. They need to stop making free services, and charge money for services that will fund the open source projects in their foundation, that or finally donate it to a real org that will actually maintain the projects in question.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoThis is almost like "think of the children" in regards to enabling users to do stuff with their own phone. Yes, if you know how to jailbreak an iPhone and are able to have the other person use the phone, you can spy on them. You are already "on the other side of the airtight hatch". I don't think there are technical solutions to having physical control of a person and their phone. Many times tech people want to imaging a perfect tech solution to a problem, but many times you need legal and social solutions.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoI don't see how this is "think of the children"? The point is that we need to be cognizant of how the things we build can be (ab)used.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoIt’s this thinking about how things can be abused that is behind calls to ban encryption or for ISPs to be filtered, or for Torrents to be banned. Every powerful tool can be abused. In fact, the more powerful it is, the more it can be abused. The abuse of the tool is the responsibility of the person abusing it. We don’t require baseball bat or hammer manufacturers to think about how their product can be abused, even though baseball bats and hammers have been used to murder people before.
- klyrs 6y ago> It’s this thinking about how things can be abused that is behind calls to ban encryption or for ISPs to be filtered, or for Torrents to be banned. You skipped the slippery slope and went straight to the scariest outcome. That isn't healthy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
- ViViDboarder 6y agoIs someone saying tools shouldn’t be made? It’s good for engineers to think about how tools they make could be abused to mitigate damage. In a case like this, the developer could have added some periodic notification to the device or require the device user to rotate a code or reauth with the service periodically to limit abuse. Can you think of a modification like that you could implement on a baseball bat? Of course not. Is merely a straw man.
- m463 6y agoand to this day you can't export your imessages in any official way.
- imperfect_blue 6y agoYou can run people over with cars, electrocute them with electricity. This doesn't mean we should never have built cars or generators. The more powerful and impactful something is, the greater the potential for abuse. You don't even need that something to be abused - bad people benefited from electricity just as much as good people. This doesn't mean we should stop building powerful and impactful things, or think of ways to restrict them such that only the "good guys" can benefit.
- Sebguer 6y agoYou absolutely should think about the ways the things you create can be used to harm other people, and take steps to mitigate that.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoSo you only buy foam bats and rubber mallets since they have less potential to hurt people?
- Sebguer 6y agoI mean, I do own a rubber mallet - it's quite good for what it does! But, no, I would buy a tool that fits my purpose. If my purpose is to hit a baseball, or hammer in a nail, I'd buy a real bat, or a real hammer, because that's the purpose of the tool. If my goal was to swing it at a friend, though, I'd probably go for the foam bat. Just like, if my purpose was to build a piece of software to archive emails, I would build it so as that it is clearly its purpose, and it would be engineered in a way to make it challenging if not impossible to be used to secretly abscond with someone else's conversations. You seem to be interpreting my response as "people shouldn't build tools that can be used for dangerous purposes", when instead I am saying, "you should understand, and take steps to ensure, that the tools you create are used for their intended purpose." Hopefully that purpose isn't spying on people, but if it is, be up-front about it!
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
- vinniejames 6y agoAt least you got in early on those PLTR stock options
- DoctorNick 6y agowell, stop doing that.
- ignoramous 6y ago> I implemented a new feature: the ability to upload texts automatically, in background, without user intervention. > I had, unknowingly and unwillingly, built a spying tool, and a really convenient and efficient one. > Thanks to background uploads, people could install the YouArchive.It app on another person’s iPhone, set it up, maybe even hide it (something possible on a jailbroken iPhone), and then watch as the text messages come in, almost real-time. Jealous partners, stalkers and the likes could install this tool on an unknowing victim’s phone with relative ease. ... This hit home: (The absolutely otherwise fantastic) NextDNS (and anything that's similar to it) comes pretty close to a spying app, too (300,000 DNS requests per month conveniently stored for a long time, for free). I know a handful people who I introduced NextDNS to as a privacy enhancing service ended up using it to encroach upon privacy by configuring it on unsuspecting user's Android and iPhones (doesn't even require jailbreak or root and runs forever in the "background").
- bzb6 6y agoYou could’ve made the same point in a post 1/10 the length.
- Olreich 6y agoFacebook can tune the algorithm to stop polarizing viewpoints. YouTube can better vet the video content that gets posted, (they find porn with eerie accuracy, but can’t identify anything else that might not be good to spread?). Instagram can promote positivity about all parts of life instead of idolization of beauty and riches. Twitter can ban someone who constantly breaks the terms of service, instead of making them a specific loophole. None of these platforms are going to improve though. The money that they make is now closely entwined with what started out as unintended consequences and those consequences are well known. And that just makes them intended consequences. The author shut their service down when they realized the harm it was doing. They could have solved it other ways as well. Social media and other companies could fix their unintended consequences too, but aren’t likely to so long as money and engagement are the primary metrics of success of a business.
- amelius 6y agoAcademic studies in this area would help. I'm curious why we don't see more of them.
- dakial1 6y agoThere is an interesting ethics discussion here, because FB could, for example, tune their algorithms to avoid polarization by presenting users with extreme views content that wouldn't validade those views, but show them a more moderate view and bring them to a more moderate, fact based, scientifically sound and politically correct view. But would it be ethical? Who would be the one to choose what "the correct view" is? Right now FB is doing harm because it is being somewhat fair by showing people what "they want to see", so their behaviors are telling the algorithms want they want, not a third party, even if what they want is wrong/toxic.