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Frankly it's stuff like this that gives me pause about ever working at a company like Google. It's truly disgusting.
by alfalfasprout 5y ago
Frankly it's stuff like this that gives me pause about ever working at a company like Google. It's truly disgusting.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago"Don't be Evil" is outdated. Now it's "Do the right thing".
- zibzab 5y agoDo the right thing To get us another deal Sometimes it's a bit evil Sometimes just a bit shady And don't you ever worry If we cancel anything it will be Hangsout, Play Music, Timely and Poly
- munk-a 5y agoI'm still sad over losing iGoogle.
- Tade0 5y agoSuddenly the JSON license doesn't appear that problematic.
- 746487482 5y agoIt still appears as problematic as ever to me because a judge is pretty much the last person I would trust to decide what is and isn't evil. I can't even imagine how a hypothetical well-intentioned judge who wanted to apply that provision correctly would proceed. The judge would basically have to choose between imposing their own personal view on good and evil or declaring the provision nonjusticiable. Maybe the license could include a mandatory arbitration clause with an arbitrator who shares the author's values, but that still sounds like a terrible idea.
- smsm42 5y agoStill does. Nobody wants to be beholden to what one guy's definition of "evil" would be this morning. That doesn't mean ethics does not exist. It's just not done through copyright licensing.
- bjohnson225 5y agoThat just invites the question “for who?”.
- MichaelMoser123 5y agonew sloagan for Google: "we make money out of bloggers .... in any capacity".
- shadowgovt 5y agoIt was an interesting experience. I went in assuming someone's in charge, but honestly, most of the mistakes Google makes are in the category "nobody's in charge." They operate at a scale where everyone tries to use them to do everything. That's everything good and everything bad. They've been both a force for normalizing LGBTQ identity and a force against it, a mass communication tool and a mass oppression tool, a platform to help people and a platform to stalk people. They actively manage, observe, maintain, and regulate only a subset of the space of uses their tools allow. This is explanation, not excuse. I'm not there anymore because I think it should be their responsibility to take responsibility reflective of their size and impact. I lost faith that the leadership agreed. In this specific example, my assumption from personal priors is they let this ad in because there's nobody in charge of negative-filtering ads like this until complaints come, and in the absence of policy the default policy is "allow." They have categories to catch ads for illegal substances, various forms of illegal activity, and so on, but "A state-level actor will use our ad platform to paint a false message of the status of a political prisoner" is a new one for them.
- mleonhard 5y agoIf it looks like nobody in Google is in charge, it's only because the execs refuse to take action and the board refuses to properly incentivize the execs.
- shadowgovt 5y agoAnd perhaps importantly: the board can't incentivize the execs. Not alone. Alphabet is still majority-owned by the founders as of 2019. In practice, the board is advisory; 100% of stockholders who's names aren't "Larry Page" and "Sergey Brin" could vote the same on an issue, and the issue will carry in whatever direction Larry and Sergey say it should if both agree.
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago"The board" is Larry and Sergey, from a realistic voting power standpoint. All of this is ultimately their fault.
- 5y ago
- croes 5y agoName any big company that values human rights over money. It's gonna be a short list.
- brutal_chaos_ 5y agoI'm still looking and almost homeless. Our corporate culture is rotten to the core.
- _carbyau_ 5y agoMy wife is part way through an MBA. One course is "corporate ethics". When she told me, I laughed so hard... the very definition of an oxymoron.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smsm42 5y agoThere was an article I read some time ago about a guy who writes term papers and such assignments for sale - he said his most frequent customers are "business ethics" course students. Makes you think.
- cperciva 5y agoI happened to attend the retirement party for the Dean of the Faculty of Business at my alma mater, and he recounted the story of the hardest term of teaching he ever had, in his early days at the institution. At 11:30-12:20, he taught a course on advertising. At 12:30-13:20, he taught a course on business ethics. Every time a student asked a question, he had to stop and remember which course he was teaching before he answered!
- layer8 5y agoSounds like a good reason not to work for a big company then.
- IAmGraydon 5y ago
- ronsor 5y agoI dislike a lot of Google's practices as much as the next guy, but this is literally just a case of "nobody paying serious attention" rather than outright malice. We all (should) know that moderation at Google is mostly black-box bots that may or may not work properly.
- munk-a 5y agoHere's the thing though. That doesn't matter. Whether it's malicious or not, Google created this ecosystem where you need to process and serve a bazillion ads to compete with them, if they're unable to properly vet those ads it's on them to scale back to a size where they can properly vet them. If this was a one-off issue then sure - but Google runs a lot of really slimy advertisements.
- jawline 5y agoYeah - beyond political issues they also just outright advertise pyramid schemes. I live in Hong Kong and most of the adverts here are for a clearly fraudulent scheme that advertises by having young women screaming and showing a bank balance on a phone. It's pretty telling that even small-ish video producers are willing to vet their advertising partners more thoroughly.
- strken 5y agoI think it does matter, because a decentralised system would have much greater problems moderating content than Google does today. If this was coming from the Belarusian government bidding for ad time on thousands of peertube instances and the response was piecemeal requests to each federated instance's admin team, then it would also take a very long time to remove from the system as a whole. It might well be impossible to remove it from every popular instance.
- Judgmentality 5y agoA better solution is for Google to hire more people to help with moderation. It's just that Google doesn't want to spend more money, it wants to make more profit.
- dominotw 5y ago> It's truly disgusting. But why are you not quitting. I am sure you can find another job within a week. Curious what you choose to stay.
- ashtonkem 5y agoIt’s not clear to me from their comment that they actually work at Google.