8 ms·

Semi-related, not exactly a dark pattern put a job I bailed on early in my career for ethical reasons. I was hired to build a rudimentary tool for detecting nu

by mwill 5y ago

Semi-related, not exactly a dark pattern put a job I bailed on early in my career for ethical reasons. I was hired to build a rudimentary tool for detecting nudity in images, over large datasets, as fast as possible/reasonable, with a pretty generous margin of error. The agreed pay was extremely good for the performance the client wanted. Not long after I started, after getting an advance payment, one of the clients called me and very tactfully broke the news to me that what they actually wanted was a tool that would detect women in bikinis, or showing lots of skin, and that they would be crawling social media and photo sharing sites, and their 'service' was a private premium forum that included a section where members could trade pictures of girls they knew, and they wanted to add a gallery of girls who post bikini pictures, with their real names and locations and links to their socials. I re-payed the advance that day, and it very much shaped my approach to consulting.

fidesomnes 5y ago
I am trying to find the unethical part of this, care to enlighten us?
- thehappypm 5y ago
  Grabbing images of women from social media, and aggregating them without their consent, is not necessarily illegal, but it's certainly exploitative and creepy.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    This is just restating the question. "Exploitative and creepy" doesn't have a whole lot of semantic content beyond "wrong". I took a whack at articulating _why_ it's wrong while not quite fitting a clear definition of malfeasance here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632365
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    The pictures are one thing and bad enough. Including location and links to profiles could make you a party to stalking or worse, and that is quite unethical.
  - fidesomnes 5y ago
    So gathering pictures on the internet is exploitive and creepy in your opinion. That is quite a leap of faith and I'll take your word that you are not concern trolling but I don't know where you have been the last 30-40 years.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  I disagree with this comment, but it's a shame (albeit an unsurprising one) that it's flagged into oblivion instead of responded to. I think the question illuminates something interesting about the incompatibilities between our pre-social-media notions of privacy and our current public posting behavior. I don't have my beliefs on the topic clearly articulated, but I'll give it a crack. There's the argument that public information is public, and that there's no issue in aggregating it or otherwise making it more accessible, as long as the access is through legitimate means. I'm sympathetic to this and understand why people believe it, but I think it contradicts other consensus moral intuitions about privacy rights. A salient example that other HNers may be familiar with is the doxxing of Scott Alexander; any intellectually honest person familiar with the internet can tell the difference between "you can find out who he is if you do some digging" and "real name published by the NYT", despite the pathetic attempts at dismissing the possibility that doxxing him was bad (amusingly, including by people who I am 100% sure would find the bikini example to be a horrible violation). Hell, I was a reader of Scott's for years before I first came across his real name. The entire social Internet is built on security through obscurity, because opsec is hard and many people aren't constantly vigilant. There's even precedent for these intuitions outside of the social media context. It's uncontroversially okay for someone's face to show up in your photo taken in public; once you've taken it, nobody cares if you study the guy in the background. However, aggregate and operationalize this, and it changes not just in degree, but in character: It's practically a trope in thrillers for universal CC cameras + alphabet-agency elbow grease to stitch together comprehensive tracking of an individual, and the public is rightfully a little creeped out by the thought. The main difference here is that technology, as always, is democratizing the ability to do this, pushing the threat model from the unrealistic "NSA spends huge resources to track you" to the prosaic "facial recognition can just track and store everyone's movements at low cost" (or "some under-the-radar shop is aggregating your bikini shots") and a million other mundane violations of our moral intuitions. To my mind, we're in the uncomfortable period before a new norm equilibrium is reached that matches the technological context. This has already happened locally: I'm sure this group knows people who have good opsec since the early 2010s, and "treat everything you post as if it's public" is at this point an age-worn piece of wisdom.
  - Tainnor 5y ago
- ehutch79 5y ago
  You might actually want to get a psych eval if you can't figure out how that's unethical. This is not sarcasm, or me trying to be mean.
  - fidesomnes 5y ago
    Okay so you read 1984 as an instruction manual and not a warning. Cool beans.
  - knodi123 5y ago
    > or me trying to be mean If you have to say "I'm not trying to be mean" before anyone accuses you of it, then you're clearly aware that what you're saying sounds mean, but you don't care to try and avoid it, but you want to pretend you are still nice. Which, ironically, is something that would cause some intensive pencil scritching during a psych eval.
hughrr 5y ago
That sounds about right. I was interviewed for a fairly well known company on contract a number of years ago. I was told the product was top secret and it was going to be amazing etc etc. So roll in on first day after signing up to fuck knows what and it was a ticket touting company. I listened to their pitch which lasted until lunch, went and got myself a sandwich, sat on a bench and thought “fuck it, this is wrong” and just went home. When I told the agent he went crazy at me because I’d burned his commission. Gave them the finger too. In some places it’s bastards all the way down. Next time someone pulled that on me, I cut the interview off and only worked for predefined work for a number of years. If something is off grid on your contract, no is the answer.
- sbarre 5y ago
  For anyone wondering (I had to look it up): ticket touting = ticket scalping.
  - jacobsenscott 5y ago
    What's unethical about ticket scalping?
    - Causality1 5y ago
      Is there anything not unethical about ticket scalping? Tickets being non-essential entertainment is the only reason it's legal.
    - neitherboosh 5y ago
      Fans who really want to see their favorite artist/sports teams get extorted, and the money goes to scalpers instead of the artists and venues which are actually providing value. Scalpers provide no value to society.
      - randomraccoon 5y ago
        Planet Money has done an excellent episode on this - https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/25/195641030/episode-468-kid-rock-vs-the-scalpers https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/25/195641030/epis.... While I broadly agree with this, I would say that scalpers can actually provide a service of exchanging money for time and convenience. For example, you may have a free or cheap concert that sells out extremely quickly, but with scalpers, those with lots of money can always get a ticket. Much of the economy is built on the similar concept of arbitrage, where someone buys something cheaply and sells it for a markup to those who lack the ability or knowledge to get it from the seller's source. That said, scalpers in particular seem to cause a whole lot more harm than good in general. As the above podcast addresses, it's a very difficult problem to solve systemically if you are intentionally undervaluing your goods.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
You know what? I know that scraping is currently legal, but then we end up with things like that company or Clearview AI. We need some laws, ASAP, prohibiting data for being scraped for specific reasons. Also, I have some friends in insurance companies, and they say that the insurance companies right now are actively trying to learn how to scrape people's social media - secretly - so they can catch "dangerous" behavior or violations of their rules. My dad's client was telling how there was a guy who was running a happy hour secretly in his insured bar, and his company which scraped Facebook found posts from other people saying "great happy hour at this bar", he reported it to the insurance company, and they sent the bar the bill. That's freaky and should be illegal as a violation of privacy.
- refulgentis 5y ago
  I don't think it's freaky at all, I do find it freaky that there's people who will choose fraud over code as soon as code was anywhere in the loop that caught the fraud.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    Yes - because where does it end? China, which has surveillance on anything and everything? I don't want to live in a society where everything is monitored by people I don't know and haven't heard of secretly, and neither I think do you. Remember, this wasn't the insurance company that was spying. This was a data broker whom you've never heard of, who scrapes social media pages, and gets paid by insurance companies for reports. A bounty hunter using computers and scraping. That's dystopian.
    - refulgentis 5y ago
      Customers using their speech to praise your business, in the process revealing you committed fraud, and the insurance company hearing the customers, is not "China". If all this speech was in a central repository by government mandate, I agree it's China
      - 5y ago
effingwewt 5y ago
Thank you for having the fortitude to put your money where your morals are. It's one thing to turn something down, it's another entirely to give up money already earned and the prospect of more to come. So, Thank you, for truly leading by example.
jacquesm 5y ago
Props to you.
sloshnmosh 5y ago
Scraping for bikini pics? Reminds me of this lawsuit against Facebook: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-six4three-bikini-app-lawsuit/ https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-six4three-bikini-app-la...

by mwill 5y ago

fidesomnes 5y ago

I am trying to find the unethical part of this, care to enlighten us?

thehappypm 5y ago
Grabbing images of women from social media, and aggregating them without their consent, is not necessarily illegal, but it's certainly exploitative and creepy.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  This is just restating the question. "Exploitative and creepy" doesn't have a whole lot of semantic content beyond "wrong". I took a whack at articulating _why_ it's wrong while not quite fitting a clear definition of malfeasance here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27632365
- willcipriano 5y ago
  The pictures are one thing and bad enough. Including location and links to profiles could make you a party to stalking or worse, and that is quite unethical.
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  So gathering pictures on the internet is exploitive and creepy in your opinion. That is quite a leap of faith and I'll take your word that you are not concern trolling but I don't know where you have been the last 30-40 years.
wutbrodo 5y ago
I disagree with this comment, but it's a shame (albeit an unsurprising one) that it's flagged into oblivion instead of responded to. I think the question illuminates something interesting about the incompatibilities between our pre-social-media notions of privacy and our current public posting behavior. I don't have my beliefs on the topic clearly articulated, but I'll give it a crack. There's the argument that public information is public, and that there's no issue in aggregating it or otherwise making it more accessible, as long as the access is through legitimate means. I'm sympathetic to this and understand why people believe it, but I think it contradicts other consensus moral intuitions about privacy rights. A salient example that other HNers may be familiar with is the doxxing of Scott Alexander; any intellectually honest person familiar with the internet can tell the difference between "you can find out who he is if you do some digging" and "real name published by the NYT", despite the pathetic attempts at dismissing the possibility that doxxing him was bad (amusingly, including by people who I am 100% sure would find the bikini example to be a horrible violation). Hell, I was a reader of Scott's for years before I first came across his real name. The entire social Internet is built on security through obscurity, because opsec is hard and many people aren't constantly vigilant. There's even precedent for these intuitions outside of the social media context. It's uncontroversially okay for someone's face to show up in your photo taken in public; once you've taken it, nobody cares if you study the guy in the background. However, aggregate and operationalize this, and it changes not just in degree, but in character: It's practically a trope in thrillers for universal CC cameras + alphabet-agency elbow grease to stitch together comprehensive tracking of an individual, and the public is rightfully a little creeped out by the thought. The main difference here is that technology, as always, is democratizing the ability to do this, pushing the threat model from the unrealistic "NSA spends huge resources to track you" to the prosaic "facial recognition can just track and store everyone's movements at low cost" (or "some under-the-radar shop is aggregating your bikini shots") and a million other mundane violations of our moral intuitions. To my mind, we're in the uncomfortable period before a new norm equilibrium is reached that matches the technological context. This has already happened locally: I'm sure this group knows people who have good opsec since the early 2010s, and "treat everything you post as if it's public" is at this point an age-worn piece of wisdom.
- Tainnor 5y ago
ehutch79 5y ago
You might actually want to get a psych eval if you can't figure out how that's unethical. This is not sarcasm, or me trying to be mean.
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  Okay so you read 1984 as an instruction manual and not a warning. Cool beans.
- knodi123 5y ago
  > or me trying to be mean If you have to say "I'm not trying to be mean" before anyone accuses you of it, then you're clearly aware that what you're saying sounds mean, but you don't care to try and avoid it, but you want to pretend you are still nice. Which, ironically, is something that would cause some intensive pencil scritching during a psych eval.

hughrr 5y ago

That sounds about right. I was interviewed for a fairly well known company on contract a number of years ago. I was told the product was top secret and it was going to be amazing etc etc. So roll in on first day after signing up to fuck knows what and it was a ticket touting company. I listened to their pitch which lasted until lunch, went and got myself a sandwich, sat on a bench and thought “fuck it, this is wrong” and just went home. When I told the agent he went crazy at me because I’d burned his commission. Gave them the finger too. In some places it’s bastards all the way down. Next time someone pulled that on me, I cut the interview off and only worked for predefined work for a number of years. If something is off grid on your contract, no is the answer.

sbarre 5y ago
For anyone wondering (I had to look it up): ticket touting = ticket scalping.
- jacobsenscott 5y ago
  What's unethical about ticket scalping?
  - Causality1 5y ago
    Is there anything not unethical about ticket scalping? Tickets being non-essential entertainment is the only reason it's legal.
  - neitherboosh 5y ago
    Fans who really want to see their favorite artist/sports teams get extorted, and the money goes to scalpers instead of the artists and venues which are actually providing value. Scalpers provide no value to society.
    - randomraccoon 5y ago
      Planet Money has done an excellent episode on this - https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/25/195641030/episode-468-kid-rock-vs-the-scalpers https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/25/195641030/epis.... While I broadly agree with this, I would say that scalpers can actually provide a service of exchanging money for time and convenience. For example, you may have a free or cheap concert that sells out extremely quickly, but with scalpers, those with lots of money can always get a ticket. Much of the economy is built on the similar concept of arbitrage, where someone buys something cheaply and sells it for a markup to those who lack the ability or knowledge to get it from the seller's source. That said, scalpers in particular seem to cause a whole lot more harm than good in general. As the above podcast addresses, it's a very difficult problem to solve systemically if you are intentionally undervaluing your goods.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

You know what? I know that scraping is currently legal, but then we end up with things like that company or Clearview AI. We need some laws, ASAP, prohibiting data for being scraped for specific reasons. Also, I have some friends in insurance companies, and they say that the insurance companies right now are actively trying to learn how to scrape people's social media - secretly - so they can catch "dangerous" behavior or violations of their rules. My dad's client was telling how there was a guy who was running a happy hour secretly in his insured bar, and his company which scraped Facebook found posts from other people saying "great happy hour at this bar", he reported it to the insurance company, and they sent the bar the bill. That's freaky and should be illegal as a violation of privacy.

refulgentis 5y ago
I don't think it's freaky at all, I do find it freaky that there's people who will choose fraud over code as soon as code was anywhere in the loop that caught the fraud.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Yes - because where does it end? China, which has surveillance on anything and everything? I don't want to live in a society where everything is monitored by people I don't know and haven't heard of secretly, and neither I think do you. Remember, this wasn't the insurance company that was spying. This was a data broker whom you've never heard of, who scrapes social media pages, and gets paid by insurance companies for reports. A bounty hunter using computers and scraping. That's dystopian.
  - refulgentis 5y ago
    Customers using their speech to praise your business, in the process revealing you committed fraud, and the insurance company hearing the customers, is not "China". If all this speech was in a central repository by government mandate, I agree it's China
    - 5y ago

effingwewt 5y ago

Thank you for having the fortitude to put your money where your morals are. It's one thing to turn something down, it's another entirely to give up money already earned and the prospect of more to come. So, Thank you, for truly leading by example.

jacquesm 5y ago

Props to you.

sloshnmosh 5y ago

Scraping for bikini pics? Reminds me of this lawsuit against Facebook: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-six4three-bikini-app-lawsuit/ https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-six4three-bikini-app-la...