4 ms·

> It always blows my mind seeing the things people who work at google/fb are willing to "walk out" / "protest" over, and then these insidious things they're wi

by acomar 5y ago

> It always blows my mind seeing the things people who work at google/fb are willing to "walk out" / "protest" over, and then these insidious things they're willing to just sit back and let happen. symbolic action is always easy. but you're asking them to strike (refuse to work) in response to unethical demands, without the collective backing of their peers, in an industry that views union activity with - at best - suspicion or outright derision. we all like to fancy that we'd be the ones to refuse to play along but the reality is that when it's you and your job and you're facing the possibility of not paying rent or eating food after being blacklisted from the industry in response to your actions... don't judge the people who are doing what they have to in order to survive. they were compelled by people who had leverage over them and our ire should be for those people.

RNCTX 5y ago
Bullshit. How many minimum wage employees does Google have in the Bay Area? We’re talking about a class of six figure employees here. Like he said, you’re a storm trooper, just own it.
jsiepkes 5y ago
> but you're asking them to strike (refuse to work) in response to unethical demands, without the collective backing of their peers, We are not talking about some poor sod blue collar worker here. We are talking about techworkers with 6 figure salaries who can get a job anywhere. No one is asking them to start some movement. They can simply think: "I don't want to be a part of this", leave the job and get a new job that same day. > don't judge the people who are doing what they have to in order to survive. they were compelled by people who had leverage over them and our ire should be for those people. Tech workers with 6 figure salaries who can get a job pretty much anywhere they like are doing these things to survive? Seriously...? Google had leverage over these people? How?
robbedpeter 5y ago
They're creating an infrastructure of manipulation because of the collective impact of the industry within the current legal context of international privacy protections. Any individual project or feature can look trivial or harmless, like manipulating the order of articles in a feed, but the systems used to do it are mechanisms implicitly susceptible to bad incentives. They're collectively pressing buttons and breaking things in the global psychology, influencing the zeitgeist in a way that no one person or company intends. Obama's campaign was the first major successful political use of that infrastructure and there's an argument to be made that Trump's election was enabled by it. Cambridge Anallytica exposed some of the controls and showed a portion of what can be done, but we haven't seen the worst yet. International troll farms, the recent infiltration of Christian and BLM Twitter and reddit, and so on. When people are profiled by advanced algorithms, and access to people given based on those profiles, that access can be made completely transparent using deanonymizing methods through data from other sources. Any and every platform, forum, and community becomes exposed to hostile, unintended influence. We need outsized fines that protect private data as if it were sacred such that a trillion dollar company would fear even a single violation. Such that violating privacy would result in individuals going bankrupt or prison time. Such that physically bombing a foreign datacenter would be seen as reasonable recourse if they were uncooperative. There are things that no government or private organization should have absent the informed consent of users because of the implicit danger to society's basic functioning.

by acomar 5y ago

RNCTX 5y ago

Bullshit. How many minimum wage employees does Google have in the Bay Area? We’re talking about a class of six figure employees here. Like he said, you’re a storm trooper, just own it.

jsiepkes 5y ago

> but you're asking them to strike (refuse to work) in response to unethical demands, without the collective backing of their peers, We are not talking about some poor sod blue collar worker here. We are talking about techworkers with 6 figure salaries who can get a job anywhere. No one is asking them to start some movement. They can simply think: "I don't want to be a part of this", leave the job and get a new job that same day. > don't judge the people who are doing what they have to in order to survive. they were compelled by people who had leverage over them and our ire should be for those people. Tech workers with 6 figure salaries who can get a job pretty much anywhere they like are doing these things to survive? Seriously...? Google had leverage over these people? How?

robbedpeter 5y ago

They're creating an infrastructure of manipulation because of the collective impact of the industry within the current legal context of international privacy protections. Any individual project or feature can look trivial or harmless, like manipulating the order of articles in a feed, but the systems used to do it are mechanisms implicitly susceptible to bad incentives. They're collectively pressing buttons and breaking things in the global psychology, influencing the zeitgeist in a way that no one person or company intends. Obama's campaign was the first major successful political use of that infrastructure and there's an argument to be made that Trump's election was enabled by it. Cambridge Anallytica exposed some of the controls and showed a portion of what can be done, but we haven't seen the worst yet. International troll farms, the recent infiltration of Christian and BLM Twitter and reddit, and so on. When people are profiled by advanced algorithms, and access to people given based on those profiles, that access can be made completely transparent using deanonymizing methods through data from other sources. Any and every platform, forum, and community becomes exposed to hostile, unintended influence. We need outsized fines that protect private data as if it were sacred such that a trillion dollar company would fear even a single violation. Such that violating privacy would result in individuals going bankrupt or prison time. Such that physically bombing a foreign datacenter would be seen as reasonable recourse if they were uncooperative. There are things that no government or private organization should have absent the informed consent of users because of the implicit danger to society's basic functioning.