7 ms·
How can engineers working on this even look at themselves without being ashamed? For the record: I'm a graphics driver engineer myself.
by ginko 3y ago
How can engineers working on this even look at themselves without being ashamed?
For the record: I'm a graphics driver engineer myself.
- Contusion3532 3y agoThey'll rationalize their behavior, just like most of us do. "All the other companies are already doing it", "No one cares about privacy", "It's not my decision", "We need this data to help the customers".
- nottorp 3y agoWell let's ask HN: How many of us click accept on those annoying cookie dialogs or have an extension do it for them? And how many take the time to find the reject button and/or install appropriate extensions that will do the rejection? I'm in the second category but I'm sure the first one is the majority, mostly because they just don't care.
- JohnFen 3y agoSince I browse without Javascript enabled by default, I almost never see those cookie dialogs. I don't allow persistent cookies regardless.
- screamingninja 3y agoThose pesky popups keep reappearing on each visit until you hit accept. Once you accept, they never bother you again. Not sure there is a way around besides aggressive anti-tracking extensions / DNS servers etc.
- 93po 3y agoUse the annoyances block lists on ublock origin, gets rid of them on most any bigger site. Annoyances isn't on by default bc mainstream users would get too frustrated with the occasional breakage it may cause.
- danaris 3y ago"I have resigned myself to everything insisting on taking as much of my personal data as it can possibly manage, and have already been worn down too much by so many years of trying to navigate it in ways that protect myself, so now I just sadly click accept so that I can get on with my life" is not the same as "I support the right of companies of all types and sizes to take all of my data to do whatever they want with."
- nottorp 3y agoI personally know one person that simply doesn't care. They're not all resigned, I think.
- gattilorenz 3y agoI don’t, not anymore. I use the annoyance lists for uBlock origin, click on “deny” on smaller sites, use the AdNauseam browser extension on every desktop browser to poison the wells of advertisers, switched to iOS from Android, installed LuLu on macOS and deny programs internet access if they don’t need it… I was never particularly privacy conscious. I was “normal”. Now that my fucking GPU driver spies on me, I think I’m rightfully becoming slowly paranoid about it.
- JohnFen 3y agoIn other words, they'll lie to themselves.
- beams_of_light 3y agoIntel is suffering financially. This is the phase in which they, regretfully, cross all ethical boundaries for the sake of the company's bottom line.
- mcpackieh 3y agoIf that's not the reason Nvidia is doing it too, why should we believe this is the reason Intel is doing it? Truth is they're just greedy and they're doing it because they can. Edit for FirmwareBurner: I will, after you point out the part of my comment in which I claim that some F500 companies aren't greedy.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoPlease show me a F500 publicly listed company that isn't greedy. The way our capitalist economy functions and CEO compensations are set, encourages nothing but greed and short therm profits at the expense of everything else.
- nottorp 3y agoIt's the pressure for growth. Who started this trend of rewarding shareholders through share price increase instead of dividends? Was it Apple? Some entity in an unrelated market 50 years before Apple?
- lotsofpulp 3y agoWhat difference does that make? The demand for returns comes from equity owners, such as people with 401k and pension funds.
- nottorp 3y agoYes but if your numbers are constant you can still pay dividends, as long as you're profitable, while if you need to provide capital gains you need to increase the numbers so the share price will go up. This is before taking into account how these things are taxed. Edit: you changed your comment :) I answered the previous version. Edit 2: and even a pension fund could take their dividends and reinvest them. But I guess that would be too much work.
- speed_spread 3y agoFrame the mirror with their pay stubs? I'm kidding, Intel doesn't even pay that much. It probably requires not thinking about it and just following the plan laid out by the PM, which a lot of people are very good at.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>How can engineers working on this even look at themselves without being ashamed? Same how can Google/Meta engineers work at the biggest user tracking ad empires and not be ashamed. What do you expect them to do? Quit their jobs in protest? Other engineers who need that money will gladly do it. Everyone has their price, not everyone has the luxury of being so picky with their carriers, especially when it comes to having a big name like Intel on your resume. You go to work, implement the tickets assigned to you, then go home, without vocalizing on the ethics of the big picture, is what the vast majority of employees do. If you want this practice to end you have to legally regulate it, the free market alone doesn't work in favor of the end user's privacy. Without laws and regulations in place, if Intel won't do it, all the other companies would. It's why regulations are important. Plus, I think half of HN userbase built their wealth or currently works for FAANG companies that make their money from spying, tracking or monetizing user data for ads, so the stone you threw will break a lot of glass here. How do you think they justify it other than "I like money"? So why single out only Intel engineers for what is common place around these parts?
- Aerroon 3y agoOn Google/Meta it's built into the product though. You're connecting to their servers to use the service on their servers. You also don't pay them anything by default. For Nvidia you're expected to pay $1000 for a graphics card and then they will collect data on you and send it to their servers even though you didn't choose to use their online services at all.
- JohnFen 3y ago> What do you expect them to do? If they can't bring themselves to do what's right, the least they can do is be ashamed of what they're doing. > So why single out only Intel engineers for what is common place around these parts? Because this particular example is about Intel. When other companies that do this come into the spotlight, then the same criticism is levelled at the devs enabling them as well. Big picture, Intel's not being singled out.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
- mcpackieh 3y agoThe movie Thank You For Smoking about a tobacco lobbyist introduced a term for this. The Yuppie Nuremberg Defense, I've got a mortgage to pay.
- freeAgent 3y agoThank You For Smoking was an all-around great movie.
- marcodiego 3y agoRationalization. I've seen developers I thought were reasonable doing much worse things with cellphones.
- whstl 3y agoIntelligent/smart people are fantastic at rationalizing, it's like a superpower.
- registeredcorn 3y agoI'd be interested to hear more about the cellphone bit, if you're willing to share.
- marcodiego 3y agoI'd love to, but since I'm not sure what could be the implications (I was employed by them at the time), I don't know if I can't safely do it. All I can say is that it was locking out features through software.
- OO000oo 3y ago[flagged]
- sirius87 3y agoPretty sure Intel would be happy to apply a level of indirection through external contractors to get this done either way. That's the world we live in. I don't see how engineers at Intel would risk antagonising whoever dreamt this up.
- throw_m239339 3y ago> How can engineers working on this even look at themselves without being ashamed? These aren't engineering decisions but marketing ones. The role of an engineer is to engineer a solution, not make business decisions. The decision to turn telemetry on by default was not taken by an engineer, so engineers at intel shouldn't feel ashamed of anything at first place.
- freedude 3y ago> The decision to turn telemetry on by default was not taken by an engineer, so engineers at intel shouldn't feel ashamed of anything at first place. And this lack of accountability is exactly why our world is the way it is. Just remember anyone can justify evil behavior if they try hard enough. Why? because people are not basically good by nature. They are basically evil by nature. Observe any 2-3 year old throwing a fit and you might begin to grasp the concept.
- throw_m239339 3y ago> And this lack of accountability is exactly why our world is the way it is. Just remember anyone can justify evil behavior if they try hard enough. Why? because people are not basically good by nature. They are basically evil by nature. Observe any 2-3 year old throwing a fit and you might begin to grasp the concept. There is no "lack of accountability" anywhere in that story. Nothing done here was illegal, nor "evil" which is an unnecessary hyperbole.
- momirlan 3y agosame as all other IT personnel contribute to their company products' marketing efforts: " know your customer", "improve the product", etc. Not necessarily evil, just a reflection of how money and profit drives free enterprise. as the struggle for margin intensifies, all efforts are put into capturing the most details about the usage of a product.
- kayodelycaon 3y agoOh, I feel ashamed, but that doesn't stop me. I put considerable thought into the ethics of storing data and letting that data get inaccurate and harming people. Same with providing that information to people whose goals actively cause harm. But I'm here for the war, not the individual battles. I raise objections and sometimes I can make a difference. This is one I'm going to lose most of the time. So I say my bit and do my job in a way that causes as little damage as possible because the next person won't. Meanwhile, I get paid and live another day to make a difference somewhere else. And yes, I know exactly where that reasoning leads. I wrote a story with an assassin justifying his actions the same way. There are limits in the amount of damage I'm willing to contribute to, telemetry doesn't cross that line.
- anigbrowl 3y agoWho are the parties in this war? It sounds like it's you v. everyone else.
- kayodelycaon 3y agoThe battles are usually things like invasive user tracking, insecure storage of PII (comprehesive credit reports), locking people out of accounts without recourse, dinging people's credit scores, giving out (potentially incorrect) information to police without warrants, etc. So, upper management, government agencies, finance departments, and marketing departments.