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Honest question, as I want to learn something. Zuck's quotes were: > “Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their

Honest question, as I want to learn something. Zuck's quotes were: > “Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them” > “Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.” I'm against what FB did, and it is still Zuck's responsibility, but let's take a fake company as an example. Say I'm your manager, and I ask you to start learning more about what our competition is doing. If you used publicly available info (like news articles or other media, even their engineering blog), OK great -- but if you decided to snoop their traffic, which only went between that competitor's servers and their users, I wouldn't be OK with that. Perhaps you did something unethical, but also I'd be responsible bc I hired you. How do you prevent this sort of thing, especially at a huge company? Especially a huge tech company, where I believe lots of tech workers tend to specialize in tech and often lack soft skills/ability to think about the bigger non-technical picture. For example, "oh shit, we can't actually read this data w/o the customer's consent."

Ctyra 3y ago
You answered your own question. If you are a manager, and you asked someone to get this information. You have enough oversight to know if the information was obtained through ethical means or not. At FB scale, if Zuck wanted this information, he has enough staff to flag unethical snooping of users. They did it because they wanted to do it even if it's not ethical, not because they didn't realize it's unethical.
geoduck14 3y ago
If you are the direct manager, you should ask plenty of questions. If you are the IC, be prepared to answer plenty of questions. If you are a skip-manager, you need to build a culture where being ethically responsible is the right thing to do. This isn't easy to do because you quickly run out of time to talk to all of your employees and figure out what everyone is doing.
rchaud 3y ago
> How do you prevent this sort of thing, especially at a huge company? You don't have to when you're a huge American company. No one is risking prison time, and the fines are a drop in the bucket considering FB's profitability.

Ctyra 3y ago

You answered your own question. If you are a manager, and you asked someone to get this information. You have enough oversight to know if the information was obtained through ethical means or not. At FB scale, if Zuck wanted this information, he has enough staff to flag unethical snooping of users. They did it because they wanted to do it even if it's not ethical, not because they didn't realize it's unethical.

geoduck14 3y ago

If you are the direct manager, you should ask plenty of questions. If you are the IC, be prepared to answer plenty of questions. If you are a skip-manager, you need to build a culture where being ethically responsible is the right thing to do. This isn't easy to do because you quickly run out of time to talk to all of your employees and figure out what everyone is doing.

rchaud 3y ago

> How do you prevent this sort of thing, especially at a huge company? You don't have to when you're a huge American company. No one is risking prison time, and the fines are a drop in the bucket considering FB's profitability.