Amid the severe backlash that tech companies currently face (Google and FB amongst others), how do you consider your own company from a moral POV?
Do you think the current backlash is justified?
Googler. Yes, I think the backlash is all deserved. I’ve been here for many years, since back when any criticism was still very niche, and at the beginning it was different. Obviously morally superior to working at a bank, and more meaningful than working on Snapchat for Sourdough Starters or similar dumb startups. Now it’s no better than the banks, and they’re even chasing military contracts. And the work is largely pointless tedium.
I’ve thought of leaving for years. Problem is: I have a wife who doesn’t work, two kids, piles of debt, and live in the most expensive city in the country. We can’t just leave, our whole life is here. And moving to a bank now to make more money (if I even would, the tenure and promotions do pile up) means working harder and more hours. That comes out of spending time with my young kids.
I spent a couple of years having a tough time with this. It genuinely caused a long-term, slow burn existential crisis that only recently started to settle into a stable state. All of life is moral compromise, I think. It sucks and I’m sorry, but it would be too hard to stop and I’m just sort of accepting that now.
I would like to thank all the wonderful people like you who created such amazing products for me to use. I am sorry to hear that you have experienced mental anguish due to this. From my perspective you should feel pride and accomplishment from having contributed to helping millions of people every day.
I get dozens of questions answered each day through your search engine that before would go unanswered. (my last question was: "how does a digital scale work?")
I get to write beautiful documents, spreadsheets and presentations that I can easily share with colleagues, who in turn, easily can provide feedback and comments inside the documents themselves.
I tracked the length of my last run with only my phone using android and maps, something that otherwise would have been difficult to do.
My family easily collects photos of our holiday together in a single shared space.
These are just the first things that came to mind I used google for in the last week. Whatever evils google do, you do at least as much good as well.
It's absurd to me that you are feeling guilt because of this. I can't tell you what to feel, but people like you have made my life significantly better and I want to express thankfulness for that.
Another Googler here, thanks for saving me the typingm
Yes, Google does unethical things. This sucks and I feel uncomfortable supporting it. Quitting is just too costly in terms of personal cost and would not have much effect.
I worked for a corp at a similar "golden cage" position, where switching would incur a pay-cut and working harder for longer hours.
Eventually I changed company. I looked at the beurocrats around me and realised I'll end up like them - my tech skills on the decline, learning only how to manipulate and cover my ass.
We grow in the face of adversity and challenge. I think as an ex-Googler you'll have a choice of interesting positions that will benefit your career in the long run.
Please don't feel bad about yourself. Very very very few people can have high standards in life and continue living up to those standards where no one will ever criticize them (heck, even Mother Teresa got a lot of criticism[1]).
> All of life is moral compromise
So true. I wonder what sort of life critics of FANG/big-tech live.
Thanks for your reply, and sorry to hear you feel trapped in your company right now.
Do you feel like this feeling is common among Googlers?
Also, I'd be very interested in hearing what you think of the reasons from Googlers defending the company, since you probably hear them a lot by working at Google.
Just as a counterpoint many happy Googlers will not come here and post "We like it ". Sorry your work sucks. You can transfer to more interesting teams.
Using the word “evil” to describe these companies when today there are people literally dying from COVID19 because of the policies of their employers & governments seems like a lack of perspective to me.
The framing of your question has no good answer like the classic “are you still beating your wife?” where either a yes or no is still a bad look.
Ex-googler, I felt on the majority of issues, both as an entity but also as a collection of people, the intent was to do good.
I was much warier of trusting Google with my data pre-Google to post-Google.
It's constantly drilled into you the sacred nature of user data, and the technical protections seemed sound.
The elements I was most uncomfortable with were the profit-shifting/tax optimization, i.e. the Double-Irish Dutch Sandwich.
As a googler (opinions are my own) in payments that gets to see that side of things, I'd disagree with you.
To be able to do the Irish haven, Google is and was abiding by all laws in doing it. Google was doing what all the lawmakers of various countries allowed, and they allowed it for a long time. It also only impacted a portion of Google's overall revenue. It also led to Google having a fairly massive presence in Ireland, which I'm sure the people employed there are happy with.
As countries have been figuring out how to tax companies like Google, they have been forcing them to create local entities so all business with people in those countries can be taxed locally. I can tell you this was not a simple thing for companies like Google to conform to (massive amounts of work by lots of people to bill locally).
You can see if you are billed locally based on the company your invoice or payment is collected under.
I'm a Googler in Ads. This is a multi-faceted issue and there are tons of legitimate points on both its criticism and defense but IMO the backlash itself is deserved, especially for a number of anti-competitive business practices. But probably the exact same criticism can be applied to Apple, Amazon and Microsoft so I consider this to be more of a general tech sector problem where network effects tend to be amplified by its nature and perhaps better handled by regulations.
For privacy perspective, I'm not very satisfied with the status quo, but at least for Ads, privacy is now the top priority with a strict deadline so the situation may get improved. But I still think collecting less (or no) user data solves just a part of the problem; users still don't have understanding on what the real trade-off between their privacy and benefits to themselves/the overall web ecosystem from the ads they're watching is. Without this information, users cannot really make informed arguments and decisions on their privacy and ads. IMO, this is one of the fundamental reason of having significant discrepancies on the ads' perception across many people. But as this is not just a technical problem like 3rd party cookie but more of a subjective issue, this might be a much harder problem to tackle though.
I kinda consider ads a violation of human rights, given they're literally made to influence your decision making, therefore taking away a bit of your free will
I work in ads at Google, and I don't consider the company evil. It does an enormous number of things which range from very positive to very negative, but on balance I think the company is and has been positive.
I think some of the backlash is justified and pushes the company to do better, but there's also some amount of what feels like backlash for backlash's sake where it just gets everyone here paying less attention to what critics think.
Ex-Googler. I had my gripes with the company, but their ethics was not one of them. They constantly strived to make fair and ethical decisions, and they treated their people extremely well.
A company that’s as large and fundamental as Google will always have detractors. They pay too much. They pay too little. They collect too much data. They don’t make their data open enough. There will always be something.
I think a better question is: Is there a google employee that doesn’t use Google products for personal use (search, youtube, android), and is there a fb employee that doesn’t have a personal fb account?
Googler here. Yes, there are many google employees that do not use Google products for personal use. Firefox, for instance, can be used on work machines.
I use Google's products because I have to. The alternative is spending huge chunks of my time to "work around" Google. Same goes for Facebook, except there is no work-around.
This does not mean I support either company, it just means they have manipulated culture to ensure they are the only choice.
I don't consider the company evil. In fact, I think it's leading the way that we talk about ethics in computing. People talk about Maven, but it was an internal revolt--not external influence--that challenged the issues with the project.
Secondly, there's a lot of criticism about supposed violations of "Don't Be Evil". As a multi-national company, it's almost impossible these days to avoid morally complex issues. Microsoft, on the other hand, has recently been seeing in much better light due to Nadella's leadership in the post Ballmer-era. But Microsoft never had the "Don't Be Evil" and isn't getting criticism for its, e.g. defense contracts. I don't consider Microsoft to be an immoral company either.
Concerns about privacy and data handling are warranted. There should be stronger consumer protections in there area, and legislation like GDPR is good, and should be more widespread. I honestly don't think Google is the company to worry about here (or at least the biggest threat). It's companies who aren't as closely watched that are the highest risk to you. Google is pushing the state-of-the-art here, with efforts like differential privacy. From what I can see, Google respects your PII and has more advanced internal mechanisms for handling it than any other company I know about.
IMHO, Google tried to be as transparent as possible in this area. Concerned about data collection? Review your activity on myactivity.google.com. Want to move all of your data out, or back it up? takeout.google.com Location data? Google literally regularly emails you a report on your location summary so you know what's going on.
Is it perfect? No. Is there valid criticism? Sure. Could it do a lot better in many different areas? Absolutely.
Is it evil? I honestly just don't see it. Feel free to ask about individual issues if you disagree.
> People talk about Maven, but it was an internal revolt--not external influence--that challenged the issues with the project.
The revolt started internally despite a lot of effort to conceal the project, even from engineers working on it. And Google management started to stepback only after the press got involved.
As a user of Facebook. They shouldn’t be most upset about the privacy problems. A developer at Facebook should be ashamed of helping to build the absolute garbage that is the Facebook advertising suite. It’s a maze of bugs.
I spent a decade at Google and I see it as rotten to the core. I used to think this was all Eric Schmidt but given the things that we have learned about in the last 2 or 3 years I am now convinced that all the founders are to blame.
There are a lot employees there that want to do the right thing, which is a why activism has been such a big deal for so long.
The tax avoidance thing used to annoy me but that's nothing compared to everything else that has happened. Even Vic Gundotra's incompetent management of Google+ looks tame now.
Maven was handled really poorly by Diane Greene who seemed to live in her own bubble during the whole thing. Urs Hölzle didn't fare much better in this regard. Moving all of SRE under cloud was a big mistake and it has backfired spectacularly because there's enough in SRE who are not happy with the whole "We want to work with the military" thing.
The shift towards cloud was a huge change and a lot of us would have preferred if Cloud had become its own company.
The high profile sexual harassment cases that we learned about did not do much to improve trust in Google execs. And the fact that the founders of the company just vanished into thin air speaks volumes about how bad things were.
Kent Walker in particular represents everything that is wrong with Google. He protected David Drummond, he's been pushing for more work with the US military and is as morally bankrupt as it gets. At one TGIF he tried to justify forced arbitration because it was better for employees to not have to go to court and when asked why not let them choose what they wanted to do he just walked off the stage. That's Kent Walker for you.
Heather Adkins is not much better than Kent. We all thought she could be trusted until two things happened: She actively sought out to destroy every copy of the Dragonfly investigation document that delroth@ had put together using searchable information and then claimed that the privacy review had proceeded as usual, which we all know it's not true given that Yonatan Zunger eventually left because of DragonFly.
Another interesting character is Laszlo Bock which many people used to look up to. When Eric Schmidt was caught colluding with other companies all he had to say was: "We do not believe we did anything wrong." That kind of moral compass, or lack thereof, is what defines Google's DNA.
Rachel Whetstone used to be loved here as well, for some mysterious reasons given her political background.
Google execs have managed to alienate many high value employees who either left on their own accord or were retaliated against until they had no choice but to go: Erica Joy, Liz Fong-Jones, Laura Nolan, Kelly Ellis, Claire Stapleton, Chelsey Glasson, Meredith Whittaker, Laurence Berland, Rebecca Rivers and so on and so forth.
This company could have been a profitable version of Xerox PARC. Instead it became SV's version of Monsanto.
It is a great place to work at. You will meet lost of ridiculously smart people and learn a lot. So put Google on your resume, learn a lot, and then run far, run fast.
I think backlash is important, it keeps big tech accountable.
That being said, I do think big tech has been scapegoated for years. Everything is blamed on these companies: eroding privacy, Brexit, Trump, fake news, social breakdown -- at some point we as a society need to take responsibility as well because frankly these platforms are a reflection of us as a species.
I understand the skepticism, but after seeing how things work on the inside I trust my employer far more.
Is it really scapegoating though? Tech companies have radically restructured how business is done globally, ensuring that first and foremost, they profit at every step along the way. Other concerns, important concerns to society, have taken a back seat.
I mean, these are the two companies nearly every other company on the planet is in business with, and the negotiating terms are pretty one-sided.
I am not sure any other industry in human history has ever held so much power, and it's largely wielded by incompetent kids with little understanding of how what they do translates to the global stage.
I believe everything you listed is true, so it's not really scapegoating. And, saying society at large should be held responsible for the actions of a few in power is absurdity. "Taking responsibility" would be direct action against those in power. And, I agree.
A FANG employee here. I don't think my company is evil. In fact, I believe very very few companies are truly evil. A lot of criticism seems to be coming from competitors who are hurt and are determined to tar your reputation (newspapers vs FB/Google), or from ideologues who simply hate your existence (climate activists vs oil / energy companies). Sometimes, criticism is shallow in that people will say they don't like your actions but will still buy your products (eg. Apple profiting off slave labor in China or Amazon's treatment of warehouse employees doesn't affect their market success), or that the criticism of your company/product is coming from a very tiny but very loud minority (climate activists against Air travel).
You show me any sufficiently big company and I will show you enough reasons to call them evil.
Are there any realistic attempts, fictional or otherwise, at describing a market encouraging a more balanced society, but reasonably, but not excessively, rewarding successful risk takers?
I switched from Google (YouTube) to Facebook in 2019 after 2.5 years at Google.
When I joined Google I was very influenced by the 'Google is the good guy PR'. I never liked the Ads business model, but there a few Google products I really liked (Inbox, Maps and YT notably).
It's hard to pinpoint the wake up call, but I'd say it was project Maven (aka let's make an AI to help US drones kill more people), and all the lying and mislabeling there was around it (our AI don't kill people, etc…).
Wrt Cambridge Analytica, you have to go back to the mind state of 2016. At the time FB was mostly attacked because it was a walled garden hoarding all the precious data. So FB allowed users to share data with external apps. Then one apps managae to get data about 100k Americans and their friends and use it for helping Trump. And then 'data portability' was evil.
Companies exist to make money. So "evil" is probably the default when you get down to it. Anything that heads that off is temporary at best. CEOs with strong personalities, specific niches that allow for enough money without "evil" tactics, etc. Basically, the structure isn't geared toward anything better. Eventually things will come down to money vs whatever.
I see a lot of pseudo-communists point this out constantly, how evil it is to make money.
I would call them psuedo-communists because they continually engage in the same self-centered practices that corporations do, but it’s “okay” for individuals or hipster small businesses but not for larger companies.
Money is seen as some kind of evil but all it is is an exchange method. It’s a way to convert one type or good or labor into another.
The evil practices tied into money are human evils. Money is impartial and neutral, therefore trying to gain money is not inherently evil or good.
[+] [-] throwaway22349|6 years ago|reply
I’ve thought of leaving for years. Problem is: I have a wife who doesn’t work, two kids, piles of debt, and live in the most expensive city in the country. We can’t just leave, our whole life is here. And moving to a bank now to make more money (if I even would, the tenure and promotions do pile up) means working harder and more hours. That comes out of spending time with my young kids.
I spent a couple of years having a tough time with this. It genuinely caused a long-term, slow burn existential crisis that only recently started to settle into a stable state. All of life is moral compromise, I think. It sucks and I’m sorry, but it would be too hard to stop and I’m just sort of accepting that now.
[+] [-] MperorM|6 years ago|reply
I get dozens of questions answered each day through your search engine that before would go unanswered. (my last question was: "how does a digital scale work?")
I get to write beautiful documents, spreadsheets and presentations that I can easily share with colleagues, who in turn, easily can provide feedback and comments inside the documents themselves.
I tracked the length of my last run with only my phone using android and maps, something that otherwise would have been difficult to do.
My family easily collects photos of our holiday together in a single shared space.
These are just the first things that came to mind I used google for in the last week. Whatever evils google do, you do at least as much good as well.
It's absurd to me that you are feeling guilt because of this. I can't tell you what to feel, but people like you have made my life significantly better and I want to express thankfulness for that.
[+] [-] throwaway_g_67|6 years ago|reply
Yes, Google does unethical things. This sucks and I feel uncomfortable supporting it. Quitting is just too costly in terms of personal cost and would not have much effect.
[+] [-] nihil75|6 years ago|reply
We grow in the face of adversity and challenge. I think as an ex-Googler you'll have a choice of interesting positions that will benefit your career in the long run.
[+] [-] barneygale|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX-P4mx1FLU
[+] [-] RestlessMind|6 years ago|reply
> All of life is moral compromise
So true. I wonder what sort of life critics of FANG/big-tech live.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hckr_news|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fdeage|6 years ago|reply
Do you feel like this feeling is common among Googlers?
Also, I'd be very interested in hearing what you think of the reasons from Googlers defending the company, since you probably hear them a lot by working at Google.
[+] [-] bonfire|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mav3rick|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aerojoe23|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dareobasanjo|6 years ago|reply
The framing of your question has no good answer like the classic “are you still beating your wife?” where either a yes or no is still a bad look.
[+] [-] fdeage|6 years ago|reply
Not sure I see the point you want to make with COVID-19 though... You mean there is "worse" evil going on somewhere else?
[+] [-] plantain|6 years ago|reply
I was much warier of trusting Google with my data pre-Google to post-Google. It's constantly drilled into you the sacred nature of user data, and the technical protections seemed sound.
The elements I was most uncomfortable with were the profit-shifting/tax optimization, i.e. the Double-Irish Dutch Sandwich.
[+] [-] kyrra|6 years ago|reply
To be able to do the Irish haven, Google is and was abiding by all laws in doing it. Google was doing what all the lawmakers of various countries allowed, and they allowed it for a long time. It also only impacted a portion of Google's overall revenue. It also led to Google having a fairly massive presence in Ireland, which I'm sure the people employed there are happy with.
As countries have been figuring out how to tax companies like Google, they have been forcing them to create local entities so all business with people in those countries can be taxed locally. I can tell you this was not a simple thing for companies like Google to conform to (massive amounts of work by lots of people to bill locally).
You can see if you are billed locally based on the company your invoice or payment is collected under.
[+] [-] sneak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] summerlight|6 years ago|reply
For privacy perspective, I'm not very satisfied with the status quo, but at least for Ads, privacy is now the top priority with a strict deadline so the situation may get improved. But I still think collecting less (or no) user data solves just a part of the problem; users still don't have understanding on what the real trade-off between their privacy and benefits to themselves/the overall web ecosystem from the ads they're watching is. Without this information, users cannot really make informed arguments and decisions on their privacy and ads. IMO, this is one of the fundamental reason of having significant discrepancies on the ads' perception across many people. But as this is not just a technical problem like 3rd party cookie but more of a subjective issue, this might be a much harder problem to tackle though.
[+] [-] forsakenharmony|6 years ago|reply
I kinda consider ads a violation of human rights, given they're literally made to influence your decision making, therefore taking away a bit of your free will
[+] [-] jefftk|6 years ago|reply
I think some of the backlash is justified and pushes the company to do better, but there's also some amount of what feels like backlash for backlash's sake where it just gets everyone here paying less attention to what critics think.
(speaking only for myself)
[+] [-] nunez|6 years ago|reply
A company that’s as large and fundamental as Google will always have detractors. They pay too much. They pay too little. They collect too much data. They don’t make their data open enough. There will always be something.
[+] [-] fancyfredbot|6 years ago|reply
https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2020/04/16/has-covid-19-k...
[+] [-] amelius|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allie1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yots|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonyxyz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altgoogler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousobvi|6 years ago|reply
This does not mean I support either company, it just means they have manipulated culture to ensure they are the only choice.
[+] [-] _b8r0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altgoogler|6 years ago|reply
I don't consider the company evil. In fact, I think it's leading the way that we talk about ethics in computing. People talk about Maven, but it was an internal revolt--not external influence--that challenged the issues with the project.
Secondly, there's a lot of criticism about supposed violations of "Don't Be Evil". As a multi-national company, it's almost impossible these days to avoid morally complex issues. Microsoft, on the other hand, has recently been seeing in much better light due to Nadella's leadership in the post Ballmer-era. But Microsoft never had the "Don't Be Evil" and isn't getting criticism for its, e.g. defense contracts. I don't consider Microsoft to be an immoral company either.
Concerns about privacy and data handling are warranted. There should be stronger consumer protections in there area, and legislation like GDPR is good, and should be more widespread. I honestly don't think Google is the company to worry about here (or at least the biggest threat). It's companies who aren't as closely watched that are the highest risk to you. Google is pushing the state-of-the-art here, with efforts like differential privacy. From what I can see, Google respects your PII and has more advanced internal mechanisms for handling it than any other company I know about.
IMHO, Google tried to be as transparent as possible in this area. Concerned about data collection? Review your activity on myactivity.google.com. Want to move all of your data out, or back it up? takeout.google.com Location data? Google literally regularly emails you a report on your location summary so you know what's going on.
Is it perfect? No. Is there valid criticism? Sure. Could it do a lot better in many different areas? Absolutely.
Is it evil? I honestly just don't see it. Feel free to ask about individual issues if you disagree.
[+] [-] fdeage|6 years ago|reply
Also, I wonder whether the fact that most comments on this thread come from Google (ex-)employees, and not FB's, is saying something...
[+] [-] gwenzek|6 years ago|reply
The revolt started internally despite a lot of effort to conceal the project, even from engineers working on it. And Google management started to stepback only after the press got involved.
[+] [-] uyuioi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fdeage|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tantalor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw_m239339|6 years ago|reply
The issue is what does qualify as "evil"?
[+] [-] xoogler_9980|6 years ago|reply
There are a lot employees there that want to do the right thing, which is a why activism has been such a big deal for so long.
The tax avoidance thing used to annoy me but that's nothing compared to everything else that has happened. Even Vic Gundotra's incompetent management of Google+ looks tame now.
Maven was handled really poorly by Diane Greene who seemed to live in her own bubble during the whole thing. Urs Hölzle didn't fare much better in this regard. Moving all of SRE under cloud was a big mistake and it has backfired spectacularly because there's enough in SRE who are not happy with the whole "We want to work with the military" thing.
The shift towards cloud was a huge change and a lot of us would have preferred if Cloud had become its own company.
The high profile sexual harassment cases that we learned about did not do much to improve trust in Google execs. And the fact that the founders of the company just vanished into thin air speaks volumes about how bad things were.
Kent Walker in particular represents everything that is wrong with Google. He protected David Drummond, he's been pushing for more work with the US military and is as morally bankrupt as it gets. At one TGIF he tried to justify forced arbitration because it was better for employees to not have to go to court and when asked why not let them choose what they wanted to do he just walked off the stage. That's Kent Walker for you.
Heather Adkins is not much better than Kent. We all thought she could be trusted until two things happened: She actively sought out to destroy every copy of the Dragonfly investigation document that delroth@ had put together using searchable information and then claimed that the privacy review had proceeded as usual, which we all know it's not true given that Yonatan Zunger eventually left because of DragonFly.
Another interesting character is Laszlo Bock which many people used to look up to. When Eric Schmidt was caught colluding with other companies all he had to say was: "We do not believe we did anything wrong." That kind of moral compass, or lack thereof, is what defines Google's DNA.
Rachel Whetstone used to be loved here as well, for some mysterious reasons given her political background.
Google execs have managed to alienate many high value employees who either left on their own accord or were retaliated against until they had no choice but to go: Erica Joy, Liz Fong-Jones, Laura Nolan, Kelly Ellis, Claire Stapleton, Chelsey Glasson, Meredith Whittaker, Laurence Berland, Rebecca Rivers and so on and so forth.
This company could have been a profitable version of Xerox PARC. Instead it became SV's version of Monsanto.
It is a great place to work at. You will meet lost of ridiculously smart people and learn a lot. So put Google on your resume, learn a lot, and then run far, run fast.
[+] [-] op00to|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cameronbrown|6 years ago|reply
That being said, I do think big tech has been scapegoated for years. Everything is blamed on these companies: eroding privacy, Brexit, Trump, fake news, social breakdown -- at some point we as a society need to take responsibility as well because frankly these platforms are a reflection of us as a species.
I understand the skepticism, but after seeing how things work on the inside I trust my employer far more.
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|6 years ago|reply
I mean, these are the two companies nearly every other company on the planet is in business with, and the negotiating terms are pretty one-sided.
I am not sure any other industry in human history has ever held so much power, and it's largely wielded by incompetent kids with little understanding of how what they do translates to the global stage.
[+] [-] Zooper|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RestlessMind|6 years ago|reply
You show me any sufficiently big company and I will show you enough reasons to call them evil.
[+] [-] jkmcf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwenzek|6 years ago|reply
When I joined Google I was very influenced by the 'Google is the good guy PR'. I never liked the Ads business model, but there a few Google products I really liked (Inbox, Maps and YT notably).
It's hard to pinpoint the wake up call, but I'd say it was project Maven (aka let's make an AI to help US drones kill more people), and all the lying and mislabeling there was around it (our AI don't kill people, etc…).
Wrt Cambridge Analytica, you have to go back to the mind state of 2016. At the time FB was mostly attacked because it was a walled garden hoarding all the precious data. So FB allowed users to share data with external apps. Then one apps managae to get data about 100k Americans and their friends and use it for helping Trump. And then 'data portability' was evil.
[+] [-] tyingq|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangus|6 years ago|reply
I would call them psuedo-communists because they continually engage in the same self-centered practices that corporations do, but it’s “okay” for individuals or hipster small businesses but not for larger companies.
Money is seen as some kind of evil but all it is is an exchange method. It’s a way to convert one type or good or labor into another.
The evil practices tied into money are human evils. Money is impartial and neutral, therefore trying to gain money is not inherently evil or good.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]