The Tech Pledge
thetechpledge.com
thetechpledge.com
It seems very specifically about managing how the US govt. has interacted with specific companies holding user data, and also the current trends expressed by Trump regarding immigration.
These are both important issues, but it's hardly what I'd consider The Tech Pledge, being so narrow. I'd love to see a version that talks about, say, security practices, and endeavoring to put consumer privacy above business needs.
This appears solely based on how tech companies should deal with the government, not themselves.
I think we shouldn't care about what Google's management thinks, but rather focus our attention on getting some pledges written that the rank and file can sign on to. If even 1/5th of the engineers at a company publicly pledge to something, their employers can't ignore it.
While agree with the statement others have made that neveragain.tech has a stronger pledge, I still don't feel it has much to do with extremely unethical practices in the companies themselves so much as insisting those companies don't help the government with it's unethical practices. If an employer is reading these pledges and taking note, they're going to see that they should resist government actions to use their data, not that they should make any consideration how they use that data themselves.
If you weren't implying that NeverAgain.tech needed to be watered down to make it palatable to Google, my comment indeed wasn't responsive to yours. Sorry!
It's nice if your company commits to something. But what's vital is that you commit to things, and that you organize around those commitments. As a profession, we have to stop looking to management and owners to own the ethics and conditions of our work.
Things like this are fine, but don't lose sight of where the real power is. It's the strongest market for tech talent I've seen in my entire career. Your company cannot survive without people like you. Don't ask them to do things. Organize with your peers and demand. You'll win, a lot of the time, and your wins will be durable.
This pledge is pretty clearly a response to NeverAgain.tech (look at the issues it cares about). NeverAgain.tech is about what members of our profession commit to doing; that pledge doesn't give a damn what companies say, because if employers contravene the pledge, the signatories have pledged to leave as soon as possible. That's meaningful. This is window dressing.
* No protections on moonlighting
* No mention of fair equity for work by early engineers
* No condemnation of clawbacks of equity
* No whistleblower protection
* No comments on diversity or discrimination
* No comments on harassment
* No comments on reasonable workloads/workweeks
* No comments on allowing remote work or helping remote workers
Further, it doesn't even have the balls to stand up and say "We won't do evil things like give away user data to government agencies" and instead goes for the much easier "well if the paperwork is okay we'll sell out the users i guess".
This isn't worth the bytes it spent getting to you.
I'm all for strengthening the language and adding teeth to these demands, but we've got to be realistic here. A US corporation declaring blanket refusal to cooperate with the US government is not realistic.
Employees, on the other hand, can in fact pledge not to assist the DOJ, even if "correct process" is used. If enough of them pledge that, companies will have to adjust their retention practices, lest their data function as a time bomb waiting to blow their teams up.
I think if you're going to mirror NeverAgain.tech, don't water it down. But the bigger issue is: stop looking to companies to make promises. People promise. Companies can only posture.
To me, the bit where companies would need to agree to not implement backdoors into encryption protocols is actually pretty meaningful. You know that the evil shitfuck companies like Palantir are not going to sign on with that clause in place, but they weren't going to listen, anyways.
If Facebook signs on, though, it could actually be a toothy, verifiable commitment.
The could create a situation where they can't comply, at least meaningfully. "Here's the data judge, too bad it's encrypted and we don't have the key".
If the law changes such that companies can be compelled to hand over information that would be unethical to hand over, the pledge should require that companies stop collecting that information and delete what they already have. If there are countries that have existing laws that would permit them to insist on handing over information that would be unethical to provide, the pledge should require that companies cease doing business in those countries.
Right now this is simply a pledge not to engage in reprehensible behaviour. We shouldn't be providing rewards or encouragement not to act in reprehensible ways. We should be encouraging people to do better than the socially acceptable bare minimum. A pledge should be a promise to go above and beyond, and this is nothing of the sort.
I'd strongly prefer something based off that rather than the actual pledge. It's fairly easy to lose a legal defense, go back on your pledge to produce a legal defense, or change owners to one not bound by the pledge. It's much more difficult to retroactively collect data.
This is not reasonable in many cases, though. It is surprisingly hard to build many useful services on top of strong zero-knowledge crypto and have them operate in the real world where things like users forgetting their credentials are common occurrences that consumers expect you to be able to recover from. It is also actually impossible to do so when part of the service happens in the physical world (e-commerce, car dispatching apps, etc). In practice, until we solve a few long standing security and HCI problems, I can't envision a world where a large set of private parties doesn't know more about me, collectively, than what I would be comfortable with a hostile enforcement agency knowing and correlating in a single place.
Don't get me wrong, I think there is a lot of value in being mindful of which data we are collecting, why and if we can get away with building our software so that we do not need that data. I also think keeping infinite records just because "big data will make them useful in time" ignores the 'toxicity' of huge troves of private data laying around. But even in a world where every company takes extraordinary data handling measures, even against market incentives, I still would want the companies to be very careful about sharing the data they did absolutely need to collect...
The connection between the two pledges is pretty unmistakable, so much so that you can read comments on this thread about how random the two issues in The Tech Pledge sound.
Super weird.
A flood of low-skilled, poorly educated immigrants definitely helps the rich who don't mow their own lawns or make their own beds, and corporations who benefit from the wage-suppressing effects of a huge surplus low-skilled and poorly educated workers. But it hurts American citizens who are themselves low-skilled and poorly educated.
I know it's not a popular opinion here, but I happen to think that US immigration policy should be crafted solely on what is in the US's best interests. Allowing highly-skilled and highly educated people in helps the country, but I don't really see how allowing a flood of low-skilled immigrants in helps the country in the larger picture. I understand how it does from the Adam Smith/Milton Friedman perspective, but I don't think that benefit justifies the harm done to the most vulnerable workers (or would-be workers) who are citizens and taxpayers and in many cases veterans of our military.
[0] http://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/software-engineering-co... [1] http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html
Only a small percentage of people in the tech world care about this stuff.
It sucks I know. But it's true. The vast majority of people out there simply want a paycheck and don't really care how they get it. As a result this means that anyone who does agree to the pledge will most likely be sacked in favour of the person who doesn't. And there are millions of people in tech who will throw everything and everyone under the bus as long as management says so and the money ends up on the table.
So how do you solve this? Well, good question. In a lot of fields, they solve it by either requiring accreditation or a union membership or god knows what else, which causes those who go against what's seen as 'ethical' in their field to have a very hard time finding new jobs afterwards.
That's not really a likely thing for the tech world, and I don't think most people would want it to be. But as a result, it means pledges like this are pretty much useless at the moment.
How about dedicating resources to making sure everyone upgrades their devices, patches security vulns on internet-facing servers, uses password managers, etc?
How about at the very least asking "if we suffered a breach, how would we know?". Because ethics aside, there seems little incentive for startups to worry about it.
With that said, the fact that there's no reference to the greatest problem facing our society, income inequality, is highly noticeable.
A pledge by tech companies to respect the rights of workers would actually be something notable and daring.
I'm guessing that this is just a temporary page that will be replaced once you have developed the final version of the the pledge. If that is NOT the case, then may I suggest that "May 2nd" be changed to "May 2nd, 2017"?
"The 0.5% increase in engagement after the A/B test result is making the world a better place." <-- that's not enough anymore, a programmer's employer has to be taking a stand for something now. Not anything that would harm revenue. Something that is meaningful to tech types, like net neutrality.
On some level it is political of course, but only on the pedantic reductionist level of "everything is a political statement". If you want to go down that route, fine, but I won't be joining you.
The point of calling out this particular law in North Carolina is that this law claims to not be discriminatory, but it actually is. A generic policy requires interpretations.
But to be relevant to this thread, is this "politics" that a company should avoid?
Of course, we all know that it's safe for some political persuasions to speak out, but not others. I suppose the people advocating for this are - literally - Politically Correct.
I agree, politics at the workplace is inappropriate, except concerning issues of importance to that company or industry, e.g. Exxon being critical of drilling restrictions or Google evincing opinions about the continued legality of enumerating people's home wifi access points.
If you're building a tool that can be used as a Muslim registry (Facebook), and the president's stated goal is a Muslim registry, silence speaks volumes.
In a dating site religion is an important feature for users. If people don't want this data collected then they should not provide the data, it's that simple.
Otherwise it seems a reasonably unobjectionable document.
Something at the end like:
"Transparency: On an ongoing basis, we will offer our employees and our users reports on how we're fulfilling the above commitments."
Consider making this a first-class effort.
"Provide support", and not just "support"? So a startup that isn't actively involved in efforts around keeping the DACA policy would be breaking this pledge? This seems to only make sense for giant companies.
Pass an actual labor law or gtfo on this indentured servitude you execs are so addicted to. Pay equivalent wages and allow imported labor to change employers or GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE! (Sorry to cuss, but I've got real hatred for the self-serving progressive leaders who profit so much from cheap imported labor.)
Similarly, the way in which "Legal Immigration" is highlighted seems to ignore the number of lower wage, undocumented workers within the service sector that is a part of the operations of these tech companies. Why not support all immigrants in their operations who are facing persecution?