Having worked in a large tech company for quite a while now, grunts have very little (at best) influence on the decisions that upper management makes regarding where they sling their lawyers. In this time when you can be laid off for being "too old" or for other arbitrary reasons, you'll be removed/replaced for causing a stir.
First, you could just resign and choose not to participate in ongoing violations of privacy. By not giving them your help, you are already making a small difference.
Second, you could threaten to resign because of this. Better, you could get together with others of like mind and threaten to resign en-masse. If enough people do this, upper management will take notice. It's just a matter of how many Google and Facebook employees have the will to do it.
Third, when privacy issues come up, employees could try to influence their companies to err on the side of privacy. In companies this size there are always many situations which aren't guided by explicit policy or direction from on high, and where employees can use their own judgment or advocate for one course of action over the other. This is where people who care about privacy can make their voices heard.
Finally, Google and Facebook employees are smart, creative people. They are more than capable of figuring out other ways they can make a difference -- if these issues are important to them. The main question is: are they?
With all the media attention around Facebook and Google privacy violations it's becoming harder and harder for their employees to stand on the sidelines and claim ignorance or pretend there's nothing they can do. By not doing anything they are choosing to continue enabling these companies. They could act instead.
Second: You'll be replaced by someone who is either ignorant of the problem, or isn't but doesn't care.
Third: Your complaints will fall on deaf ears and you'll be replaced by someone who is either ignorant of the problem, or isn't but doesn't care.
The only way to reach companies of this size is by convincing their customers to go elsewhere. Throwing legislature at the problem might help, but it's unlikely that it will carry any teeth because of the lobby strength these companies possess.
It costs companies time and money to replace people. So you'll be hitting their bottom line just by resigning.
They might not even be able to find someone to replace you, but if they do you might be replaced by someone who's not as effective.
When you move somewhere else, you could help a competitor that respects privacy, or maybe even start your own privacy-respecting company.
At the end of the day, Upton Sinclair said it best: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Your perspective reminds me of a Chris Rock joke: "How come it's only unemployed people who tell you to quit something?" The point being: it's really easy to tell someone to quit their excellent, fulfilling job over some moral outrage that you perceive.
Finally, while I understand this is an unpopular opinion around here, I believe the tech community's focus on privacy is overwrought. We should expect to be tracked on the internet. If you're doing something that you don't want to be tracked, there are numerous tools to avoid tracking. Making those tools cheap and accessible seems like a worthy cause to me. Fighting for overly broad legislation like this seems like a waste of time.
That said, there are also plenty of people that do choose what they perceive to be the 'high road' despite the consequences, and based on my personal experiences these people are not rare, but not plentiful either.
Most of us try to find a kind of 'middle road', and the conviction of those that do choose these high roads can be extremely valuable, as I personally believe the default is that it's easy to go for the 'low road'.
All that said, I do find people who tell others to take the high road without doing so themselves, or from a completely different situation, to be tiresome.
As for your unpopular opinion: part of me thinks that the cat's out of the bag and we'll have to find a way to deal with a world where privacy is basically non-existent. I could see a way forward in such a world provided that privacy does not become yet another thing that only those in positions of privilege or power can afford. It could be interesting, maybe even positive, if lack of privacy becomes a fact of life across the board.
That said, I think it's too early to conclude it's all a lost cause, but I quite likely might be naive about all this. Mostly I count myself lucky that I can think about these matters with no obvious or direct 'skin in the game'. For now, at least.
You don't have to take the high road. But then don't try to pretend you're not part of the problem.
This ignores that when you ask them about their conscience they will tell you that they support privacy and all of that good jazz, so can I at least expect them to come out in the future and tell me honestly that they don't give a damn instead of branding themselves like saviors and friendly neighbours?
>Making those tools cheap and accessible seems like a worthy cause to me. Fighting for overly broad legislation like this seems like a waste of time.
Protecting our citizens privacy falls under the obligation of the state and legislation. No citizen should be required to hack together technical solutions to escape constant spying, the fact aside that most people do not even possess the expertise to do this.
1. People already decide this by choosing which team to work on. If you care about this sort of thing, you're probably already not on that team. You might even be on a team that's improving privacy?
2. But you'd be hurting your own career and a team that has nothing to do with the issue of the week.
3. There is certainly lots of internal discussion, so this already happens. Whether it works is another issue.
Disclaimer: ex-Googler.