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Comment by wgx | Hacker News Reader

And no engineer at Google said “hey, should we be hacking our way around the user’s privacy settings?”, or blew the whistle?

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Given the nature of the breakage (tripping over a non-w3c standard heuristic in one browser with no obvious and visible error resulting), I'd assume no engineer knew the code could trigger problematic behavior for some users until I see evidence of intent to the contrary.

I dunno, a JS workaround for clients with third party cookies turned off seems kinda deliberate...

Unless the workaround was done to enable Google+ functionality (responding directly to user intent to allow a +1 button click to work instead of failing with some kind of "LOL, your third-party cookies are disabled" error) and the breaking of the third-party disable heuristic as it related to general ad tracking was just an unintended side-effect.

Users don't click the +1 buttons.

Nobody asked for a +1 button, and I'm pretty sure you don't need 3rd party cookies to make it work anyway.

Also pretty sure a company whose bread and butter is pervasive tracking doesn't break a user opt-out method by accident.

It only takes one or two unethical engineers to implement it, even if most of engineers don't want to.

On a broader scale, the NSA had William Binney implement a way of vacumming up data, but the system include Constitutional protections and required a warrant to access.

Once it was implemented, the NSA took him off the project and put other people on to remove the controls.

It only takes one or two bad apples to spoil the whole barrel.

Perhaps open source licenses should prohibit their use for adware, spyware and surveillance.

Apart from a plethora of open source projects to build its websites Google is using Android to hoover user data and open source should not be used to support a surveillance state.

This is a can of worms and probably not enforceable but it's worth it just for taking a stand.

Certainly no one who had any power to stop it blew the whistle.

"Move fast and break things", including user privacy settings

I wonder how many engineers are trained, even a bit, in ethics...

At least in Canada, to be labeled as a professional engineer, even if it's a computer engineer, there are mandatory codes of ethics you have to follow. I had an ethics class during my time at college for their computer engineering technologist, and you definitely do get taught these things. In Ontario, we have a group called OACETT, if you want to label yourself as a certified engineer, you have to be a part of this organization and vow to follow certain codes of ethics. The only problem is, software developers don't count, and many people who are hired to write code, myself included, are never required to have this certification. I wish we were treated more like electrical engineers, structural engineers, etc, but for some reason code still isn't considered to be a safety risk to humans like a bridge or wiring in a house is.

You'd think somewhere around the point people started controlling nuclear reactors with software that software development should've fallen into this category. Which is long before now, where we control everybody's cars with software.

What does ethics training even look like?

I have a set of ethics, probably mostly derived from my upbringing and environment.

Would a module and a few lectures at college change my ethics? I don't see how it could...

An ethics program consists, at the very least, of:

1) a shared understanding of what is definitely acceptable and what is definitely unacceptable (e.g. accepting a $1000 dinner from a vendor in a location with plenty of $100 or $50 dinner arrangements is unacceptable in many industries). Courses and training will at least define the lines for the industry in question. In finance, for example, ethics training includes issues like soft-dollar arrangements.

2) a set of procedures for inquiring about and responding to ethical quandaries. Many companies in the post Sarbanes-Oxley era have a chief ethics officer and a clear reporting chain specifically to define and standardize company ethics and to ensure that lower-level employees can make informed decisions.

I studied (non-software) engineering in Australia which had a mandatory ethics course.

The lectures focused around:

- Regulatory compliance (codes of practice, state laws etc) - Legal responsibilities (I.e liability, disclosure, whistleblowing etc)

We were given different case studies to research each week and we spent time in class Tutorial groups discussing the case studies the next week: I.e. What ethical issues were involved and what an engineer's responsibilities could entail in each case. The Tutor mostly asked leading questions and class argued about possible responses.

Some particular cases I remember we discussed were: Genetic Modification, Challenger Space Shuttle Explosion, CFC's, Asbestos and Kansas City Walkway Collapse.

Considering ethics as a field of study has been a thing since at least Ancient Greece I would say yes, it probably would have some effect on you.

there are two levels of ethics: personal ethics (what do you personally find acceptable) and professional ethics (what does the industry find unacceptable). The former varies wildly from individual to individual. The problem is that the industry has no standard professional ethics, hence no IT workers would have been trained in ethics. Other engineering fields have actual ethics training and some of them integrate that into licensure.

I think the fact that Google is now officially removing the Don't Be Evil principle from its code of conduct is a hint to all of those principled people that are still working there that "hey, we don't want you, so why don't you get lost?"

Silently removing the Don't Be Evil principle may have been subtle, but I'm sure it was a loud and clear message to everyone at Google, especially as it happened right after many protested the company's work on autonomous killer robots (okay, okay, the "killer" part will be added later, so that Google can plausibly claim utter ignorance).

Those who protested Google's work with the Pentagon specifically mentioned the Don't Be Evil mantra. And now Google is getting rid of it. I think that clears everything up about the type of company Google is turning into.

Can you point to where it's being removed? I believe the document you're referring to is this one [https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct.html].

I search it and get a hit for "don't be evil"

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