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One more thing (apologies):

If you take the engineer off the hook because “they can’t change things,” you know what inevitably happens? You discover that the product and eng managers can’t change things either. In theory, maybe, but in practice they are given accountability for revenue and growth targets, so what choice do they have?

Let’s move up the ladder. Can we blame the directors and ELT. No, the markets hold them accountable for growth, and every company plays dirty, so what choice do THEY have?

Pretty soon everyone is shrugging, and now you understand how SYSTEMIC problems persist: Nobody is held personally accountable because no one person can make change without sacrifice, and sometimes not even then, it would take mass walkouts or protests , and each person is but a drop in the bucket.

This mechanism of not holding people accountable because they don’t have sufficient authority or power to make unilateral change is how all systemic injustices persist. Racism, sexism, class distinctions, corruption in government, predatory corporations, all of them.

They persist because individuals say, “What can I do? Nothing, so I might as well go along with it.” And if everyone accepts this...

The next thing you know, they’re writing software to assist opressive regimes oppress their citizens.

Agree in spirit, but in the case of Google/Alphabet there is somewhere for the buck to stop: AFAIK Larry + Sergei (+ maybe Eric?) control more than half of the equity in terms of voting power, so if they want too promote their principles at the expense of revenue growth they can do that regardless of the feelings of other shareholders.

This is more speculative, but I think public markets don't really react adversely to visionary CEOs / founders putting principles over growth, so it's not like they would make all their paid-in-equity engineers take a pay cut for their principles either.

All participants are equally complicit, but some are more equally complicit than others :-)

p.s. I know the market seems to like Apple’s perspective on privacy, but unless we can examine an altrnate universe where iPhones aren’t selling like hotcakes, it’s tough to know whether the market values the eithics involved, or just thinks it’s a fine strategy.

If the latter, the market doesnkt really value their values, but rther their ability to make money. Which is mot the same thing.

We can examine an alternate universe where iPhones aren’t selling like hotcakes actually.

> With only seven million iPhones sold in China during the second quarter of 2018, Apple's market share in the country dropped by 12.5 percent year on year to 6.7 percent, according to a report by the International Data Corporation (IDC)

Apple have some very particular values in China though, storing iCloud data and encryption keys on state-owned servers. But the trend to decline started a long before that recent Apple decision.

Hasn't Apple basically abandoned the low price phone market in the same period though?

Maybe.

> If you head over to Xiaomi China’s official store (via XDA-Developers) you’ll see three new bundles unsubtly named the XS, XS Max, and XR sets. Included in each bundle is a new Xiaomi phone — either the Mi Mix 2S, Mi 8, or Mi 8 SE, respectively — a Xiaomi Notebook, a Mi Band 3, and a Bluetooth earpiece/earphones, all for the same price as their namesake iPhones.

Apple could already make tons of money off of user data right now. Do you not think people have suggested this within Apple? It'd be ridiculous to assume so.

They are leaving a ton of money on the table taking their privacy stance right now.

Well as a consumer, I value their perspective on privacy, and am willing to throw money at them to protect it. Sadly, I don't think most other consumers factor in privacy to that extent.

Collective action problems are an awful mess. By the time it's clear to everyone that a problem exists, few individuals can get results in return for impoverishing and isolating themselves by taking a stand. The few who can are so dependent on the system that they aren't going to do anything without the threat of a guillotine or FBI raid.

Putting yourself in a weaker position due to your views doesn't scale and thus doesn't work. For one hero there are ten conformists at the same level of skill, waiting for him/her to leave. While it's brave, it is also pointless. The problem as you state it can be solved only by explicit consensus, being it a law or just a manifesto. Modern privacy has no professional and power-y organization under it, except for few self-distanced like GNU, FSF, etc. Moreover, by staying at google engineers who have an opinion probably can influence much more than those who left.

If your argument is that they can do more good by staying, fine. I say the exact same thing about staying in Ontario despite the recent election of a wannabe Trump populist.

But if you say, “Ontario made this stupid decision,” I can’t tell you, “I didn’t vote for this, I can’t change it, I’m not responsible.”

I have to tell you, “It sucks, and as a citizen I bear some of the responsibility, and here’s what I’m doing in the hopes of fixing it.”

My only argument is that people who stay have some accountability. Accountability doesn’t mean they are automatically bad people, but it does mean we can ask them, “What are you doing about it?” And they don’t get to shrug and say, “Nothing I can do, so my conscience is clear.”

I see your point, but personally believe that we shouldn't dismiss high morals of those who realized to work for misbehaving businesses. It is just impractical to think that these grounds are unbreakable in general, so why care at all. Why not give them vote box instead.

You are weakening your own case by grandstanding. No sane person would expect you to "take responsibility" for some politician you didn't like (or help) to get elected in Ontario (a place with 14 Million people, but of limited global impact). You staying in Ontario (even without engaging in political activism) is not at all comparable to directly working on products you consider immoral in a company with an engineering workforce roughly one thousands the size of that but vastly bigger global impact. Neither in terms of personal culpability, sacrifices required or plausible positive effect your decisions might have.

you can use the same argument to tell people not to vote. it's not a good one.

Not a good one use or argument itself?

Citation needed. How do you know that? Maybe it's more like this: For every conscientious person deciding not to take a stand because they think it's pointless, there are ten conscientious persons also deciding not to take a stand because they think it's pointless.

Maybe when one person speaks up, others will be emboldened.

It is called a hunger strike and for that you must be literally hungry anyway. All other strikes are solved by dealing with few instigators. I doubt that it really requires any citation, since it is a manager’s textbook case.

To be fair, the OP was complaining about short-term biases from management. The entire ethical discussion is pushed way over its actual relevance (really, how big an ethical flaw is not deleting a cookie? Google will identify you anyway, cookie or not).

That said, about this:

> and now you understand how SYSTEMIC problems persist: Nobody is held personally accountable

It looks completely backwards. Environments that fix systemic problems are overwhelmingly on the side of not blaming individuals and looking only at the system. You are probably thinking about goal misalignment problems, and yet, just going after the individuals is still counterproductive if the system won't support the ones that do the right thing.

> > and now you understand how SYSTEMIC problems persist: Nobody is held personally accountable

> It looks completely backwards. Environments that fix systemic problems are overwhelmingly on the side of not blaming individuals and looking only at the system.

That's a fascinating exchange. I find myself siding more with you than with braythwayt, but still uncertain because the idea is new to me. Is there a good writeup of arguments for both sides?

I don't think these two ideas are as opposed as you're implying. They're describing two different perspectives on the same process. To wit:

1. Individuals have values and ethics that they'll make a reasonable effort to comply with. Society recognizes this and rewards and punishes individuals for the ethical bent of the projects they are clearly responsible for.

2. As the size and complexity of a project grows responsibility becomes diffuse until there's no single individual to hold responsible for any given decision. Once this happens the informal, personalized ethical safeguards begin to break down.

3. Once the informal individual scale safeguards have dissolved they usually can't be rebuilt. Instead they need to be replaced with formal safeguard mechanisms that operate at the project scale.

I don't know of any good writeup on the side of blaming the individual. On the side of fixing the system, I think the canon would be to look at systems theory (at the more human centered flank, like Meadows). You can get to the same conclusion on administration theory from Deming and his following, or any of the X-safety groups, like work-safety, aviation-safety, nuclear-safety, etc.

What really confuses the discussion is that a well working system that deals with ethical failures does necessarily hold people personally accountable. But you can't fix it by focusing on the "holding people accountable" part, it never works. You have to focus on the "system" part.

This is a toothless, short-sighted, and self-serving philosophy that does not solve any problem.

I will explain, but first let it be known that I am a scorned Google user. I jumped on board the magic carpet of every Google service as soon as I could and loved it the whole time, but it has become clear to me that Google and my values no longer align. So I'm leaving.

However, telling the workers to "just quit" won't solve anything. In fact, it guarantees that the company will have a higher percentage of people you morally disagree with leading to, by your moral standards and actions, a more evil product.

Additionally, quitting because you disagree with company politics is the least meaningful protest you could levy. Inaction from the sidelines is just as damning as internal complicency. If you want to split moral hairs and feel Superior because you quit, go for it but don't pretend like you're a hero or in any way part of the solution. To be specific, Google won't reverse it's whole company plan and Buck the entire industry trend due to a _temporary_ uptick an employee turnover of a few percentage points (if that).

Change can come from internal activism and external Market pressures. Quitting is neither of those and actively contrary to the former.

To be specific, my words above are:

“If you can’t change your organization, change organizations.”

If the argument is that by staying they can create change, our views are compatible.

If the argument is that “although they may try, they can’t change anything, but they should still stay,” then my argument is that they have chosen to be complicit, and it is appropriate to hold them to account.

Nobody is really telling anyone to quit, but the argument above is that if they don’t quit, they cannot be held accountable. I reject that notion.

> To be specific, my words above are:

> “If you can’t change your organization, change organizations.”

> Nobody is really telling anyone to quit, but the argument above is that if they don’t quit, they cannot be held accountable. I reject that notion.

This is a false dichotomy.

The world exists in grey areas. Just because you are passionate about security and privacy does not mean joe the google engineer is culpable for the _industry accepted_ practices you disagree with.

People are fallible and so are companies. If everyone had to change-or-quit every company they worked at, no one would work anywhere. Your philosophy is not sustainable, logical, or implementable. In the spectrum of immoralities, fingerprinting users is pretty far down on the list, although it is certainly present.

> However, telling the workers to "just quit" won't solve anything. In fact, it guarantees that the company will have a higher percentage of people you morally disagree with leading to, by your moral standards and actions, a more evil product.

Not necessarily.

Thank God Albert Einstein "just quit" as opposed to returning to Germany to influence it from the inside and change it from within.

Perhaps that engineer could go on to work for companies that care more about privacy and help them succeed, or explain to others why he left and convince others to as well.

Movements are not collections of popular supermen who do extraordinary things. You make it seem as if, unless you can completely change the course of the company, don't bother. Same as "don't vote your vote doesn't matter."

I drew a different conclusion from reading the parent. The issue with "your vote doesn't matter", however true it may be, is that the decision not to vote results in removing yourself from the decision-making process, giving more power to those you oppose. That seems to be specifically what the parent is arguing not to do, as someone who has quit no longer has any power within the organization.

That may be true in a closed system, but Google is not a closed system, and that person can do any number of things outside of that system.

A person leaving is essentially a vote. It says I no longer have faith in the decision makers of this current group of leaders at google. You no longer will offer your value to them - that on its own, is most likely a loss (they would not have kept you if you didn't offer value.) On top of that, you add value to a potential competitor, or the EFF, or here on HN, where many have already switched to Firefox.

On its own, it doesn't mean much. But collectively, it could be devastating.

If not, oh well. My job isn't to ensure Google decides to be good and not evil. But I can determine if I will support something evil or not. And I choose not.

>Change can come from internal activism and external Market pressures. Quitting is neither of those and actively contrary to the former.

False. A mass exodus of employees can certainly increase market pressures as it signals instability; it can also be extremely difficult (sometimes impossible) for new hires to understand big legacy code bases -- so quitting can be a form of legal/indirect sabotage

We saw what happened when you try to do that on their mailing-lists.

Between things decided by data and management I'm not sure what a single developer can influence. I guess it sill more than by quitting, because you won't say anything in the exit interview in case you want to come back.

I agree that values are important, but I have a problem with comparing this Google situation to other situations that literally kill people. An engineer who values privacy could reasonably think that staying at Google and fighting the privacy fight is the best way to keep pushing his or her values.

I reckon it´s not only money that they give value. Other intangibles might apply (as all family related issues).

I agree that engineers might also have something to say, but we don´t actually have a clue if some of them actually expressed they concerns for this change, unless you have some insight from inside the company that you may not be able to share.

Even if some of them left as you suggest, I´m pretty sure Google wouldn´t have any problem to find some other engineers that would happily implement anything without questions.

Nevertheless, I agree that concerns should be raised by everyone in the org, but the only ones that might lead to an actual change is stock holders/board of directors.

Sure. If you have the monopoly, you don't need people to love you.

While Google could easily find engineers to implement anything, they can't as easily find people who know what to implement: People with a deep understanding of the web. The power grab we could observe over the last year has alienated a lot of people. In hindsight we will know whether that grab worked for them.

Right now, they are burning through goodwill at a high rate.

I think you're misreading his comment. And your followon comment is showing your assumptions:

>If you take the engineer off the hook because “they can’t change things,”

He never said this, and in my reading is not trying to say this. What I read him trying to say is:

"Quitting is not the only way to handle the problem."

Or the harsher:

"The solution is not to run away from the problems."

More or less the equivalent of:

"If the US is going downhill, the solution isn't to run away from the country, but work to fix it"

As an engineer you're part of the company. And putting a recent unfortunate case aside, Google is relatively open to engineers voicing their opinions. If you're fatalistic or meek, sure, you can leave. But that's the weakest of all options.

I don't feel like it is reasonable to draw a direct analogy between Nazis and implementing browser level account logins.

The decades I was thinking about referred to the business of tobacco companies. I was very much alive while public opinion swang against them, and I recall lively debate about the ethics of working for tobacco companies, the loss of tax revenue from tobacco companies, the ethics of tobacco companies sponsoring sport, and so on.

As for the Nazis, there are some parallels, just as there are for other social problems like racism. But in my initial comment, I preferred to stick to a more direct comparison involving employment with a fantastically profitable and legal company.

I meant the quote on "just following orders" which is specifically the Nuremberg Defence.