Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdeuchler | Hacker News Reader

A reminder that if you work for Facebook you are fully complicit. Especially if you're an engineer, there should be no shortage of jobs available to you at this time. There is no excuse to work for a company that's sole focus is exploitation of its users.

View on HN

The problem with this argument - I care about issue X, company C is known to disregard/exploit users with X and so I assume all employees of company C are complicit while I give a free pass to the users who remain ignorant and simply don't care no matter how many times these issues surface.

And where do you stop? Are all doctors working for big pharma related to opioid crisis complicit? what about people working for firms related to the financial crisis? engineers working for any company that suffered data breaches due to lax data security? what about engineers working for companies that haven't suffered data breaches yet but might have lax security? scientists working to certain biotech firms related to GM? engineers working for car manufacturers that cheated emission norms? engineers working for telecom/internet service providers that cheat users by throttling/net neutrality etc. etc. etc.

Yes, they’re all complicit, to different degrees. Even the janitors and cooks are complicit when they support unethical enterprises.

If any Facebook engineer suddenly acquired some moral sense, he should spend his time working to sabotage the company from within. Some have walked away; others have walked away and publicly spoken about facebook’s dubious culture.

Now it’s time to see some sabotage.

I was with you until sabotage. It’s spending energy maliciously when as you say, there are plentiful options. Non aggression principle rules.

Whistleblowing would be a good middle-ground here. Also, I don't think sabotage would be as efficient since FB would just restore everything in an instant.

The problem with whistleblowing is that the consequences need to be more direct and actually leave a dent. As it is right now, FB can absorb pretty much any fines they're hit with.

No need for “aggression”. The CIA wrote a sabotage manual, which involved things like “forgetting” to lubricate wheels, spending lots of time in meetings which go nowhere, slowing down and getting distracted while working, etc.

I consider all of the energy being spent in the maintenance of facebook to be malicious. If a datacenter caved in because of a structural flaw in the building, then that’s a lot less energy going into supporting facebook. How many datacenters would have to cave in before they wouldn’t be able to recover?

https://www.businessinsider.com/cia-manual-sabotage-producti...

Exactly. When I get recruitment emails from Facebook I like to kindly remind the recruiters that I am not interested in furthering the interests of a company that in my opinion is making the world worse, not better.

Reminder that the same applies to Google.

Yes, but it’s not about business model, it’s about trust. Both companies, Facebook and Google, built their business modeles around advertisers and have no other option than to sell your data. But, for some reason, 9 out of 10 engineers that I work with dislike Facebook and don’t trust them. They are willing to share work documents and emails with Google, but not Facebook.

That's only because Facebook is optional. They use Google for their email and documents because they need something for those things.

> They are willing to share work documents and emails with Google, but not Facebook.

Last time I checked, Facebook did not offer free personal and company e-mail and collaborative office suite.

This is an asinine, Deference to authority, nanny state garbage take..

No-one is forced to give all their info to fb. Better yet, no one is forced to use fb.. Of your using these services, and you give all your info to them, that's on you, not engineers just earning a check.

Did you read TFA? It's clear that FB has info on people that they never willingly gave to FB. It's also clear that FB can mine information about people who have never used FB, simply by virtue of their being in the contact list of someone who DOES use FB.

You are absolutely right this calls for nanny state involvement. This is precisely a case where the invisible hand of capitalism is impotent and government regulation is essential.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com