WhatsApp co-founder accuses Facebook of trading privacy for revenue

https://signal.org/blog/signal-foundation/

Any transaction with an evil person/organization, that satisfies their non-evil terminal preferences, should be encouraged, because you’re decreasing the resources they have available to them to do evil with, without causing evil to happen.

Facebook bought WhatsApp because it increases the size of their social graph, sure. But if I consider “making statistical associations between people” a morally-neutral act, and “actively spying on the particular actions of individuals” to be an evil act, then “feeding” Facebook the WhatsApp social graph was, from my perspective, a setback on the pace of the evil they were doing. In an alternative world where they didn’t buy WhatsApp but instead just outcompeted it with Messenger and everyone switched from WhatsApp to Messenger, Facebook would have done more evil by spying on conversations that—in this world—it didn’t get to spy on, because they occurred in the interim period where they owned WhatsApp but hadn’t fully wiretapped it yet.

Sure, it will finish digesting WhatsApp and change it into something that allows them to spy on people. In the meantime, the WhatsApp founders are free of working for WhatsApp; and so could, theoretically, just build (or, more easily, invest in the creation of) another secure social network. And then trust people to just decide to abandon WhatsApp for its Facebook-owned-ness (like they’re already abandoning Messenger for its Facebook-owned-ness) and switch to it.

It’s a cycle: Facebook will probably make every successive competitor secure-chat network company an offer they can’t refuse, and absorb them. But this results in less evil being done to people than a world where those networks never existed in the first place; and, in the process, Facebook’s total revenue and market share (even including those acquisitions!) are shrinking, because they shed huge amounts of money for each acquisition, and the time they spend “digesting” these companies is time their employees have to spend doing redundant work—making a beach-head into data-legibility of these user-bases, rather than actively exploiting the data-legibility of the users they’ve got. In other words, these acquisitions are revenue-negative for the first year or two, because they can’t immediately shove their hooks in, and so there’s nothing there to immediately sell to advertisers.

The Roman Empire collapsed because it got too big and didn’t have its distant member states under its control. It couldn’t tax them, or use them as soldiers in its wars. In theory, you could have made it collapse faster, by accelerating the rate at which it acquired these loosely-held fringe member states.

Or, for another analogy: your liver only has so much garbage it can process from your body at once. Give it too much to do—too many molecules to xenometabolize and “absorb” into safe bodily molecules—and the result is called “septic shock.”

Acquisitions are a poison. You can do one or two at a time, but even then, they’ll slow you down; slow down the rate at which you act upon the stuff you fully control. And if you do too many of them, you’ll just keel over.

Personally, I want to feed Facebook as many companies as possible. Ideally, feed it companies where the founders then leave and build more companies to feed it, with the aim of extracting unbounded amounts of resources from—and continuously poisoning—the behemoth. (Heck, these acquired companies have employees that get absorbed, too. Hopefully they’re vetted by the founders as following their ethical precepts. If they are, then the founders are essentially air-dropping good people into Eviltopia—good people who the evilcorp can’t just clean-sweep out without stalling the acquired company. That’s even more “poison” it has to deal with, and even more revenue-negative delay.)

Lotteries are a net benefit for society, because they transfer money from irrational people (ticket buyers) to rational people (lottery runners.) Even if the lottery-runners are not good people†, the fact that they’re rational means that they’ll be spending more of their newly-acquired resources on “wise” (usually morally-neutral) investments, and less on things that end up benefitting evil people, like buying illegal drugs.

My whole stance, here, is that you can take a graph of economic transactions, and color the vertices as being good or evil. Consequentialism would suggest doing whatever moves the most money (across the entire economy, as nth-degree knock-on reactions to your action) from evil actors to good actors.

One consequence of this stance: you should never (before considering those nth-degree effects) buy from a person/company you think is evil. You’re helping them liquidate their assets! Now they have more freedom to do evil with them!

(Whereas, in the opposite case, if you sell an evil person a house, now they just... have a house. It’s a mostly-illiquid asset. They can’t do much with it except live in it. If you sell evil a house—knowing they’re going to live in it, not hold it or flip it as an investment property—then you’re effectively letting evil voluntarily freeze part of its assets. Great!)

The sound bite version of all this: if $dictator wants to pay all their money to be hooked up to an eternal-bliss machine, it is your moral duty to take that money. Whether or not you think they “deserve” eternal bliss, they’re getting something that doesn’t harm anyone else; and in exchange, you’re taking all the resources they’d use to harm anyone in the future away from them. This isn’t selling out: it’s a negotiated solution that satisfies both parties’ preferences (where your morals are part of your preferences.)

I fully believe that this is how we’ll have to deal with any aliens we ever meet. They’ll want some things we think are evil. We’ll want some things they think are evil. The solution is to trade, as much as possible, in ways that satisfy the mutually-acceptable shared subset of our preferences—which comes, on both sides, at the expense of our resources to do mutually-unacceptable things. (I.e., not the GDP-improving kind of trade; the “money is disappearing from the economy” kind of trade, e.g. employing foreign experience-service providers where you get nothing fungible in return for your money.)

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† Lottery runners—at least in the case of state-run lotteries—are actually usually pretty okay people. They’re usually the same people who run state alcohol licensing: i.e., “temperance”/“moderation” people, the kind who wanted prohibition passed back when. The newer generations of them aren’t activists, but beuraucratic pragmatists; they know they can’t just prohibit these things, so instead they try to ensure that as few people touch them as possible. Usually the same people running a state lottery are pushing for those “Game responsibly” ads, and discouraging media coverage of casinos.

But, of course, you could still do better. A lottery that donates the proceeds to charity would be an unalloyed good.

Maybe “inherently” is the wrong word. Is “Diet Coke” inherently a diet drink? That’s the idea I’m trying to get at here: that people wouldn’t buy a “Diet Coke” that isn’t made with a sugar substitute, because then it wouldn’t be “Diet” any more, and that’s why people were drinking it in the first place.

Also, knowing what you know now, would it be better to sell the whole company when your investor wanted an exit? Or what you think you should've done?