Not just execs, I hope. The engineers who wrote the code and managers who told them to do it should also face justice.
The problem though is that software engineering doesnt require any licensing requirements, etc. so one can always refer to incompetence being the problem (ooops a bug) and might get away with it.
Someone who works at FB even came out and said so:
"Remember, what Facebook is doing has never been done before. There are going to be mistakes."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19321420
So yeah, I think what that person is saying should be translated as:
"Please don't think twice about punishing rank-and-file FB engineers. We are so competent, all our mistakes have only been intentional ones."
> A Facebook spokesperson said before May 2016, it offered an option to verify a user's account using their email password and voluntarily upload their contacts at the same time. However, they said, the company changed the feature, and the text informing users that their contacts would be uploaded was deleted — but the underlying functionality was not.
I doubt it was an engineer who deliberately removed the text but kept the contact import functionality.
Engineers who make mistakes that harm people are still responsible for the mistakes they made. You cannot just claim "it was a bug" and get off scot free if your code harms someone or otherwise breaks the law. Also there's no need for this sarcastic tone, "have you never..?"
> I doubt it was an engineer who deliberately removed the text but kept the contact import functionality.
Why would you doubt that? I personally think that situation sounds quite likely. But either way we're just speculating.
Also, don't ignore the part of the parent comment that discusses the manager's (and implied other decision markers) that result in the decision being made to make an illegal change to the code.
Engineer, or manager, or QA assistant - someone or some group of people will have made the change. And "oops that was a bug" doesn't count. Corporations and their employees must be held to the same laws and standards to which the rest of us are held. "Ooops I didn't mean to do that" doesn't fly as an excuse to break the law.
(Yes, the US does have some new problems with private laws being passed, where the public is not allowed to know the law itself - and this opens up huge scary things. But that is not what is being discussed here and I don't believe is relevant.)
Yes. 100%. "I was just following orders" is not a valid excuse, ever - Nuremberg is the obvious extreme example, but it's true everywhere.
When the orders are to do something that is plausibly legal, and you have good reason to believe that it is in fact so, "I was just following orders" will probably work in most jurisdictions.
If it's either obviously illegal or it's clearly at least dodgy and they didn't get explicit confirmation from the project lead, "following orders" is not a valid excuse.
To take the VW case as an example: if your project lead tells you to implement a way to recognise test conditions and adjust the performance to reduce emissions, that is dodgy af and you should at least get confirmation that this isn't illegal (i.e. that it's not intended to cheat on certifications but maybe just for certain internal testing scenarios). In the end the entire chain of command that led to this being implemented is guilty, but if the person implementing that behavior knew what they were doing was illegal or at least suspect and they didn't get confirmation, they're still guilty.
How do you expect the developer to figure out its illegal when a team of lawyers couldnt?
Facebook claims to "value privacy" (and some devs have even told me that they value it "more than any other company") but their actions consistently show either neglect or outright abuse.
Should a developer be punished for implementing something illegal that the legal team signed off on and that wasn't obvious illegal? No, because the legal team is supposed to take the responsibility and if it wasn't obviously illegal the developer had no reason to assume the legal team was lying.
Should a developer be punished for implementing something obviously illegal even when the higher ups say "don't worry about it"? Yes. If your boss tells you to rob a bank, you still go to prison for bank robbery.
For everything in between: whistle blowing is a thing. If you suspect something fishy is going on, document everything, raise concerns and report what is happening.
Also if you are a well-paid employee in a position where you can easily find another job in the industry, speak up to your superiors and refuse to be complicit. Organise.