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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

To make money on analytics?

He is speaking of the developers and engineers who have the technical expertise and should know it's a bad idea but still agree to implement it regardless of their moral compass.

Why the implication that devs/engineers who have such technical expertise "know it's a bad idea"? There are plenty of devs and engineers who would have no moral issue with mass data collection and analytics. You don't magically become a paragon of morality just because you got a CS degree. Just ask Zuckerberg.

I’m working at a company and they want to do a massive amount of logging from our companies IOS app. Basically log everything in the name of security. I made the statement today what does legal think about the data we would be now storing? It has user locations, gps coordinates, all the other fun stuff you can get from a users phone. They all looked at me like I was crazy for even asking that question. And I don’t think a single person in the room the devs included had even though about the personal data we were going to be able to collect. And if we SHOULD be collecting it.

If your company does business in the EU, or has users within the EU then the GDPR kicks in.

The legal department would care about that.

To be fair Zuckerberg didn’t get a CS degree. Your point still stands of course.

To be even more fair, I feel pretty sure Zuckerberg would be happy to agree that "you don't magically become a paragon of morality just because you got a CS degree".

I’m not sure why anyone cares about Zuckerberg’s opinions on morality. The point that a CS degree does not impart a higher moral code is not controversial. My comment only pointed out that Zuckerberg was a bad example because he doesn’t have a CS degree.

And my comment pointed out that your parent comment didn't present Zuckerberg as an example, but as a source of support.

(Does that make sense? No, he'd make more sense as an example. But that's not what the comment said.)

Yes, I see now, thanks for pointing that out. The implication being Zuckerberg relies on people with CS degrees even if he himself does not have one.

I've worked on questionable projects at a big telecom. I refuse to run ISP provided modems/routers at home, i refuse to use my isps dns and use dns-tls etc etc based on what i have seen.

The devs have often said things bad idea and raise concerns unfortunately you generally have no power, the decision to implement something is made above you. Generally the people making the decisions know things are questionable but you need to make your KPIs / get promoted / earn more money for the company etc etc.

If you don't follow a direct order and refuse to work on a piece of work in reality you will be fired.

That leaves you with the option of looking for a new job yourself or being forced to find a new job as you was kicked out.

While some people can take the moral highground, outright refuse and resign, others have to deal with life issues such as paying the bills and supporting a family which makes it extremely hard to pick a fight refusing to do something. We do not like to think it but we are just another cog in the wheel and dispensable.

Nice point. I've been considering changing my router for a while out of privacy concerns. Do you have a suggestion? I was wondering whether i could use my raspberry pi 3b+ for it.

I've been using Mikrotiks for over a decade, they just work and are pretty cheap. They do require you to know a little bit more about networking then the regular, end user oriented, routers.

Only negative I would mention is that some things are a little bit harder to setup, like a VPN for example (and it doesn't support OpenVPN over UDP).

Google and FB are doing the same thing with their data (and worse) and the engineers they employ don’t seem to care that much, even though they are pretty smart.

Seriously browse through the who's hiring thread... some engineers may see it as an easy way to get their foot in the door in the data analytics industry. Hopefully they just focus on bettering their portfolio.

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