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Comment by enitihas | Hacker News Reader

I think Google have pushed themselves into a corner, where it would be difficult for them to win. Companies like Microsoft and Apple which don't care about Employee unrest would continue to wrestle contracts like JEDI and Chinese market, and continue growing.

Bing continues to operate and censor in China, but nobody bats an eye. But people don't encourage boycotting MSFT because of it. Apple Maps works in China too. China is a substantial market for Apple. Apple keeps removing Apps on the behalf of the Chinese government (recently removed an App used by Hong Kong protestors), and on iOS it is almost impossible for a non tech user to install apps outside of app store.

I think what all this will do is encourage companies to refrain from things like "Don't be evil", since once you do that the geanie is out of the bottle, and you won't just be compared to your peers, but be held to a substantially higher standard.

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I think the same mantra is also responsible for the rise in succes. It's an enormously attractive proposition to get paid a lot, work on world's largest dataset with world's most advanced hardware - while all doing good, akin to working for an NGO. The downside is that if you want to get rid of that proposition you're still stuck with a larger than average pool of idealistically driven employees.

As for now one of the few companies I have the desire to work for is Apple due to their stance on privacy - though I find it difficult to completely respect them due to their stance on China, which is entirely conflicting with their western stance regarding privacy and ethics.

It's an enormously attractive proposition to get paid a lot, work on world's largest dataset with world's most advanced hardware - while all doing good

The getting paid a lot is to entice people to do the mental gymnastics necessary to pretend what they do isn’t mere adtech.

Conversely you might want to consider the mental gymnastics required to pretend that all that people at google do is merely adtech.

Apple's privacy marketing is bullshit considering China doesn't allow privacy.

China is only one part of the world in which Apple does business. It is in Apple’s best interest to offer privacy as a feature to attract customers in other parts of the world where privacy is not illegal, since it is not something their competitors are yet capable of offering as well.

I hope that picking a side in the business world works out. Not sarcastically, but genuinely.

But I have serious doubts, and it's not even really the default mantra of human nature or any of that jazz, more so just the fact that large-scale international business is so nuanced due to the differences in cultures and beliefs that I don't see the simplicity of having one side versus another working out very well in practice.

That's the point though - Google positioned itself as somewhere that was ethical, compared to places like Apple/MS that don't care, and a lot of their employees liked that.

Indeed. There are certain jobs I wouldn't take, or that would have to pay me at least 100,000 more a year to be associated with their moral ambiguity (for me it happens to be facebook)

Really? Apple sure seems to be shoving a lot of ethical privacy crap down our throats right now. They may even have a point, but it's still obviously holier than thou and not any different than Google claiming to not be evil.

Google chose to present itself as advocates for moral values, while MSFT/Apple are neural.

I am glad google is paying big money for this. Business could just be business, but virtue signaling is just too tempting to stop. Because it makes a cause for oneself, make it self-righteousness and tragically heroic. Now they are big enoguh and lost all that gold child status, they want the old style business back.

Don’t be evil, said the crowd. Your words are your liability.

Apple is not neutral in its posturing and is painting itself as morally superior to its competitors at a core business level.

As of recently. They've identified privacy as a wedge issue and appear to believe they can leverage it in the minds of their potential userbase as "we respect your privacy, our competitors do not" (nevermind they still maintain a cloud copy of your iPhone contents if you switch that on, or collect your app usage analytics and do only-Apple-knows what they do with that data, not at all unlike their competitors).

But because Apple is not funded by ads, they don't have the same incentive as Google or Facebook to monetize your data.

That said, it's a matter of time until an Apple CEO looking for a way to juice the quarterly numbers finds a way to put that data to work...

Already happened. They have search ads for apps; safe to assume they can tie your use of apps into that dataset. Just because their primary business model is hardware and software sales doesn't imply they don't have a hand in ads; the ROI and margins in ads are stupid high. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_search_ads/s...

Monetizing data is not an evil thing in and of itself. People are so quick to outrage at anything these days.

Only with regards to to the narrow issue of privacy.

But since the introduction of the Mac, a common and arguably justifiable attitude towards Apple by a lot of people has been that "the only difference between Microsoft and Apple is size".

Ironically, there is no difference in size now, as they both have almost identical market caps.

Even Microsoft created a video criticizing gmail privacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x4_dozWkq0

Apple is treading the same path with their ads about Privacy in the US and also continuing to sell into China.

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