People wo believe that "tool makers aren't responsible for how the tool is misused" (for example, with cryptocurrency), do you feel the same way about adtech?
Blaming technicians for the negative externalities of their industries is a dark path. Are we going to blame lawyers who defend rapists? General Motors assembly-line workers? Engineers who work for oil companies?
Software engineers agreeing to build awful shit is more like mechanical engineers building weapons. They should know what they are doing is going to cause harm and if they choose to do it anyways I have no issue calling them unethical.
Lawyers effectively defending awful clients, for example, managing to get them off the hook on a technicality, are likewise generating massive negative externalities for society at large.
It's either both or neither, and I'm not comfortable going down that path.
The phrase "Effective adtech" is really downplaying the amount of unethical shit involved in building it.
It could be effective without turning the internet into a race to the bottom. It could be effective without third party tracking, it could be effective without vacuuming every bit of data possible from every source imaginable. It could be effective without turning every device we own into an ad platform.
> It's either both or neither, and I'm not comfortable going down that path.
No, its not both or neither. That's absurdly reductive to suggest. It is possible for lawyers to behave unethically in their duties, but just defending the guilty (or prosecuting the innocent) is not unethical on it's own.
Similarly, it's possible for engineers to behave unethically in their duties. Just building software isn't unethical.
Building platforms that are deliberately and systematically eroding our privacy in every corner of our lives in order to make money absolutely is unethical. Turning society into a corporate-controlled panopticon is absolutely unethical. Absolutely scumbags
I'm a developer myself and I've never faced the dilemma, but I don't feel like blaming others for not wanting to become judges of good and evil. Like in the case of a lawyer, doing your job and doing it well is in and of itself ethical.
I really can't draw a line in the sand where adtech is unacceptable but $something_else is, just because I have such an hatred for advertisement.
This is the kind of rhetoric that is used to justify doing war crimes. It is absolutely not a defense of unethical behavior.
This is a harmful misunderstanding of how the legal system works. Subjecting laws and procedures to scrutiny, and exposing "loopholes" is exactly the role of a vigorous defence. The fact that the consequences for the state (and society) of miswriting or misapplying the law can be so severe is exactly what keeps the system honest.
Sorry for the low signal answer, but you're the second to raise this objection and I wanted to clarify I don't actually think that.
Even if they have been declared guilty of a crime in the past they might be innocent of this one and still have a right to council.
Suggesting that software somehow has that same kind of standard where engineers are required to build anything and everything they are asked to the best of their ability or they can lose their accreditation (as if we even have that in software) is absolutely absurd.
He told them about how it is important that defendants are presumed innocent, and that everyone gets a strong defense, in order to make sure that those who are wrongfully accused do not get wrongfully convicted.
They talked about it for something like an hour, and the people were only sort of convinced. And his lunch got cold.
Later, he found himself in another small town, defending another rapist/murdered, eating lunch in a diner and being asked by the people there the same question.
This time he said "his family paid me $100000 to defend him". The crowd accepted that right away as a perfectly fine reason to defend some totally vile criminal, and went back to their lunches.
Only if such lawyers are unethical in how they go about doing this.
Lawyers who defend accused rapists are a necessity for a well-functioning justice system. The alternative is a process where the accused isn't permitted a legal defence, if they're taken to trial for serious crimes like rape.
Software engineers who spend their days forcing increasingly invasive advertising technology upon us all are not necessary. For the most part, we'd all be better off if they all downed tools.
The structure of the argument is: because A is equivalent to B and I'm not comfortable with B, then I'm not comfortable with A either. Resolving the let binding in the variables A and B is left as an exercise to the reader.
EDIT: parent has been edited since this comment was written. Please disregard the belligerent tone, reply to parent no longer applies.
Disagree.
> Are we going to blame lawyers who defend rapists?
No, because I want there to be someone who defends that rapist's rights. In contrast, it's easy for me to blame a software engineer who's developing bad technology X, because I want the job of developing X to not exist.
> General Motors assembly-line workers? Engineers who work for oil companies?
Yes, but only if they have better options for earning a living: I can't blame anyone for not wanting to starve. Assembly-line workers often don't have better options, but software engineers usually do.
This path looks pretty well-lit to me.
I think morally that's correct as well.
Cryptocurrency is a weird one you bring up coz I don't think anybody is proposing hunting down and jailing Satoshi even if they think Bitcoin ought to be banned.
A company I worked for was more in the business of improving targeting. Of course people will argue if targeting demographics is bad per se, or better or worse than other parts, but I personally don't care if I get generic ads or ones tailored to me. So for one of our main product, we were reselling and integrating some data for a bigger player, as in, we were 1 of many data points determining if the ad would be interesting for the person who would see the ad or if they'd give them another one.
Yes, it kind of gets into this angle of privacy and user tracking... but I'm ok with the scope we did it in and I thought hard about if I can accept this without a guilty conscience - but for example I'd never knowingly work on trying to bombard the user with even more ads, or popups, or whatever - but just saying "ads shouldn't exist" is maybe aspirational but sadly I don't see it as a valid version of reality in the foreseeable future.