I always get annoyed how these programmers can have a good sleep at night given what they have done. Note that blaming it on the marketing VP is not fair. If even 50 % employees have a thought this tracking can be stopped.
I was recently discussing the Uber revelations in an ethical tech group that I run. The most shocking part for me was that at one time the app was designed to behave differently depending on whether the user was categorised as law enforcement based on their usage history.
This surely required complicity at all levels, from management down to engineers and testers.
But someone point out quite astutely that such a feature can be generically framed as "optimise/adapt behaviour based on historical usage". It makes business sense to categorise a user's profession and alter ride costs based on that. All that's needed then is to give a higher-up the control over a dial that effectively nullifies law enforcement's ability to get a ride.
The sad fact is that our surveillance society was built with the willing cooperation of countless developers for whom money was far more important than the privacy of their users.
It's gotten to the point where we just sorta accept that people want to work at places like Facebook and Google. There's so many of them that the thing to do is treat it like a morally neutral job or be seen as a weirdo.
And when the largest and most pervasive global surveillance systems history has ever known "aren't so bad", then nothing is.
For vast majority of devs, any level, the way data pipes out to different business units from your appliance at a large business is often obscure/unknown. You integrate SDKs and API's that are black boxes, you send data out to warehouses with 30 analytics teams measuring/creating new data products you'll never see.
like it or not, there are always people who will see this as the lesser evil because of their personal circumstances don't give them other options.
I should go work for Google? Because they clearly value privacy?…
https://www.unikumnett.no/2019/10/12-reasons-why-no-one-shou...
It's not a rabbit hole to hear out someone you disagree with. Unless you're either afraid 1) they might be right, or 2) the listener doesn't have critical thinking skills. I get that #2 is scary, and it's a legit issue in society, but they shouldn't be listening to you either.
Also, there are good tear-downs Peterson's message online, the one you linked is... not.
However, having been through a fairly significant psychological journey myself and then reading the 12 Rules for Life, I'm quite worried that his rules have the potential to prolong or exacerbate psychological insecurities. Some of them, e.g. "Pursue what is meaningful" and "Make friends with people who want the best for you." are absolutely fine. But there is nothing there I can see about self-compassion or self-acceptance. If anything there's a general trend in the opposite direction of encouraging self-criticism. This probably works in the short-medium term for people who experience pleasure from validating their own self-critical thoughts, but I fear in the longer term that it will postpone or diminish their potential to love themselves.
Admittedly I have only read the rules themselves and not the whole book; in fact I'm reluctant to read the rest if that is the best he can do.
I read all sorts of terrible stuff, and it probably influences me more then I'd like, but it's easy to jump in the middle of something that "seems" reasonable on the Internet.